Bree Jo’Ann’s new poetry collection Black Glitter was published in August by Monster House Press. With exciting, vivid imagery and powerful emotions at play, Black Glitter captures a young adult’s search for identity, purpose, and happiness in the early 21st century. Recently I talked with Bree about pop culture in poetry, identity shaping in late capitalism, Sailor Moon, Midwest living, and how we grow through writing.
Zorko
Black Glitter is filled with references to TV, film, music, cartoons, Big Box stores, and many of relics of pop culture. There’s Dragon Ball Z, Weezer, Owen Wilson JNCO jeans. I could relate to it because it’s like, these are relics of the generation we belong to. The book, especially Part 1, seems to be rooted in the recent past. I remember you mentioned that the book was written a lot with your 20s in mind?
Bree Jo’Ann
Yeah, the first part of the book takes place roughly from 2007-2008 when I was at Purdue University. A couple of the poems were actually written longer ago, but most of the were recently written but reflecting on that time.
I’m really into having pop culture reference as an anchor in my work. When I come across pop culture reference in other people’s work, I tend to hone in and feel more at home. That’s especially important for me in poetry because poetry can be so nebulous, it’s nice to have some familiar touchstones.
Zorko
I think that early college period is such a rich time to write about. In a lot of people’s lives, I know it was for me, a very strange in confusing time. You’re kind of caught in this limbo between the way you thought in high school, the way you thought relationships work, the way you thought about the world in general, and a new experience that you can’t really define yet. I think the Part 1 poems especially capture that really well. It’s kind of like a search for identity and center, which is a major theme I found throughout the book.
Bree Jo’Ann
Yeah, I feel like I challenge I lot of my illusions and delusions throughout the book lol. Purdue was the 4th college I went to! I went to different schools every semester the first two years of college, so I had a lot of challenges and disappointments with building and maintaining relationships and gaining a sense of self.
Zorko
Following from that, do you find that as a writer, when you grow as a person you grow in your writing too? Like, when you learn more about yourself your writing goes to new places?
Bree Jo’Ann
I think so. I don’t know if I could have written the poems in my book during the time they are set, but there are times when I read some old writing and I’m blown away. But I’ve also been more into poetry the last five years. When I took my first poetry class, I didn’t read poetry at all. I’d been writing prose and fiction. I didn’t feel like I could relate to poetry, but when I found more work with those familiar pop culture touchstones, I got more into it. I’ve gotten into more linguistically rich poetry more recently, and I think it’s been a good influence.
Zorko
That’s definitely been a way into poetry for a lot of people I know. It definitely was for me. I was reading some poetry when I was a teenager but I really didn’t see myself writing it until I found people on the internet who were closer to my age, and writing in a way and about themes that I could more directly relate to.
The title of the collection comes from the poem “#Dark Tao.” “You could feel the star stuff shifting inside you. When you closed your eyes, you could see black glitter.” I love the title. I just think it sounds great, as a title should. That poem brings up “The Void” too, which is a really cool theme. The theme of that poem, of trying to get away from the lifestyles, the consumption, the practical pressures of life, to find something closer to a real self, runs throughout the book.
I feel like there is a kind of emptiness explored in these poems which can be, at different times both positive and negative. I’m not sure I know how to articulate it. But there seems to be a theme of trying to fill in emptiness with different products, or identities that are sold to us, or obsessions. And then there’s the emptiness we can kind of touch if we really are alone with ourselves? If any of that makes any sense.
Bree Jo’Ann
It totally makes sense! I feel like The Void is a big deal to our generation lol. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the media and ideas that we have access to so to some degree we seek out The Void, but because we’re so accustomed to all the noise, we’re also terrified of The Void. As a wife and mother there are times when I desperately want to be alone, but after a surprisingly short amount of time, I start to feel lonely. It’s funny now that I feel a certain amount of nostalgia of the alone time that I used to have, but it was crippling at the time
Zorko
I think there’s also this relationship in many of the poems with how media can form identity. How we can latch on to movies, music, television, etc. as a way to create our own individual identities. But again I think the book kind of sets itself apart, because there are for sure a lot of negatives to this, the fact that corporations look to sell certain ready-made identities. But sometimes what we consume is really what we like! It’s what speaks to our personality, or who we are. It’s not all being duped constantly. I felt this a lot in the poems of the 3rd part especially “#Mood” and “Roleplay.”
Bree Jo’Ann
I definitely have a complex relationship with my consumption of media and stuff. I remember specific time in my life when I remember feeling this intense emptiness after finishing a TV show or a book and rabidly seeking my next obsession, like when I finished Gundam Wing and its movie Endless Waltz, and I felt like I’d seen all the pictures of the characters online and read all the manga and knew everything there was to know about that series. Same with Sailor Moon. As I got older I found more products to suit my interests, which was great to a certain degree because I felt like my interests were more obscure when I was younger, but I also knew that I was also just buying a bunch of useless crap half the time.
