An interview with the charming Jennifer Handy
Jennifer Handy is a Pearl Hogrefe Fellow in Creative Writing at Iowa State University. Her poetry has been published in or is forthcoming in Interim (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) Nathaniel Hawthorne Review (Penn State University Press), Poe Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press), SHIFT (Middle Tennessee State University), The Wallace Stevens Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press), Watershed Review (California State University, Chico), Voices (Midwestern State University, Texas), and elsewhere. Her poem “The Snake Charmer” opens our Spring 2026 issue.
TRP: I have a question about your wonderful poem “The Snake Charmer.” I’m fascinated with the idea that places have a kind of grammar that imprints on us, that we are “collecting it all up inside [us], like drops of rain / harvested from a vast root system over decades.” That, someday, we might return to what’s familiar, no matter how uncomfortable or inadequate it may have been. That frustration of inadequacy is something many poets feel with language, but I haven’t seen it stretched towards geography quite like this. Did you have a particular place in mind when writing this poem?
Jennifer Handy: Yes, I was writing about the Sonoran Desert. I recently spent six years camping in the western United States, and more than two of those years were spent in Arizona. Living with no air conditioning for two summers in the Sonoran Desert was unreal, almost a mirage; they were the two hottest summers on record. I wrote “The Snake Charmer” while camped there. Before leaving, I knew, in that bone-deep sort of way, that I would never recover from the desert. It was so beautiful and brutal all at once. If money weren’t a limiting factor, I’d spend the rest of my life camping and living outdoors. It puts you in touch with those things that are most real and important.
TRP: You’ve got two chapbooks out: California Burning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Dirt (Finishing Line Press, 2025). They’re two wildly different projects. California Burning is a collection of lyric poems that centers around the wildfires that ravage the state, while Dirt is a narrative poem: a “memoir-in-verse” about gaining cultural and ecological literacy while surrounded by suburbia’s sedating hegemony. Is there a through-line between the projects? And what might be next?
JH: You’re right! All of my projects are quite different in content, tone, and style. That said, there are consistent themes that come up in many of them. The first is environmental issues. You don’t spend six years living outdoors without developing a deep and abiding concern for the natural world. The other two themes are related: a concern with materialism and the inadequacy of suburban life. I grew up in the suburbs, and I always hated it: the ugliness, the sameness, the mediocrity, the infuriating distance from anything wild and beautiful and real. But the materialism and consumer culture of suburban life are what I find most disturbing. Of course, this is also an environmental issue, as consumerism is what drives so much pollution.
As for what might be next, I have a full-length book of poetry forthcoming: A Child Cries in Levittown (Finishing Line Press). As the title suggests, it’s about suburban life: conformity, prejudice, emptiness, and repression. The subtle cruelties and almost-invisible forces that can destroy a person even amidst an environment of superficial comforts and plenty.
I’m currently working on two other projects. One is a collection of poems about the desert, of which “The Snake Charmer” is a part. The other is a collection entitled This Is Not a Polar Bear: A Study in Postmodern Extinction, which examines symbolism, expectation, and reality within the framework of environmentalism. This book focuses on the predominant image of climate change (the polar bear) and draws upon trends from twentieth-century philosophy, literature, theory, and art in order to construct an underground cultural history of the bear.
TRP: These both sound compelling, and I’ve no doubt the TRP editors will be on the lookout for them! If you’ll forgive another standard, but important, question, what are the writers that have shaped you as a poet? Do you have any particularly strong influences?
JH: Wallace Stevens is probably my all-time favorite poet. Some recent favorites are Valzhyna Mort, Brooke Matson, Jessica Laser, and Ernest Hilbert. As far as influence goes, I find a great deal of inspiration from philosophy and from art. I’ve become more and more interested in ekphrastic poetry, drawing especially on Modern and Postmodern art.
TRP: What drew you to publishing in Tar River Poetry?
JH: It’s a journal for poets by poets! So many great poets have been published here; I’m honored to place my work among them.
TRP: And we’re honored to have you. Can you take me through what writing a poem looks like for you? Do you have a set practice?
JH: I’ve been working on developing a better practice for planning and revising my poems. “The Snake Charmer” was written in about an hour, and I don’t think I changed a word of what I originally wrote. That one really was a product of inspiration. Usually, though, I start with a title, the first and/or last line, and a general concept or idea. More recently, I’ve started mapping out the imagery and vocabulary in advance. I’ve tended to do that in the past, but I’m trying to become more conscious and organized about it. As for revision, I’ve taken to underlining any words or phrases that I don’t like and working on them until I do.
TRP: One hour! That’s inspiring in and of itself. And, last but not least, what are you reading right now?
JH: I recently finished Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky and Midlife by Matthew Buckley Smith. Currently, I’m reading Something about Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and All of You on the Good Earth by Ernest Hilbert.
TRP: Fine company, on all counts. Thank you for the interview.
Fabian Gomez Irizarry worked on this interview.