“Wild Text Raging”: A Conversation with Threa Almontaser

The Wild Fox of Yemen, by Threa Almontaser, received the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award for best first book in 2020, nearly a year before it was published by Graywolf Press. In the judge’s statement, the poet Harryette Mullen praised the author for “formally and linguistically diverse . . . bold, defiant . . . declarations . . . [that] ask how to belong to others without losing oneself, how to be faithful to oneself without forsaking others.” Almontaser, who is Yemeni American, grew up in New York City, and near the time she was starting college, her family settled in North Carolina. She received a BA in English and an MFA from North Carolina State University. With a TESOL certification, she continues to teach English to immigrants and refugees in the Raleigh–Durham area.

She is the recipient of awards from Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy and the National Endowment for the Arts. After the Fulbright Fellowship that she received in 2021 was canceled due to Covid-19, she reapplied and received another to conduct research in Malaysia for the 2024–2025 year. Almontaser serves as editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and a juror for the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards. She is currently at work on a novel, what she describes as “a story that smudges a line between fantasy and current day, enchantment as neighbor to real life.” A longer-term project is a second poetry collection that, right now, she says, “is in the back of my mind, but it takes me seven years to perfect a poem.”

Almontaser won the inaugural Maya Angelou Book Award in 2021 for demonstrating a commitment to social justice through her poetry. Both that honor and the Walt Whitman Award call attention to the way that her work enriches the tradition of American literature. Yet she has a global reach in many poems such as “Please Take Off Your Shoes Before Entering,” which is dedicated to “the massacred Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand.” Like the poems in The Wild Fox of Yemen, the opening words on her website are an invitation to appreciate as well as a tribute to her “dual belonging”:

Please take off your shoes before entering
لرجاء خلع حذائك قبل الدخول

*

Renee Shea: In 2023 you were the chosen poet for the Chautauqua Scientific and Literary Circle, joining the ranks of Tyehimba Jess, Jane Hirshfield, and Ilya Kaminsky. How was your experience in that heady literary and intellectual experience?

Threa Almontaser: It was an incredible experience. I felt like a cicada climbing out of itself. Folks who lived nearby accepted me swiftly (a stranger even lent me their bicycle!), and a young volunteer came up to me after my reading to thank me because he had never heard rap music echoing through that neighborhood, and it gave him great joy that I played a song and analyzed it during my lecture at the amphitheater.

Shea: You’ve called The Wild Fox of Yemen “a love letter to Yemen.” Now that it’s been out in the world—and given the changing situation in the Middle East—does that description still capture your purpose?

Almontaser: Yes, I think now more than ever. As whole countries get wiped out by imperialism, poetry and essays and journalism and witnessing and learning the true history of those cultures helps write back toward what is being erased in real time.

Witnessing and learning the true history of those cultures helps write back toward what is being erased in real time.

Shea: One of the ongoing themes of your work is the impact of anti-Muslim sentiment on you as a young girl, your family, and the larger community. In “Hunting Girliness,” you write: “[My mother] says, Stop being reckless. I say, Truth is, / I quit being cautious in third grade / when the towers fell & later, wore / the city’s hatred as hijab.” In what ways, other than the obvious, was 9/11 the defining moment, an inflection point, for you?

Almontaser: I think what affected the rest of my childhood was, post-9/11, the way Arabs were treated as a whole. Fear became a permanent fixture. Muslim parents feared for their children, and mine were no exception. Whether we were at home or outside, it was like giving ourselves up to the world. It took a great deal of bravery to remain “reckless” and fight back.

Shea: One of the most powerful poems for me is “Home Security after 9/11” (excerpt):

💣 Consent: if the police show up at your door and ask you if they can come inside to search and you consent to the search, then the police do not need a warrant.

