CLD: Courtney, I remember coming across Riot in Your Throat Press a few years ago and thinking “this is how it should be done.” Tell us about how you started the press and what galvanized you politically and creatively in that process? Talk to us about the highs and lows of running a fierce feminist press and how on earth you juggle such a large task against an incredibly demanding and successful career and also how you, as a poet, manage writing your own work? Do you find it compels you forward or sometimes holds you back, or is it a symbiosis?

Courtney LeBlanc: My first collection came out in March 2020, the month the pandemic shut down the world. As a result, it was published with little fanfare. My publisher didn’t do much to help promote the book and I felt the whole process was a little underwhelming. I wanted to create a press that supported its poets, that worked hard to uplift their voices and get their books into the hands of readers. I’m unusual in that I have both an MFA and an MBA so I knew if I combined my business knowledge with my creative knowledge, I could create a great press that published beautiful, necessary work.

I admit to being very Type A – I’ve never met a list I didn’t love! And this helps me stay organized and on top of things. But I also really value quiet time and will block days on my calendar where I don’t schedule anything, specifically so I can focus on my own writing or editing. I run a monthly generative workshop, called Poetry Coven, and that keeps me writing. I also read poetry every night before I go to bed – sometimes just a poem or two, sometimes an entire book. It quiets my brain but also feeds my creativity. And I’m a firm believer that surrounding yourself with good poetry serves as inspiration rather than a roadblock. I’m always inspired by other people’s poems.

CLD: You recently wrote: “Right now, I’m writing a lot of political poems because of…well, everything that’s happening in our country. I’m in a unique position because my day job is International Affairs for the federal government. I work every day in the Pentagon. I see how this administration’s decisions are affecting us in a way that many poets may not.” This puts you in a unique position as a creative, because you’re standing in two worlds, aren’t you?

Courtney LeBlanc: It can be hard to reconcile the two parts of my life: my high-level government job and my poetry life. But I feel they support one another: I can be analytical and linear at work and creative in my writing life. I can vent any frustrations or fears into poetry. And to be honest, without my day job, my press, Riot in Your Throat, wouldn’t exist, because my day job funds the press. And speaking of the press, we just had our open submission period, and I signed four amazing poets and I’m so excited about their collections. These voices — fierce, feminist voices — are needed more than ever.

From 2023 – 2025 I was the Arlington Poet Laureate and in that position I used poetry to voice some of those fears and frustrations. I live in a city that was named after Robert E. Lee – his home was here and named Arlington and the city that sprouted up around claimed the same name. I live in a state that is technically in the south but the area I live in, northern Virginia, is very much a blue stronghold. While Poet Laureate I wrote and read poems about Arlington’s complicated past, about its proximity to the White House and everything that entails. I wrote about women’s rights during Women’s History Month and at a ceremony held in the courthouse, read a poem that dropped the word “fuck” in it. I used my platform to (hopefully!) expand what people thought about poetry and what it could do. I can live in both worlds but so does poetry.

CLD: One of the things I recall first and foremost is your aesthetic, from your photograph on your website to the poems about painting your nails black.  It’s an evocation of a definite era, which I feel time-and-again with your layers of prose-poetry. When it’s done well, prose poetry is so addictive and its own aesthetic, a bit like Beats Poetry was. Were you aware of that when you were writing it? It’s more than just an aesthetic though, isn’t it? It seems to embody the ‘direction’ you go in with curating some of the best women-written poetry collections in recent years. You have managed to harness the voices of a generation, in a way that feels very intuitive, but I suspect it is the result of hours of reading and re-reading until you know you made the right choice. Talk to us about this process? Especially from the vantage point of being an accomplished poet laureate and poet yourself? How does your own creativity enable you to make those crucial selections?

Courtney LeBlanc: In relation to I Always Paint My Nails Black, my poet-friend had just died and, as the poem says, she always painted her nails dark too and that day I’d heard the song Push by Matchbox Twenty playing (while I was at the dentist! Is music of my youth relegated to waiting rooms?!)  and the poem just spilled forth. I was really pleased with how the poem came out and it’s one that required very little editing afterwards. It works well as a prose poem because it felt urgent to me when writing it, so keeping it in the form of prose, where there are no line breaks, leans into the urgency of the topic and the poem.

When I’m reading manuscripts I can make the initial decision very quickly – if I’m not pulled in within the first five poems I’ll pass on the manuscript. The manuscripts that hold my attention get a full read. I’ll narrow it down to no more than 10 manuscripts that are strong contenders. Then I begin rereading each of them and making notes and paying close attention to how the poems make me feel. I know a collection is a winner when I find myself holding my breath as I read – when I simply have to keep reading. That’s when I know I want to publish it.

I think my own experience as a poet and as an editor has given me a keen eye. I love when a poem surprises me and goes somewhere unexpected. When the first few poems in a manuscript are strong and the craft is evident in the writing, I get really excited to keep reading.

