This month we are celebrating the titles that we’ve acquired during 2018. These manuscripts came to us through our open reading periods. Today we bring you Kirun Kapur, author of the poetry collection Women in the Waiting Room, which will be published in late 2020.
Have a manuscript you think we’d like? During our November Open Reading Period we are looking for poetry (chapbooks and full-length collections), short fiction (again, both chapbooks and full-length collections), novels, novellas, nonfiction (CNF, biography, cultural studies) and translations from German. Also, our Big Moose Prize for the novel is currently open to early bird submissions.
 

The Author

On writing Women in the Waiting Room

Women in the Waiting Room grew out of my frustration with my own poems. I felt I was covering the same ground, writing the same kind of poem again and again. I wanted to push myself into new territory. I experimented with traditional forms, like the ghazal, but I also wanted to explore white space, disembodied voices, broken forms and fractured narratives. It took some time to realize my small formal experiments were talking to each other and might come together in a larger whole.

At the center of all the poems were women, all kinds of women—mythological, historical, anonymous and intimately specific. Their bodies and stories formed the backbone of the book. As the subject of the work came into view, I realized there was a corollary to writing the same poem over and over: I’d been avoiding writing something, too. Illness, powerlessness, friendship, violence, love, silence—some of the most profound experiences that women have—were subjects I’d touched on in earlier poems, but only in the broader setting of history, family and nationality. Why did these subjects feel different in the context of a single woman’s life? How could these subjects take form? How would they change a form or be changed by it? I wrote Women in the Waiting Room to find out.

Excerpts

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