Jehanne Dubrow is the author of five poetry collections, including most recently The Arranged Marriage, Red Army Red, and Stateside.From her Q & A with Matthew Thorburn on the Ploughshares blog:
Matthew Thorburn: How did this book come to be? Did you conceive of it as a larger project from the outset, or did it come into focus as you were writing the poems?Visit Jehanne Dubrow's website.
Jehanne Dubrow: My mother has told me the stories that form The Arranged Marriage since I was a little girl: her exiled Jewish childhood in Honduras, her experience of being held hostage by a violent man, and her forced marriage in El Salvador which followed that trauma. These narratives are so much a part of me that The Arranged Marriage happened very organically. I wrote fifteen of the collection’s central poems in the first week and then spent the next two years building the rest of the book around those key texts.
MT: Did you find that the prose poem form offered advantages for you when creating this book? How did you decide that these would be predominantly prose poems?
JD: I came to think of these as my “newspaper column poems” and their narrative strategy a sort of poetic reportage. Received and fixed forms would call too much attention to themselves, and so I learned how to write my version of a prose poem—little, safe boxes that could contain trauma and...[read on]
Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (April 2010).
Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (November 2012).
Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow and Argos.
--Marshal Zeringue