The Lover’s Phrasebook by Jordi Alonso
Illustrations by Phoebe Carter
Red Flag Poetry, 2016
We seem to have lost the notion of a book-as-artifact in this digital age. Just as we no longer have music albums with liner notes, we are used to electronic books, and most of our reading today is done online. The Lover’s Phrasebook (Red Flag Press) by Jordi Alonso, with illustrations by Phoebe Carter, is an artifact in the best sense of the word. Each page is a postcard, which contains both a painting and poem.
The poet and I met electronically to discuss his book.
West Moss: How did the collaboration between you and the visual artist work? I assume that you wrote the poems first and then she responded?
Jordi Alonso: The concept of “untranslatable” words, which is to say words that cannot be translated into English on a one-to-one basis, that I drew on while writing the poems, was originally Phoebe’s idea. She had started collecting a list of such words and shared them with me because our friendship is mostly founded on a shared passion involving words in any form, art, translation, language, and food. I’ve always loved the quiet sensuality of her drawings. When I finished writing the poems, and when I knew that Red Flag would need an illustration for each poem, knowing that I wouldn’t have written these poems if it weren’t for Phoebe’s original list, I asked her to illustrate them.
Moss: Tell me about yourself as a writer, a reader, and a poet.
Alonso: Separating myself into three component parts (writer/reader/poet) feels disingenuous. I am all those things at once and each one in turn. At the moment, and for the last few years, I’ve been interested in cultivating a poetics of desire. At a reading at Kenyon a few years ago, Carl Phillips said that all poetry has, at its core, an erotic element. I was captivated by that claim and it happened to fit in well with the collection I was working on at the time, Honeyvoiced, which is an exploration and a re-translation of Sappho. I suppose poetics never fully finish developing, rather growing and changing as the poet who holds them grows and changes, even so, everything I write and read informs mine.
Moss: How did you come up with the idea of publishing a postcard book?
Alonso: I approached the editors at Red Flag Poetry with an idea for this book because they’d published a poem of mine on a postcard and I thought the design was lovely. I had written the poems in 2015 as a way to explore as many words for “love” as I could. English is one of my favorite languages for its flexibility, both syntactically and linguistically, but one thing that has always made me long for more is the lack of words describing the various shades of the feeling that we call love. There’s a myth that the Inuit have dozens of words for “snow” because it is such an integral part of their life that distinctions must be made. It is not a myth however, that love is an integral part of mine, and, I hope, of Anglophone readers at large; this book is an attempt to expand our vocabulary for that conversation.
Moss: You draw on many languages for this collection. Are you multi-lingual?
Alonso: I am. I’m fluent in English, Spanish, and French, and I’m learning modern Greek, Arabic, and Catalan at the moment, though graduate school has gotten in the way of that, lately. I can also read Latin, Ancient Greek, Middle English, and Anglo-Saxon with a good dictionary at hand.
Moss: Have you collaborated on other works of art before?
Alonso: I have indeed collaborated before with Kate Mueth and the Political Cowgirls and J. Stephen Brantley when we worked together to rewrite the myth of Andromeda, but that was theatre and not poetry (though I did write dialogue in blank verse). Based on my experience with Phoebe, though, I think I’ll be doing this a lot more often.
Moss: If you were to put the visual element of this collection aside, for a moment, how would you say that these poems are connected to one another?
Alonso: I would like to think that the poems are connected without the illustrations, just as the illustrations are connected without the poems because they sprang from the same thematic place, which is this desire to explore love throughout its forms and its languages. I can speak to the poems in that they are linked, literally, from A to Z, with one poem per letter. Even if they weren’t organized in that way, they’d be tied together by their shared purpose. Phoebe’s gorgeous illustrations are the proverbial maraschino cherries on the sundae, if you will, delightful on their own, but all the more lovely in conjunction with my vanilla words.
Jordi Alonso was the Turner Fellow in Poetry at SUNY Stony Brook where he received his MFA, and he is now a Gus T. Ridgel Fellow and a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He has been published or has work forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Noble/Gas Qtrly, Roanoke Review, Edible East End, and Fulcrum, among other journals. His first book, a collection of erotic poems inspired by Sappho entitled Honeyvoiced, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014.
N. West Moss is the author of the short story collection The Subway Stops at Bryant Park (Leapfrog Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, McSweeney’s, Salon, and elsewhere.