"the possibility of resilience in dark times": Interview with Amy M. Alvarez
Amy M. Alvarez’s poem “Burn Out” was published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day in January of this year, one year after Alvarez wrote the first draft. Addressing burnout, the body, and how we respond to an often horrific world while still caring for ourselves, this poem saw several iterations, each with a unique formal conceit. I interviewed Alvarez over email, where we discussed the editorial process she took on to prepare this poem for publication.
Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): Between the first and final draft, we lose the narrative quality of the prose poem in favor of what you characterize as the sharper, more focused images of the couplets and tercets. In your email to me, you said the final draft is "less cluttered visually" and has the necessary “immediacy” for the topic. Do you see immediacy and narrative detail as opposites on a spectrum? Or how do these elements interact?
Amy M. Alvarez (AMA): There are certain “rules” around length, format, and content for Poem-A-Day that impacted the choices I made. Part of my revision was also an attempt to respond to what was happening in the world, to appeal to a wide audience of readers, etc. Normally, there are other factors at play in my revision process: the broader narrative arc of a book, how a certain poem can stand alone and hold its own in terms of lyricism, narrative, and form. These elements are always layered into the work, but this publication called for me to narrow the physical form of the poem as well as the length. Ultimately, the way the poem appears online may not be what appears in my next book. I don't see publication as an ending in the revision process—it's just one stage of many.
BTR: A handwritten note on the middle draft reads: “randomize more for a burnout.” And, indeed, the final draft is a reshuffling of the lines that are “doing the most work.” In each subsequent draft, narrative vignettes gave way to flashes of sensations, of hopes, of assertions about the self. The final draft depicts burnout as shocking and unrelenting, as opposed to the more gradual wearing away portrayed in the first drafts. In what ways did your view of burnout inform this shift?
AMA: I was playing with the concept of burnout both as a physiological and psychological phenomenon along with the idea of erasure in poetry. I wanted the work to engage with layers of self—personal, professional, political—and what it means to find oneself in a state of burnout across all these aspects. I wrote this poem from a place of wrestling with cynicism and trying to hold on to a sense of hope. I think the shifts in the poem could be seen as both the external sense of what was needed for publication as well as my internal sense that “zeroing in” on the tangible was a means of focusing my own depleted energies.
BTR: Erasure is such an interesting form; it often involves erasing another writer’s words, but, in your middle draft, you erase your own. That draft allows the reader to opt in to more detail, more story, more context, while the final does not. How and why did you decide to excise that more?
AMA: I was interested in the multiple stories that were possible in the earlier drafts. What would happen if the poem dropped some of the personal specificity and became broader in scope? What could be burned away within the poem to reveal something else? I was also thinking about the idea of erasure politically—people being disappeared, books being banned, protections of women’s rights being removed—and this experimentation was part of that consideration.
BTR: The final draft is missing all references to people that exist in the first one: the speaker’s grandmother, spouse, mother and siblings, and desired children. Even the first-person memory of the concert is gone. Was this a conscious decision to prioritize the universal over the personal? Do you think the personal can be universal? Or was this the result of something else entirely?
AMA: I do feel the personal can be universal and I didn’t notice that all references to individuals besides the speaker/self had been eliminated until you pointed this out! I felt that some of what remained was so incredibly personal for me that I didn’t feel I was eliminating the personal in favor of a “universal” version of the poem. Again, I am not sure this will be the final version of this poem, but for this version, the paring down felt like it allowed me to create a focus that felt necessary for the way this poem had to live on a particular page in a particular moment in time.
BTR: The title of the poem (burn out) is a verb phrase, a command. Why did you choose that form over the noun (burnout), the concept or person?
AMA: This was intentional. I wanted the poem to assert the possibility of burning out on one’s own terms: How can we live a life that is full and joyous while also engaging with and attempting to repair injustice? How can we keep our eyes open and not despair? How can we despair without drowning?
BTR: For all of its intensity and lament, the poem ends on a note of resilience. This emotive shift is more visible in the first drafts, wherein a dotted line separates the final section from the rest, but it is still clear in the final sentence of the final draft. As you approach an ending, are you thinking about hope? Is that specific to poems about “personal and political challenges,” or does it extend to all of your work?
AMA: I don’t think every poem can end in hope—that feels disingenuous to me. In this particular poem, however, I was attempting to hold onto and consider what might make existence worth it despite the pressures I felt both internally and externally. I wanted to end in a place that felt truthful but gave me, and my readers, the possibility of resilience in dark times.
Amy M. Alvarez is the author of Makeshift Altar and the winner of the 2025 American Book Award and CARICON Prize for Poetry. Born to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents in New York, New York, her work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, place, and social justice. Selected as one of 2022’s Best New Poets, her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. In 2022, she was inducted as an Affrilachian Poet. She has taught at public high schools in the Bronx, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts, and at West Virginia University. She currently teaches at Boston College and in the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University.
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual editor and writer. An alumna of the Fulbright Program, she is a contributing editor for Letras Latinas Blog 2. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Florida, she is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is the assistant editor at Graywolf Press. At Graywolf, Torres Rivera works on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction titles, and is especially involved in works in translation from the Spanish.
