Austin Poetry Review: Tell us about your work in progress.
Elizabeth Upshur: My work in progress is called “zombiemaster” because it reckons with the original construct of the zombie and zombiemaster, the creator/enslaver, which is pretty striking on its own, but I’m most interested in looking at how this zombiemaster has been excised in contemporary memory and what that means for the zombie, and how the zombie-zombiemaster hierarchy can be read or overlapped over a relationship with interpersonal violence. I’m interested in the plurality of the zombie: historically; socially; in cultural memory; pop culture; American consumerism/exceptionalism; medically; futuristic AI concerns; etc.
APR: Share a 3-10 line excerpt from one of your poems that you feel encapsulates your style.
EU: This is from my poem i do and i do not want a rabbit, which won the 2024 Lucky Jefferson Prize.
I think it
it surprises me,
how much desire i have
to swallow the wild
-ness you possess,
i lick my teeth,
catch scent,
catch prey,
catch.
eat.
APR: What themes or ideas do you find yourself returning to in your poetry?
EU: I find myself returning to the color red in a lot of my poetry, the danger of it, the visual synonym for blood, the heat of it, my early association with fire as a child growing up in California, to how the color becomes a crime of passion even. The usual poet things like the moon or teeth, but also monsters, lines from the Bible, and water.
APR: Who are some poets or writers who have influenced you?
EU: There are so many writers who have influenced me! I am constantly wowed by what Toni Morrison accomplished as an editor and as a writer and as a poet. I literally painted out her poem “Eve, Remembering” to put on my wall, and it likely echoed into a poem I wrote earlier this year called “Love Poem from the Serpent to Eve”. I love the way that Morrison interrogates power and predation. She doesn’t have a bad piece of writing, but I remember being floored in my initial reading of A Mercy and how atmospheric and heady it was to be in that world she was painting. I really love what Dr. Taylor Byas is doing right now, and I’m a big fan of poets Ariana Benson, Anuradha Bhowmik, Tiana Clark, and then more foundationally e.e. cummings and Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks and Assata.
APR: What are you hoping to explore in your writing next?
EU: I’m hoping to explore more medicine (ancestral, contemporary, spiritually, etc) in my poems specifically, and more Southern Gothic in my fiction. I’m one page in on an essay exploring consent on the dance floor, and I’m really excited to see where that goes and who it connects with very soon.
