Alleliah Nuguid Explores Horror Themes through Poetry in “A Human Moon” [INTERVIEW]

Alleliah Nuguid is a Californian poet based in Tucson, Arizona. She holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Utah and an MFA in Poetry from Boston University. Her work has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, Taft-Nicholson Center, and Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, and her poems have most recently appeared in The Slowdown, hex literary, and Volume Poetry. Her debut collection, A Human Moon, won the 2022 Dynamo Verlag Book Prize. A Leo sun and Scorpio moon, she would love to read your tarot cards.

Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

James: Congratulations on your debut book, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading and rereading before diving into the book. What was your journey to becoming published. 

Alleliah: “It was quite a long journey. The poems in this book took about eight years to write in total. I wrote the earliest poems when I was a student at Boston University getting my MFA. Shortly after that, I entered the PhD program at the University of Utah. So, these poems span the time I was in grad school and a year after.”

James: Your book opens with “Excarnation”, which you’ll read later, and it’s a compelling piece that sets such a macabre and visually striking tone. What was your thought process for choosing the opening poem of “A Human Moon”? 

Alleliah: “Well, funny enough, ‘Excarnation’ is the newest poem in the book. Somehow, the book did not feel quite complete even as I was sending it out to contests and after it was accepted for publication. I wrote ‘Excarnation’ and thought, ‘Wow, there it is. There’s the first poem of the book.’ It needed to be before everything to sort of set the stage.”

James: “INTERESTING RESULTS OF PROFESSOR WOODWORTH’S ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES” is a found poem from a 1903 New York Times article. It’s striking because of the nonchalant and impersonal language used to describe the people of another race, as though they are mere curiosities. How did you find the article, and then make the leap to constructing a found poem, which is very effective in this case. 

Alleliah: “Eventually, I was thinking about the purported objectivity of science, both today and in the past, and considering how what we see as objective now may be seen quite differently later on. That led me to do some research and see what sort of scientific articles had been published and how they presented their findings as purely unbiased and in the interest of science, when really there’s so much underlying it.”

James: “Crossing the Bay Bridge” opens with the lines:

What curative was that,
driving there, driving back,

attempting to suppress
through repetition?

The rhythm of repetition is set so effectively and continues throughout the poem. How do you approach capturing the rhythm of a poem through the revision and editing process? 

Alleliah: “Well, that is an interesting one because repetition is also built into the subject matter of the poem. It’s about a time when I was driving back and forth across the Bay Bridge, essentially moving from one city to another. So, it made sense to incorporate repetition into the structure of the poem as well, kind of making the content and the form align. And in that poem, there’s a lot that is hidden even throughout the repetition. Even in that sentence, ‘What am I attempting to suppress through repetition?’ There’s the object that is obscured, and the repetition helps to further the obscuration of whatever it is that is being suppressed.”

James: I read it several times, even loud, and found the back and forth rhythm came through in a way unique to poetry. Was this an example of a poem that you read out loud as part of the editing process, to figure out if it was working?

Alleliah: “Oh, you know, every single one of these poems, I read out loud, some more than others but reading out loud is a really critical part of my editing process. I find it incredibly useful because what feels good in your mouth feels good in the listener’s ear. And also, when you read a poem out loud, you can lean more toward natural rhythms in language and you can see where the language might be a little unnatural on the page. Voice naturally sorts of fixes it.”

James: “I re-read “Murder Cabin” several times. It’s a fascinating and strange series of four loosely related poems. In the second you write:

Youth gleams technicolor, spurning horizon.
Trunk stocked with bourbon and boxed wine.

Two women, three men. Draw
a pentagram among them:

I am curious how you constructed this poem, how it began and evolved into its final form.

Alleliah: “I have always been a huge fan of horror ever since I was a child and I watched the Chucky movies, which were brutally scary to me at the time, but it was a really intoxicating feeling. While I was at the University of Utah, I realized that I could turn my personal interest in horror into an academic interest as well. There had been some horror themes in my poems, but not super consciously. So, at that time, I began to consciously introduce more horror themes and I wanted to take on the challenge of writing essentially a horror movie poem.”