CLD: Despite the #metoo movement and the wearing of pink hats and the numerous petitions, marches and calls for equity, there are times it feels we’re not altering the dynamic at all. With the ongoing Epstein saga and other affronts to women’s justice in general; do you feel poetry effects change or is that just the idea we want to believe? If the former, how does it influence actual change? Some would argue the bigger picture is what’s happening worldwide and there is less of a need for feminism as universalism. I tend to think that’s another way to gaslight and deride the right of women to true equality and that there will always be a need for feminism. What are your thoughts?

Courtney LeBlanc: I would love it if we achieved equality and feminism was no longer needed but that’s simply not true. I think there’s a need for intersectional feminism – lifting up and supporting queer, trans, Black, Brown, etc. people and not just cis, het, white women and given what’s going on in our own country and in the world at large, it seems this is needed now more than ever.

I believe poetry affects change, but I think it does it by giving people a voice. It does it by letting readers know they aren’t the only ones experiencing these things. It does it by drawing attention to what’s happening in the world. It’s a reminder that we’re still here and we’re angrier than ever. We’re not going away and we’re not shutting up. Will that result in real change? I hope so but until it does, I’ll keep screaming.

CLD: I have read all your own poetry collections; the over-arching themes within seem divided between your sense of social justice and love of others. I was particularly struck by your conclusions about your friend who had spent most of her life suffering from depression. I thought this was a really finessed way of understanding depression in a way I often do not read in psychology books. It’s a lived reality rather than a bald theory; that there are some people in our world who, through zero faults of their own, suffer so much from depression that their daily lives are unbearable. Handling this as you have in poetry, is extraordinary because you bring notions of existence, psychiatry and autonomy to the table so fiercely it’s both necessary and very emotive for those of us who have lost people to suicide. Was this your intention? To have this dialogue? Or was it secondary to the processing of your grief?

Courtney LeBlanc: I don’t think that was my intention when I wrote the poems because honestly, I just had to get the grief out of me and writing was the only way I knew how. Because I’ve lost a friend to suicide and at the same time my best friend, who also suffers from life-long severe, drug-resistant depression and suicidal ideation, tried a new treatment and it saved her life, I have a very nuanced understanding of suicide. For Paula, my friend who died, she really was drowning in her depression and while I’m still devastated she’s gone, I also know she’s no longer feeling that way. After decades, she’s finally free of that. So while I miss her and wish she had made a different choice, I am also grateful she’s no longer suffering. Because she was suffering. I still struggle with it sometimes but ultimately, she made a choice and I can’t change that. I don’t have to agree with it or like it, but I can be grateful she’s free of her suffering. And I’m grateful that every day my best friend, Virginia, chooses to live.

CLD: You use edgy imagery and recollection in a startling and evocative way that transports your reader to painful times in your life, quite bravely, where you really explore ‘loss’ viscerally, through the abundance of recollection which is almost written like a film. I ‘see’ what you describe, the intensity of the unraveling emotion(s) are so stark you taste them, with lines like: “I go whole days without thinking about her & then I feel like shit but I know she’d want me to forget & I do think of her whenever I read a sexy poem because she wrote such damn good sexy poems.” You talk about mental health in today’s voice, mentioning ketamine treatments and what we do to stay alive. It’s a clever counterbalance to the horror of suicide and it helps the collection be more than grief or loss, whilst not obviating that reality. What was your goal when you decided this collection would focus on the loss of your friend? In terms of how you planned on reaching your audience with it?

Courtney LeBlanc: In June of 2023 my friend Paula died by suicide. I was in an online poetry workshop when I found out and I broke down in tears and had to leave the workshop. I couldn’t write about it that night, but the next day I started writing about it. Around the same time my best friend, Virginia, tried a new treatment for her depression – ketamine infusions – and it saved her life. I began writing love poems to her and to our friendship, because it is truly one of the most meaningful relationships in my life. Initially it didn’t occur to me that these two incidents would be the two main topics of my next collection, I was just writing poems because my grief and my gratitude were battling it out inside my heart. But when I finally sat down and gathered up the poems the theme revealed itself quite clearly – the collection that would become Her Dark Everything was part elegy and part love poem to two women in my life who battled the same sickness and had two very different outcomes.

Mental health is often still talked about in hushed tones. People get uncomfortable when it’s discussed. I hope this book changes that for some people, I hope they see they’re not alone and that there’s hope and healing.

