In the first virtual Plática y Poetics I had the privilege of sitting with two powerful poets and dear amigas, Lauren Oertel and Bree Bailey, whose collections invite us into the complicated terrain of the body, memory, survival, grief, love, and transformation. Lauren Oertel’s Scars & Other Luxuries asks us to look closely at the wounds we carry, physical, emotional, inherited, and societal. They lead us to consider how those wounds can become sites of memory, resilience, connection, and even beauty. Lauren’s conversation moved into scarcity and the difficult choices we make to survive, the social judgments attached to those choices, and the ways our bodies become sites where shame, control, pleasure, and liberation collide. She spoke about how the body becomes a place of reclamation and freedom, focusing on the details under a scope of the unseen networks that nourish, communicate, regenerate, and hold one another up. “Scars & Other Luxuries” reflects on the body as archive reminding us that what we often take for granted,such as health, safety, shelter, connection, the ability to heal can itself be modern luxury. The plática shifted with Bree Bailey, into a conversation of intimate landscape: grief, motherhood, divorce, heartbreak, anxiety, humor, memory. It felt like we were tight roping between the complicated act of continuing to live. Reading Wailing on Whisper Street felt, for me, like being at her bedside when she entered a stream of though—sometimes laughing, grieving, sometimes recognizing myself in the brutal honesty and language of the page. Bree’s humor becomes a way of entering difficult truths without softening them, using repetition mirroring the mind replaying moments, relationships, memories, and the versions of ourselves we are still trying to understand after loss. The past remains behind us, entering our present, interrupting, changing the way we inhabit our lives. Our conversation became an acknowledgment of the strange simultaneity of loving someone who is no longer here while continuing to move through the world. Her poems create beautiful architecture where language, intimacy, memory, and poetry become intertwined. Poetry is word architecture, and love becomes something we can preserve within word structures, stanzas, and prose. This was a plática about what our bodies remember, what our hearts have had to endure, and the language that allows us to reclaim, as both witness and shelter.