At the break of moon, a front door Herculesced
To pine dust, children dreaming of [ ].
Forced from sleep,
                        Dogs shepherd us into a nightened cave
Where a mother is crying, Let me grab a scarf, just a scarf.
Bleary-brained in its meteor glow, static sounds belling the block, I believe
                        we are being abducted by [ ].

One of your reviewers asserted that any anthology on 9/11 would be incomplete without the inclusion of this poem—suggesting that bearing witness as you do here is an essential element of remembrance. In what ways do you think this poem might be experienced by a generation not yet born during 9/11?

Almontaser: It’s become even more all-pervasive—it was never just a Muslim problem. Moving to the third stage of response requires that Americans ask questions that tested our values as individuals. There’s a natural instinct to contribute what we can and then move on. After 9/11, human empathy quickly gave way to the divisive question: What must we do to make “us” safe from “them?” It was uncomfortable for many to question America’s role in the terrorist attacks, or to reexamine our power and how we use it. Instead, politicians appropriate these great moments of possibility and lead us backward. This latest genocide is no less of an opportunity for elevating our individual caring response to a national level.

Shea: You write with such a remarkable panoply of references from literary, mythological, and popular culture: Moses and Medea keep company with the Fugees and Nikki Minaj, Mahmoud Darwish with Natalie Diaz and Robert Hayden, to name a few. Do all these sources live in your head at once—as inspiration?

Almontaser: I like chasing my curiosities and strange impulses—celebrating these varied discernments—staying curious, and not letting the content dictate the container. Everything is made from a collage of other stuff. I love poems that reference eight or nine or ten things, while demonstrating how all of them can connect. I ask myself, what exactly do I like from this form of media? What are they doing well? What atom of this craft is specifically sparking my interest, making me want to work on my own art? The only way to be sure your ability matches your taste is to keep feeding your curiosity, to be in constant pursuit of it.

Shea: The Yemeni poet Abdullah Al-Baradouni (1929–1999) is a seminal influence on you as both poet and person. You’ve said that you were surprised to find that “From Exile to Exile” is the only one of his poems to be translated into English, and you began to remedy that by translating two of his poems that are included in Wild Fox (“When People Are Cursed,” “Why I Am Silent about the Lament”). Do you think he would be pleased not only with your translation but your efforts to introduce him to an English-speaking audience?

Almontaser: I’d like to believe all political poets, including Baradouni, strive for their voices to be heard for many years and many ears, whether they’re crying out for revolution or heartbreak, for their neighbors or for themselves. Mary Oliver likes to say that she writes poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now—a useful mindset during revision, but also for translating the thoughts of someone who had lived and fought and loved way before your time.

Shea: In “On Writing,” you point out that “writers of color are also allowed to write about the universal, not just the specifics”—an assertion that heralds what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously calls “The Danger of the Single Story.” How have you woven stories of your family, celebrations of your culture, your country (named in 2022 the “poorest country on earth”) that rebuke stereotypes and trade single stories of suffering for depictions of a vital, rich culture? I think about the glorious “aunties” in your poetry, such as the henna artists who “with their patience, [are] turning lanky limbs / into a mysterious mural” (“Stained Skin”).

Almontaser: It’s our responsibility to write for the Yemeni community to more than just our survival, but our joys, too. Whenever I read a really good poem, I think this is older than me, and this will outlast me. We write toward joy, not just in spite of, but because it already exists. And there shouldn’t be an erasure of the authentic self.

We write toward joy, not just in spite of, but because it already exists.

Shea: You also exhort in “On Writing”: “Make room for the hybridization of language. Understand the failures of translation. Create space for the many Englishes.” You create new words, neologisms maybe, but you seem to delight in giving an English word or expression new life, often by changing the traditional part of speech. So we have “a front door Herculesced,” “when I Arabic my way towards them,” “rephrasing Pinocchios my nose,” and “I / alien my way into his country.” “Bodygarden” and “daughterful,” new words, make their way in other poems—and make perfect sense! How do you do that?