Four poems by Courtney LeBlanc:

I Always Paint My Nails Black

& sometimes my husband teases me & says, Black again? They make other colors, right? & of course they do but I love black nails & every time they’re freshly painted I feel sexy as fuck & so I’m probably not going to get any other color & in art, black is the presence of all colors & my friend Paula always painted her nails dark too & she’s dead now & I knew the day she was going to do it, the exact date, I knew it & I forgot to call & I forgot to text & I know I couldn’t have saved her & I hope the water she walked into held her & I hope the pills she swallowed gentled her journey & I go whole days without thinking of her & then I feel like shit but I know she’d want me to forget & I do think of her whenever I read a sexy poem because she wrote such damn good sexy poems & I think she’d like that I think of her then & the first person who asked me how I wanted to be touched painted his pinkie nails black each weekend & removed it each Monday morning & I can still see his face & I still remember his hands on my body & it was the first time I wasn’t afraid of my body or its pleasure & that was the same summer “Push” by Matchbox Twenty was playing nonstop on the radio & the lead singer painted his nails black & it was the first time I’d seen nail polish on a guy & I liked it & I was eighteen & I’d just moved into my first basement apartment & I was fucking Brit, the boy with the black-painted pinkies & I was so young & so free & I rarely painted my nails then & now I’m never without polish & my best friend loves pedicures & she always gets the same color too, a shade of red called “I’m not really a waitress” & she tried to die several times & she’s still here & I’m so fucking grateful & she finally found a treatment to rewire her brain & I wish Paula had found peace & was still here & still writing sexy poems & still painting her nails dark. But she’s not. So I am.

21 Months Since My Best Friend Began Ketamine Infusions for Her Depression as Math Problem

            ~ after Julia Kolchinsky

21 months = ~630 days = the amount of time she hasn’t wanted to die < 24.3 years we’ve known each other < 30 years which is how long she’s wanted to die = her entire adult life – how she feels post-ketamine treatment × my love for her × driving her to appointments – the tears I cried in the waiting room + her saying before treatment I wanted to die every day (averaging 2 on a scale of 1-10, 1 being you are planning to die by suicide, 10 being you’re as happy as imaginable) + after treatment she’s at a 7-8 = my 8-ounce heart lifting = she’s going to stay = I can tuck my fear into a back closet in my 3-pound brain × this year I  know 2 women who have died by suicide + the year isn’t over × I’m still scared she’ll decide to die × what if my love isn’t enough × what if my love isn’t enough × what if my love isn’t enough = I wouldn’t be able to breathe without her + I’m still afraid I’ll lose her = she is my anchor = I am her anchor, tethering her to this life

To the Man at the Gym Who Tried to “Help” Me with My Form

I see you, your back curved like
a comma as you choose a weight
too heavy. My own back straight
as the line I walk every time I’m
in the gym: don’t linger too long
at the weight bench or some burly
fellow will surely think I need his help.
Don’t flex in the mirror because I’m just
inviting a man to stand beside me,
flexing in return as he tries to catch
my eye. Earbuds in but nothing
playing—just the dull ache of
awareness, my mind on my reps
and the fool in the tight tank top
who keeps trying to spot me. We
women watch each other’s backs,
keep the creeps from crowding.
After an hour I wipe down
the equipment, leave with my back
as straight as the stick up my ass—
according to the man who didn’t
get my number, despite his ability
to bench twice my body weight,
despite his thick hands squeezing
my shoulder in un-earned comradery.
Tomorrow I’ll return, ready
to lift or run or urge my body
to do a few more pushups. Tomorrow
I’ll return, invisible armor in place,
a weight no man has ever had to lift.

The Night My Father Died We Made My Brother-in-Law Watch Dirty Dancing

because the whole week was exhausting. None of us slept. Our eyes swollen from crying. My throat was so sore I worried it was strep. When the strep test came back negative, I worried it was COVID. Because the hospital bed still sat in the corner with medical supplies stacked beside it. The neighbors kept bringing over food and so we grief-ate. That morning I woke at 3:45am to give my dad his dose of morphine. I found my mom asleep in the recliner and when I woke her, she said, I couldn’t hear him breathing from the bedroom. I sent her to bed, tucked the syringe into my dad’s cheek and pushed the plunger slowly, the morphine absorbing because he could no longer swallow. I stayed up till 5am, dozed till 6:30am when my mom woke and took over so I could go for a run. Because it’s hard to cry while running. And when my dad’s brothers and sister arrived I greeted them in the driveway, the day cruelly bright and beautiful. It took his brothers three tries to make it into the house, three tries to say goodbye. My aunt called my sister by the wrong name but none of us corrected her. And then my dad’s best friend showed up. It took him thirty minutes and four cigarettes to gain the courage to hold his hand. And when my dad took his last breath, we didn’t realize for a moment he was gone. But no inhale followed. And I couldn’t find a pulse. I kept my fingers on his wrist hoping to feel the tiny blip. But it didn’t come. And so that night my sister and mother and I watched a movie we’d seen a dozen times, we sang along to the soundtrack, and laughed when Jim didn’t know the plot. We needed nostalgia and distraction and a happy ending. We needed Baby up on that stage, her whole bright life ahead of her. 

Bio: Courtney LeBlanc is the author of the four full-length collections, most recently Her Dark Everything and Her Whole Bright Life (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize). She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate emeritus and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She’s also the founder of the Poetry Coven, a monthly generative workshop. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Find her online at www.courtneyleblanc.com. 

Website: https://courtneyleblanc.com/

Books: https://courtneyleblanc.com/book-catalog/

Poetry Coven: https://courtneyleblanc.com/poetry-coven/

Riot in Your Throat: https://riotinyourthroat.com/