KL: And you often do that hanging ending, which is a way to grapple with a risk of sententiousness. I remember someone saying to me long ago, who was not a poetry reader but had just read some poems, ‘Why does this poem, why do these poems end with this sort of thud? What is this thud with the last line?’ And ever since then, I’ve had a kind of horror of that. But thinking of the one before, formulating a problem in the starkest possible way while making strange and conspicuous word choices is helpful. What if the answer is ‘no?’

Ladybug, ladybug, 
fly away home. 

Your house is on fire. 
Your children

So ‘Your children,’ just hangs there while the other lines are end-stopped.

RA: Well, I stopped it there because it is a familiar nursery rhyme. Most people will know how it ends. And like many nursery rhymes, it’s bleak. So, it really goes: ‘Your house is on fire / Your children will burn.’ But since I thought this was familiar, I thought I could leave it off and direct the reader to look towards the children, ‘What’s going on with them? Are they in danger?’

Because, well, there’s a lot in this poem and the book as a whole about fire: ‘Our earliest ancestors / were accelerants.’ The word accelerants, of course, means something to speed up a process. Now, some people on the right and the left think that they should push society into collapsing more quickly so that out of the ashes, their kind of new world can arise. They’re called ‘accelerationists.’ What I was mostly thinking of when I said ‘accelerants,’ though, is the more familiar meaning, like when arson investigators investigate a fire to see if it was started intentionally, they see if there was an ‘accelerant’ there, like gasoline on the floor. So, ‘Our earliest ancestors / were accelerants // they ate change.’ Change as in thermodynamic processes. It’s related to fire, even if it’s a slow fire, the fire of digestion, I mean, life is fire, a contained slow fire. Life is fire, and life is endangered by fire.

KL: The book has a slow-burn quality, with many explicit images and word clusters about fire. That’s why I say it’s very cohesive in all kinds of ways, but certainly, at the language level – you feel like you’re in its sort of bubble or echo chamber. And there’s also a lot of referring to other things – cliches or well-known bits of language in the world, or ready-made bits that you draw attention to as a sort of jokey passing pleasure. Fragmentary bits are drawn in – but there’s a sense of it all burning up.

RA: There are a lot of poems in the book that, much more explicitly than this, refer to fire. I mean, there’s even a poem called ‘Fire,’ and then there’s ‘Flame.’ I think it’s because I live on the West Coast of the United States, but you’re in the same situation here in Australia, where you’ve had so many massive wildfires. Right now, there’s one that’s burning right up to the northern outskirts of Los Angeles that’s already put a lot of people in danger. I’ve been in fires. I don’t know if we want to go off into something autobiographical, but I’ve had ashes falling on my head, and I’ve been in heavy smoke where it’s hard to breathe. One time, I was in my house alone, and my husband had my car, when suddenly, on my cell phone, there came a warning that said, ‘Evacuate immediately.’ And so, I went outside, and I’m looking around – I don’t see fire, but I can smell it, and I know there’s a fire somewhere, and I’m thinking, ‘How would I evacuate?’ Then, it turned out to be a mistake when another message came through and said, ‘Not Everett,’ which is where I live. It was a warning about another fire a little further up the hill. So, I’ve been close to fire.

KL: That sense of looming disaster is strongly thematised in the book, and one of the poems is called ‘Disasterville.’ In another of the poems, you use the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles figuratively, this bubbling tourist attraction next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That juxtaposition works well for the world of your poetry. When you say ‘in fiction / time runs both ways,’ it points to the idea of poetry as immemorially deep. And you often use various kinds of creation myths. You use Genesis, and you use figures of geological time, which cross-cuts with the threat of imminent disaster.

RA: Right, in the beginning and the end is the Alpha and the Omega.