Almontaser: It just happens! It’s the best part of writing to me, the most fun. I get to explore the ecosystems of terms in my head, all the ways I can “write to find out,” without restrictions (self-imposed or otherwise). I sit at my computer and think, How close can I get to the feeling I’m trying to convey? I enjoy rereading an older poem and being startled at my own word choice, like a relived revelation. I like the alchemy of that action—of making up the thing, then surprising myself with it over and over again.

Shea: I wouldn’t presume to ask you who the “wild fox” is or what he/she/they represent, but let’s just say there seem to be many foxes in this collection. To quote a few: in “Heritage Emissary,” your father tells a story about his childhood “catching a wild fox with his cousin—Arabic / the medium through which his body can return home”; in “My Father Finds Home through the Birds,” “There is a raptor collecting fox fur in his beak.” One reviewer describes the “foxhunt” of reading your poetry, speculating that “a fox of sacrifice might be an image of Yemen itself” or maybe you—the author—are the fox. What are we to make of this wild fox who is a presence throughout?

Almontaser: I’m drawn to the idea that the trickster troubles things out of a kind of hunger and that, in some cases, you can’t tell whose side the trickster is on (or who they even are). It’s important for poets to constantly interrogate. Using the fox as the central preoccupation of the book helped me completely understand writing as a mode of inquiry. That questioning—particularly of institutions and the relationships therein—reminds me of a trickster fooling an enemy or a friend. I wanted to make the reader suspicious of me. To probe my motivations. I believed this would make the reader more active, to really examine the words I was writing.

I’m drawn to the idea that the trickster troubles things out of a kind of hunger and that, in some cases, you can’t tell whose side the trickster is on.

Shea: You want to make readers “suspicious” of you in order to make them “more active”? Now, that’s intriguing. You’ve said that sometimes you write in Arabic not only because it’s part of your identity but also “to make the reader feel as thrown off, unsettled, separated and misplaced as the speaker seeking refuge.” In one poem alone, I encountered maa’tuf, diwan, fajir, galabeyat, thobes, Rahman, foutah, miswak—pretty daunting! On one hand, inclusion of such language may promote cultural awareness or appreciation, but don’t you worry that the Arabic words and allusions might put readers off?

Almontaser: It never even occurred to me that anyone would be put off. I assumed it would be enjoyable to find the definitions, like a treasure hunt, using Google or context clues or an Arabic-speaking friend to find the answers.

Shea: In some poems, it’s not only the shifting languages but the form; for instance, in “Recognized Language,” you shift in the third stanza from the traditional Western form of left-to-right to right-to-left. Is that a challenge, a reminder that there’s a different way, a puzzle—or what? Also, is your use of [ ]—brackets with open space—a way to engage the reader?

Almontaser: In Arabic, we write from right to left, which is what that form was mimicking. And I used brackets for poems like “Home Security” because invasions are a form of silencing, or as a child, you’re sometimes too afraid to say what had happened out loud, else it solidifies into your reality.

Shea: It’s dazzling to see how much is going on in these poems! With everything you’ve just described—and your faith in your readers not just meeting but enjoying whatever challenges they might encounter—how did you put the whole collection together? I’m interested in the three “sections” and how they emerged, but also the form of the poems on the page—indentations, spacing, enjambment. I have visions of you on your computer moving words and phrases around as you “design” the poems: is it a final step once you have the language(s) in place?

Almontaser: It definitely felt like I was designing the interior of a home—a lot of labor on an architectural level. The three sections simply made sense to me at the time in terms of how human growth works: a beginning, an in-between, and an after. Overall, I wanted my poetic language to feel like a resistance to expectations. Writing as a reparative dynamic, creating a new landscape on the page and healing from the exposure of colonial stereotypes. I wanted each and every line to offer up a new image of ourselves. That multifarious mindset helped me remain creative with form.

