Author Spotlight: Laura Cresté
- letraslatinasblog2
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Buy: In the Good Years by Laura Cresté | Four Way Books | September 15, 2025 | ISBN: 978-1-961897-56-4
Can you describe the environment(s) where you wrote your book? This could be the room, the desk, the city, an MFA program, a fellowship, or any other environmental factor (you only wrote when it rained, you always wrote with fresh flowers in the room, etc.).
The book came about slowly, over many years, ship-of-Theseus style. Only four poems from the manuscript I originally started sending out to contests in 2017, a year after graduating from my MFA program and, in retrospect, too early, made it into the published book. But I never felt as if I were scrapping an entire manuscript (which would have been discouraging!); it just evolved over time.
I wrote these poems in my childhood bedroom. On NJ Transit’s 190 bus from Rutherford into Port Authority. In beautiful homes that belong to the families I nannied for in New York City and the Hamptons. While at a windowless office job on company time. During the pandemic at my in-laws’ house, while listening to woodchucks burrowing under the kitchen floorboards, and stomping back at them. Much of the book was written during my fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. For seven months I lived in a converted barn that once housed lumber, and later served as Helen Frankenthaler’s studio. I wrote poems in my head while walking across a granite jetty at low tide, and revised them while sitting across the workshop table from other poets, often eating cake and sometimes waving at each other from within our poems.
I wrote the poems from a desk overlooking a lake in Monson, Maine, where sea planes frequently landed, and next to a too warm pond in Sewanee, Tennessee that made some people sick, and under towering trees on the Reed College campus. The one constant that held true for most of the process was that I wrote at night. Daylight is good for reading and for editing. For generating new work, I need the quiet and the lack of urgency. When I wake up, I feel a to-do list pressing down on me, and so I prefer the freedom and playfulness of being the only one awake, writing lines that surprise me.
I turned in the final version of my book for typesetting the day before heading into the hospital to be induced for labor. Several copyediting passes happened in the months after, while, in the next room, my husband or my mother held my newborn, who refused to sleep if not in contact with another person.
What was your writing process? Your editing process? Did you adopt a unique process for this book, or do you have a “go-to” approach for all your writing?
My process is nearly always collage. I have one all-purpose notebook which I use for journaling, list-making, collecting quotes, and first-drafting poems. After a month or two, or six, if the days get away from me, I flip through the notebook to see what I’ve generated and then transpose what interests me onto my computer. That already culls down the material significantly. And then I start grouping the writing into several poems. A lot never emerges from the notebook.
Very rarely, a poem comes out wholly formed, and when it does it feels like a gift. I wrote “Poem for My Children Born During the Sixth Extinction” in one sitting, on a slow summer day at my office job, which I only remember for being so rare. Usually a poem’s genesis is much hazier in my memory.
Since having a baby, my process has had to change a bit. I write much more often on my phone, in the dark, with one hand. That’s fine for first-drafting but then the hard part is finding the time to edit. Like the millennial belief about needing to make big purchases on big screens, I’m like that with editing. It can’t be done on the phone.
Is there a connection to your past in your book?
As first books of poetry so often do, the book spans much of my life. So there’s my own lived past, as well as the past that I’ve inherited: the patterns established before my time that I now find myself participating in (ways of communicating, beliefs about love), as well as the historical forces that let me be born. And then there’s how the two intersect: my attempts to understand myself within those contexts, and to consider more critically what I learned about intimacy from the adult relationships I observed as a child.
When I was a younger poet I wrote often about my mother’s side of the family—Brooklynites, mostly-Irish, lapsed Catholics—which is the family I grew up closest with. The older I’ve gotten, the more curious I’ve become about my father’s side of the family, Argentines who left Buenos Aires after the military dictatorship that began in 1976 and are less well-known to me. Two family members in particular loom large in my book: my grandfather, a playwright who wrote under the name Alberto Adellach, and my aunt Alicia Crest(e), who was a singer-songwriter and poet. My grandfather died when I was five years old, and my aunt, who never lived in the U.S., died when I was a teenager. We didn’t share a spoken language, but their presences in the world as artists matter to me. During the seven months of my fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, I worked at translating their respective plays, poems, interviews, and obituaries. Getting a sense of their voices on the page made me feel connected to them, as if we were—across time, culture, language, and death—participating in a shared, family project of writing.
You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book?
I like to imagine when horses were unremarkable
as Toyotas. When you wouldn’t turn to your companion
after spotting them in a field and say “horses.”
*
I know conversation with the land only goes
one way. But when I pull at the weeds,
the weeds, I think, pull back.
In both instances, there’s dirt. The field, and these gestures toward the past. The land as a site of memory. In the Good Years is unsurprisingly bookended by tercets, which is my favorite form to write in.
William Carlos Williams is synonymous with plums. If you had to choose one fruit and one animal/plant/celestial body that would forever remind people of you, what would you choose and why?
Friends now tend to send me any interesting whale news they come across, because of my eleven-page long poem, “At the Lighthouse,” about a baby humpback whale that died of entanglement and washed up in Provincetown. I like that whales remind people of me, if only because it creates a nice occasion to catch up. I’ve strengthened that association by featuring Sean Landers’s painting Sperm Whale Skeleton I on my cover. Then there’s Elizabeth Flood’s ink drawing of the dead whale in Provincetown, framed in my home—a wedding gift.
I think I’m drawn to whales because they occupy an inviting space between familiarity and mystery. We’re introduced to whales early on in picture books, where they’re represented as gentle giants. They’re ancient and unknowable in many ways; we still don’t know everything about their habits and life cycles. But because they’re mammals like us, feeling a sense of kinship is easy. They believe in caretaking and mourn their dead. I do think the gentle aspect of most whales is important to me, because I don’t feel the same affection for orcas, though that orca yacht-sinking spree a few years back was, of course, a bit thrilling.
As for fruit: God, I love a nectarine. That would put me in the same stone-fruit family as William Carlos Williams, which makes me glad. As I mention in my book, we share a hometown. WCW’s son took over his father’s practice (of medicine, not poetry) in Rutherford, New Jersey and was my pediatrician.
What are you currently reading?
Late at night, on my phone, I’m working my way through Debt by David Graeber. Recent books of poetry I’ve loved include The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Matthew Tuckner and Our Hands Hold Violence by Kieron Walquist. Next, I’m excited to start Aracelis Girmay’s new book Green of All Heads.
Many of my reading hours are spent on children’s books, which thankfully my child has incredible patience for. The best ones in our current rotation are Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl, The Feelings Book by Todd Parr, and Stalactite & Stalagmite by Drew Breckmeyer—a funny book about the millennia it takes for two rock formations in a cave to grow toward each other; I hadn’t seen a picture book about deep time before.
Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it?
The theme that’s emerging out of my next poetry manuscript is reproduction and replication. A few months before my child arrived, we moved into a replica of a building of some historical importance. And then the past year has been defined by the time-bending miracle of watching a baby develop language and acclimate to our culture. I’m also often thinking about the viruses we try to keep out of our home, and less successfully, those invasive ladybug look-a-likes and western conifer seed bugs. I frequently have a sense that things around me are multiplying, duplicating, and that is making its way into the work.
Laura Cresté is the author of In the Good Years (Four Way Books, 2025) and You Should Feel Bad, winner of a 2019 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. She holds an MFA from New York University and has received fellowships and other support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Community of Writers, Monson Arts, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She lives in western Massachusetts.