Zorko
Do you think though that sometimes we do learn positive things from certain media that we might just think of as a waste of time? Like Sailor Moon? Do you think maybe watching that when you were younger might have taught you something, or given you something valuable? I’ve never seen the show so I’m just using it as an example.
Bree Jo’Ann
Oh for sure! Sailor Moon and other anime gave me a lot of hope when I was a kid. It was more complex than other kids shows because it showed the lighter side of the bad guys and the darker side of the good guys. I recently watched my favorite episode of Sailor Moon with my son and I had all of these complex emotional impressions and memories that I’m still in the process of unpacking.
Zorko
That sounds great! I’ve got to get going on watching the show now.
Bree Jo’Ann
(Bree shares a beautiful video of her son watching Sailor Moon for the first time)
Zorko
Omg adorable!
From the poem “My Beanie Babies are my best friends” in Part 3: “Do you ever try to deconstruct your desires? It seems like an important act in a society with lifestyle branding and a ubiquitous Internet.” I feel like this process is what I was getting at above. Parsing out our desires for certain products and what they mean and what good or harm they can do.
Bree Jo’Ann
I feel like a central theme of my work is unpacking fantasies. Like, how much of what you want is really you and how much is imposed upon you. And when you find that something is imposed upon you, is it worth it to fight that influence or is that influence benign? This is especially important for me as a woman and a minority. I’ve had to question a lot of things that I’m interested in lately because I’ve found out those things might not be “for” me, especially when it comes to literature. I’ve found that some people are secretly or not so secretly sexist or racist.
Zorko
A lot of the poems in Black Glitter work through the ways in which these things (tv, music, books, etc.) are marketed with white people in mind. Like I see this in poems like “Listening to Folsom Prison Between Classes” and even in “Roleplay” as well. It’s a level of the book that as a white person I’m not able to fully engage with, because of the separation of it from my experience, being that enormous parts of our cultural/media environment are marketed and created for people who look like me. But I can definitely see how it’s at work in the book.
Bree Jo’Ann
I’m glad that comes across. Writing about my experience as a minority has always been a struggle for me. I feel like the experience of middle class black kids is highly overlooked. It’s starting to surface more now, but it wasn’t around when I was growing up. Most media about black kids was about surviving slavery, civil rights or the streets, which are all valid experiences just not mine. I grew up in a rough neighborhood, but my mom was a teacher and I was very sheltered.
The experiences that I related to in the media featured mostly white kids, so identity was a real struggle for me and a lot of kids in my position.
Zorko
Black Glitter is full of great titles! Many of them relate pretty directly to the poems and then there are ones with greater ambiguity. And all of them are just, very cool. What is your process like for coming up with titles?
Bree Jo’Ann
Sometimes I start with the name of a poem, which embodies some idea that I’m trying to express, and other times I wrote the poem and it went untitled for a while until I was able to come up with a good title. Some of the poems were harder to find titles for because they started out as “macros” superimposed over a background picture, like Dawn Moon, Spell for Abundance and Websurfing in Starbucks, but I’m happy with the titles that I came up with.
Zorko
You’re from Gary, Indiana and published Monster House Press, an Indiana based press. Lately I’ve been trying to seek out more writers and presses based in the Midwest. Do you think growing up and being based in the Midwest sets you apart in any way as a writer from people you read who live on the coasts, or in the bigger cities?
Bree Jo’Ann
I think I started out wishing I was from a coast and being influence by work set in or influenced by bigger cities, but I’ve grown to appreciate my corner of the world. I feel like I’m free to choose my own influences instead of being too close to up and coming trends. Monster House Press is cool to me because it has published work from writers all around the country, including the coasts, but they’re really good and finding home grown work. I also like that when I first moved to Indianapolis, I had no trouble at all connecting to and being a part of the writing and art worlds. I just showed up at events, talked to people a got busy!
Zorko
I feel like the smaller size of the communities mike make it easier for folks on the outside to get involved.
Bree Jo’Ann
Definitely. There isn’t so much competition and people are willing to collaborate most of the time.
Zorko
Thanks for talking with me. Anything else you’d like to say to the folks reading?
Bree Jo’Ann
Yeah, thanks so much! I think we pretty much covered it all, I’ll just plug my twitter and where to buy the book:
@how2baradwytch | Twitter
https://monsterhousepress.com/books/black-glitter-bree-joann
Bree Jo’ann is a hyperactive pixie dream girl from the hood. She has a super useful Fiction Writing Degree from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has appeared online in Peach Magazine, >FAF Collective and Radioactive Moat’s Deluge. It has appeared in print in PRINTtEXT’s Didactic. She lives with her son and her husband in Indianapolis, IN. She vacations at the elaborate, rambling mansion inside her head.