Shea: You’ve said that your poems both provoke and entertain. . . . Somewhat similarly, Naomi Shihab Nye described them as “richly playful and deadly serious at once.” It’s a wonderful, paradoxical combination that invites multiple readings. Could you talk about how that mix works using “When White Boys Ask to See My Hair” as an example?

When White Boys Ask to See My Hair

My hair is not taking any visitors right now.

My hair was used as a banner on the moon.

My hair is belly dancing on an auntie’s tabletop.

My hair fell off the long line on Mt. Everest trying to take a selfie.

My hair is flipping off an ICE raider after he barges into her favorite deli, arresting her neighbors.

My hair is Medusa’s second cousin, the strands slithering along your throat. Avert your gaze for your own good.

My hair was captured from the exotic Manu wilderness and caged for a popular circus show.

My hair is ducking beneath a desk, trying to recall the drills, math sheets falling in a white rain.

My hair escaped an arranged marriage to sail the Red Sea with a crew of burly pirates. She is busy battling maritime brigands and trying not to get lost.

My hair is under siege in Yemen, her home recently bombed, her children buried under the rubble. I am not entirely sure if she will make it out alive.

My hair was abducted by aliens. Rumor has it they spun her into a star. That might be her there, winking down at you.

My hair was mauled on a Tanzanian Safari. I found a few leftover curls flossed between a caracal’s fangs.

My hair joined a deep-rooted Bedouin tribe. She enjoys feeding nomadic camels from her palm, became the shaykh’s third wife, and sings ancient poetry into campfires. She is happy. I don’t think she is coming back.

Almontaser: Most of the poems in the collection contain both carnality and tenderness to get a certain point across. There’s actually a logical connector between those two adjectives that many people don’t see right away. It’s impossible for me to only be one or the other. I like twists and turns and tug-of-wars. When writing “White Boys,” I asked myself, How can I give a fresh perspective to this ordinary event? Being playful yet serious is a way to do that. Braiding multiple emotions acts as a launchpad for your intuitive logic.

Shea: In “Muslim Girl with White Guys, Ending at the Edge of a Ridge,” you write, “It’s the gong of the poet’s helve I listen for, / sword inscribing the air,” and “I become / calcified, a wild text raging.” The collection as a whole shows your emergence as a poet, a writer, a woman embracing that “wild,” maybe “reckless,” definitely rebellious, absolutely fierce self. In what ways is writing how you both experience and chart that evolution—or identity?

Almontaser: That reckless abandonment fueled the act of writing itself. It encouraged me to edit into a wider range of syntax and diction, to give my metaphors real depth and make sense. It ensured I didn’t self-censor and that I gave myself grace, imagining more possibilities for where the work could go. It disentangled me from what others might deem “inappropriate” or “violent.” That fierceness clawed its own way to the surface of these poems—and stayed there.

Reckless abandonment fueled the act of writing itself.

Shea: In the poem “Hunger Wraps Himself,” you refer to “Hope—Darwish’s incurable / malady”—an unusual combination. Do you find cause for hope today, or is the very possibility a delusion, a weakness—a malady?

Almontaser: Holding onto hope for a lot of people is like walking into a spider web. You can feel it on your face, but you can’t see it. Still, I think it’s worth it to keep one’s eyes open. Poets, to me, are the epitome of hope. Both go hand in hand. They affect resistance movements and public demonstrations all the time, as the drum in lieu of a drum. When used the right way, it can fuel the people leading a collective effort or bring more feet to the march, evoking them to stomp harder. Poetry empowers hope. And hope empowers the movement.

Shea: In “Ode to Bodega Cats,” you write: “All I want is to be an adequate ancestor / to the Yemeni women who come after.” Are you satisfied that this debut collection of your poetry moves toward that goal?

Almontaser: Yes, I’m very proud about where this collection has gone. I want every Yemeni girl who reads it to feel honored and known and remarked upon. I hope after reading it, they decide to write too.