I don’t think you can finish a poem in the same way I don’t think you can finish a feeling, but I can find a tolerable place to pause. I am a very neurotic self-editor, and in this book in particular, because there’s so much personal vulnerability in it, I felt the need to shave the poems so I could account for almost every move or word or turn or line break. With the more formally experimental poems, I sometimes stumble when I read them, and I think that’s a good thing: I want that stumble; I wanted the poems to be rough and off-kilter. So I worked very hard to shape them into very tight, vibrating forms.

I don’t know the answer to that, especially with projects like Seat Assignment or Sorted Books, because both do still feel ongoing. The Sorted Books Project is my longest ongoing project to date, where I’m working in libraries or book collections with other people’s books and trying to work only with what’s there, to draw something out from the book arrangements I make.

It feels most natural to have a lot of projects in motion simultaneously. I need the freedom to initiate and abandon a variety of works, be it a painting, performance, video, or even a book project. If I come back to a piece that doesn’t resonate anymore, I might toss it out completely or turn it into “studio mud,” where it gets broken down and becomes material for something else. I know when something’s done because it clicks and just feels right.

I don’t know. A good friend of mine is sending her album to mastering now and she’s been reaching out to me being like, “Let me know if you need to talk about this because this is the really hard part.” I’ve been very grateful for my community right now, but still, I don’t know. I do think it will get to the point where I just start enjoying listening to the sessions and listening to the songs, and I’m not thinking about what it needs or what it doesn’t. I do think I’m close with a lot of them.