James: It was really effective. To drill down on how you came up with the structure of it, was it written all at once? It sort of ties together, but each of the individual poems stands on their own.

Alleliah: “I initially envisioned this as a sequence that would be an entire horror movie. So I thought might as well start at the beginning with the opening credits. That’s just where I started. I thought about how these movies generally tend to start, often with an act of violence, often an act of violence committed against a woman. I thought about what it says about these movies that so many of them start in that way. Of course, there’s been a sort of horror renaissance lately, so a lot of the tropes don’t widely apply now as they did before, especially thinking more of classic horror or, I should say, horror movies from the ’90s and 2000s when I was growing up.”

James: Jordan Peele has introduced a whole new artistic form to the horror genre that almost elevates it in a different way.

Alleliah: “Yeah, definitely. The genre has come such a long way, and in that second part of it that you mentioned, ‘road trip,’ there is generally that gender balance in that kind of movie for whatever reason, where it is three women and two men, and each of them fulfills some sort of archetype. In this poem, I was trying to look at what is being said without being explicitly said.”

James: “The Window and the Mirror” could be considered a study in enjambment, with lines of varying length and line breaks in unexpected places, as though you are intentionally trying to throw the reader off balance. How do you approach line breaks as a tool for capturing the essence of a poem? 

Alleliah: “That’s such a great question. And it varies from poem to poem. In that one, ‘The Window and the Mirror,’ I see it more as having an undercurrent of pain throughout, more so than in other poems. And so the line breaks are quite unnatural, stilled, intended to disorient.”

James: I thought it was very effective in doing that. When you translate a poem like that from the page to how you recite it, how does the poem change? I think poems have, as I’ve talked about in multiple episodes of this podcast, three lives: there’s the written form of it, there’s the audible form where you don’t see the poet, and then there’s actually seeing the poet perform it. I think those three things are different in their own way, but taking a poem like that where it’s intentionally jagged and intended to be disruptive when you read it, how much of your recited version tries to match that visual form?

Alleliah: “I’ve never thought about it consciously like that. Really, I suppose there’s always a reason why the lines are broken as they are, and that must transfer over to the voice somehow. With my poem ‘At the Mall,’ which I will be reading later, the line breaks are sort of similar to those in ‘The Window and the Mirror’ and also intended to disorient. I don’t know, I think maybe you’ll have to tell me how those line breaks are reflected in the reading. Yeah, no, I think we talked about it in that way.” 

James: In “World Made of Sugar” the page turn is literally at the turn of the poem, amplifying the moment. You write:

In California (lollipop palms
lolling their dull heads

windward) you told me
you were dying.

My assumption with poetry is that everything is intentional. How do you approach how your poems appear not just on the page, but on the pages of this book where layout and design can be an additional constraint?

Alleliah: “It’s been an interesting process with the poems in this book and working with my wonderful publisher, Dynamo Verlag. When I wrote this manuscript, I had no idea what sort of book it would eventually become. Dynamo Verlag exclusively publishes 5 by 7 books, so they’re smaller than the usual book and as a consequence, it had some interesting effects on the poems. A couple of the poems in there had to have their lines significantly changed because they were more spread out across the page and it simply wouldn’t work with this design. So with ‘World Made of Sugar,’ it was unintentional, but it worked out so well.”

James: “O Rubber Glove” is a wonderful example of a short poem, a series of questions, beautifully capturing what would be a simple image if described in prose. You wrote:

what forms have you known
before fleeing across the interstate? tumbleweed-freed
from decision?

into what coerced shapes
have they seduced you
under the sun's gravel-scrape?

what corrosive sweetness
have you witnessed
withholding
judgment lacking
a mouth?

Describe how you know a moment you are experiencing is a poem waiting to be written. 

Alleliah: “Certainly. Yes, this poem was exactly that—driving across the interstate and seeing this rubber glove and thinking about the life it has lived, the life it will live, what it has seen, and essentially, who it has known through the intimacy of having a hand wear it. Yeah, and just thinking about its context, but I will never know.”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast to hear Alleliah recite selections from the book.