Interview with Carolina Hotchandani
author of The Book Eaters

by Joanell Serra

Carolina Hotchandani was born in Brazil and has lived in most regions of the United Stated before settling, a few years ago, in Omaha, Nebraska, where she is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She earned her B.A. in English Literature from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Northwestern University. Her debut poetry collection, The Book Eaters, won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize for first and second poetry books and was featured in Poets and Writers Magazine‘s “Performing the Future: Our Nineteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets.”

Hotchandani’s beautiful book, released in September 2023, has received a very warm welcome to the poetry world. Awards include: Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, honorable mention; Poetry by the Sea Book Award, finalist; Eric Hoffer Book Award Poetry Category, finalist, and Reading the West Award, shortlisted. Several poems from The Book Eaters were published leading up to the release of the book. You can read “Archipelago''and “Somehow History” at Blackbird, “Self-Portrait as the Cornfields” at Four Way Review, “Blueprints” and “A Cord to Bind Us” at Diode, “Wormholes” at SWWIM Every Day, and “Self-Portrait as a Woman Halved” as “Poem of the Week” at Missouri Review.

From Perugia’s site “...The Book Eaters is a study in belonging as well—to our bodies, our memories, our stories, ourselves, our families, our cultures. Hotchandani’s poems interrogate what it means to be full or empty (of words, of the past, of another human being); they illuminate our inextricability from our creaturehood. Even as they explore unraveling—through the metaphor of insects that devour the very pages we produce—these poems are tightly woven into an exquisitely crafted, cohesive collection.”

I embraced every moment of the journey I took with Carolina’s words. The careful unfolding of the poet’s world and the characters within it remind me of the process of getting to know a friend through a series of deep and intimate conversations. Like all excellent poetry, her poems invite multiple readings--once for the story, once for language and sound, once just for pleasure. While some of the material relates to life’s most challenging events—a parent with dementia, immigration, the pandemic, loss of a loved one, political upheavals, and the birth of a child, the poems lean towards redemption, hope, and making meaning of pain and loss through language.

It was a delight to get to know Carolina through our conversations over the last month, and to unpack some of the more nuanced layers of her book. I found her answers illuminating as a reader and helpful as a writer. Please check out the interview below and as always, I encourage you to purchase the book from the publisher, Perugia Press.

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Joanell: Your book is divided into three discrete sections, although they build on one another nicely: ”Memory, Halved,” “The Making of Mirrors,” and “A Family of Trees.”

I am always interested in the poet’s process of assembling a book--the decisions of what to keep, what to place where, and how to create a book that is a journey. How did you make your choices in terms of sequence and sections? When your manuscript was chosen for the Perugia Press Prize was it as it appears now, or did the editors guide this process? 

Carolina: When I submitted The Book Eaters to the Perugia Press Prize, it was structured as it is now, divided into the three sections you named. I see the first section of the book as concerning primarily memory loss, the second as exploring new motherhood, and the third as interrogating what an identity even is, given that a single person can transform so dramatically in one lifetime.

Witnessing my daughter’s entrance into language was powerful and inspired me to write, yet simultaneously, I observed my father’s falling out of the narrative of his own life. Seeing these opposing yet simultaneous transformations, I wrote The Book Eaters, which traces these divergent paths. I spent a very long time mulling over the structure, considering the pacing of the book, and ordering/reordering poems in order to create a reading experience that I imagined would be smooth.

One aspect of my book that did change between my submission of the manuscript and the publication of the book was that my father passed away—of a heart attack–an event unrelated to the cognitive decline the book explores. Once Perugia accepted my manuscript, I wondered if I should or should not “edit death into the book,” so to speak. A few poems refer to his passing, and when I made these changes, my editor, Rebecca Olander, felt that the book achieved a new sense of completeness and closure.

Rebecca was a wonderful, sensitive reader of these newborn elegies, and we worked on fine-tuning these and other poems together. The overall structure of the book, however, was the result of six-and-a-half years of my own pontification, editing, self-scrutiny–all the obsessive brooding associated with poets!

Joanell: There are resonant repeated metaphors that I found particularly striking. One of them is the concept of things being split open—starting with the poem about the Partition of India, the country of your father’s childhood. And then I see it visually when you write about your father’s brain scan, which of course contains hemispheres. In “Because I hear she hears me from the womb” you write:

This strange body of mine
will divide itself in some
weeks’ time, to birth

a body, to feed
that body, splitting itself
again as I read and inhabit

the lives inside a book.

And then of course there is “Memory, Halved” and “Self-Portrait as a Woman Halved.”

Did this metaphor come about organically? Does it feel like the natural consequence of being the daughter of two people from different continents while living in a third?

CaroIina: I’m an analytical person by nature, and I was sometimes channeling my father’s scientific orientation as I wrote this book, so what feels organic to me might be more analytical than what is expected in poetry. My father was a nuclear chemist, and perhaps it was the fact that he was always scribbling chemical equations onto napkins that made me think about the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy as my father lost his memory and as I created a new human from my body. I’d wonder, where did my father’s memories go? With what were they replaced? How was it true that, one minute, I was a single body and upon giving birth, suddenly two?

As the book evolved, I considered other sorts of halving—namely, this sense of being culturally and linguistically bisected. And often echoes between poems or themes would beget other echoes. I started to think of the Partition of India as another sort of splitting that could resonate with a poem like “Self-Portrait as a Woman Halved.” I enjoy when poems converse with one another in these ways in a book.

Joanell: Much of the material you share is quite painful—watching your father lose his ability to communicate, and his memories, facing your mother’s cancer, a challenging birth. Yet you write with a sense of detachment, able to observe and record small but intriguing details and share them in gorgeous poetry. Can you speak to this voice of distance within the experience?

Carolina: I am intrigued by your way of seeing my perspective. I definitely didn’t feel detached as I was writing these poems on difficult subjects, but I think the act of writing compels me to search for ideas that exist within or behind or under my experiences. Though emotion is what brings me to the page, usually it’s an idea–or the interplay between ideas, emotions, and sense data–that keep me engaged in the writing process.

My poem “Order of Operations,” for instance, is a poem that sprang from grief, but as the writing process unfolded, other ideas asked to be folded into the poem. Who knew that I was going to think of algebra when I came to the blank page and started to write about how one prepares for loss and grief? When my writing feels fruitful, this is how it goes; I begin with one feeling but am led by the association of ideas that emerges on the page, to discover new focal points.

Joanell: The cultural pieces are so important in your work and yet so understated. There is a sense the writer is both Brazilian, Indian, American, and yet none of them. You are your own country in some ways--this powerful blend, sharing stories from both aspects, but grounded in the Midwest of this third country. I’d love to hear about how being a child of multiple cultures influences your experience of being a poet.

Carolina: I think being a person with a multicultural heritage made me feel, for a long time, the absence of a clear literary tradition to which I was responding. I envied Black American writers who could point to their literary lineage as well as their response to it. I was never steeped in Brazilian or Indian literary traditions, and though these cultures certainly shaped my life, I know that no Brazilian would consider me especially Brazilian, and no Indian would see me as very Indian. Although I have lived in the U.S. since I was four, I’ve never been seen as an insider in this country. My family’s confluence of cultures, and our habit of moving from place to place made me feel that our way of life was not widely shared. Because of this, I enjoy reading works that explore liminality. As I’ve familiarized myself with other writers who explore cultural contact zones and who do this in a philosophical way, I’ve felt more empowered to explore my cultural heritage.

Joanell: Who or what were the book’s doulas? A place that offered support or respite, like a residency, a specific graduate school mentor, a personal choice to go on retreat, or a contest that convinced you to keep at it. Can you share any of those things that helped this book arrive in the world?

Carolina: Attending the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2021, the year when it was virtual, was life-changing. Being there helped me forge connections with a wide community of talented writers: at that conference, I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Victoria Chang and attending a lecture by Paisley Rekdal. I later worked with Rekdal when I was a Tin House Scholar in 2022 and with Chang when I was a Community of Writers participant in 2023. In 2022, Rekdal discussed the more public role that poetic elegies played in the pre-18th century period. After the 18th century, elegies tend to mourn the loss of private individuals, yet in doing so, they raise the question, “Why should the public care about a private individual’s loss?”

Though I knew of this shift about which she spoke, I hadn’t asked this question of my own work. I am deeply indebted to Rekdal for encouraging this mode of inquiry. Meanwhile, Chang encouraged me not to shy away from the strangeness of my poems—and to make them stranger. Her book Obit is a steady source of inspiration for me.

Joanell: Do you think being an academic informed your ability to organize the book?

Carolina: I believe that writing a doctoral dissertation strengthened a certain “muscle” (if one may call it that) that I then deployed while working on this book. In writing a dissertation, one has to hold inside the mind an argument that has a large scope; each chapter is but one part of the dissertation’s 150-200-page argument. The poetry manuscript is not as polemical, yet I did find myself asking of my manuscript, “What is each chapter trying to do? What is its function in relation to the whole?” Meanwhile, I also wanted to create a sense of chronology as I ordered the poems. It was sometimes overwhelming to juggle in my mind the idea of chapters as arguments and also the desire to create a narrative arc with my poems, but I could think back to my dissertation days and tell myself I’d surmounted other such challenges. This was helpful.

Joanell: How has the experience of the book being published been for you?

Carolina: It has been an unexpected joy to “come out of the closet,” so to speak, as a poet. Is it okay to use this terminology? I am not sure. What I mean is that, when people would previously ask me about my profession, I’d be vaguely evasive, mentioning that I was a professor, but I’d hide my poet persona behind my professor persona. The book’s publication has been a chance to claim poetry writing as a central part of my life and to lead with it. This has been immensely freeing.

Joanell: I am loath to ask, as I hate this question myself sometimes, but--what’s next?

Carolina: I am in the early stages of working on my second poetry collection. I recall this phase of working on my last book—when each poem seemed to contain a seed for the whole manuscript and existed as a sort of pressure cooker that felt both exciting and scary to approach. My first book depicts the birth of my daughter, the death of my father, my mother’s cancer; I was living through a time that was fraught with personal loss and also ripe with poetic material.  Fortunately, there aren't any tragedies brewing in my personal life right now, but I admit I’ve felt a bit anxious about the way that, in the past, loss has seemed to inspire writing for me. But then, I don’t really want to experience more personal loss! Obviously, there is much to mourn and redress in the public sphere; we live in a world that seems perpetually on the brink of apocalypse. The wars are incessant. The turn toward far-right nationalism everywhere is terrifying. The many ecosystems that are withering are alarming and tragic. But I don’t always know how to channel into poetry my thoughts and feelings over our collective situation. These are some of the questions I am grappling with and the limits that I’m testing.

Joanell: My sense is the poems you write and eventually share will be necessary poems, because they come from a deep inner knowing, matched with your critical thinking and marvelous wordplay. And I’m looking forward to reading them!

Carolina Hotchandani’s collection The Book Eaters is available to purchase at Perugia Press.

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Joanell Serra is a Northern California writer with work published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her books include The Vines We Planted (Wido, 2018) and (Her)oics Anthology, a collection of women’s essays about the pandemic (Regal House Publishing, 2021). A  licensed therapist, she offers personal coaching, women’s retreats, and writing workshops. She is currently an MFA student at Randolph College. Discover more about Joanell at https://joanellserraauthor.com/