In Jessica Nirvana Ram’s Earthly Gods, the speaker grapples with the intertwined tensions of self, family, and religion. Against larger backdrops of culture and diaspora, the poems in this collection examine what it means to be a self in relation to the world, engaging with tensions of familial and geographical belonging. In lush and abundant images, the speaker’s sense of self expands through the collection, thinking through questions of lineage, matrilineal inheritance, and daughterhood.
In this interview, we discuss form, inheritance, and the shifting experience of self in relation to the world.
Vika Mujumdar: This was such a compelling book to read—how abundant and rich it is in its images, how materially grounded it is even against the larger familial, geographic, and religious themes that it centers. I’m curious about the structure of the book as a project, and how it’s divided into three sections each with its own different epigraphs and poetic lineages. Could you speak a bit about your relationship to these three poets and how they’ve influenced you work?
Jessica Nirvana Ram: When I started putting the collection together, I was in grad school. My thesis director helped me separate my poems into different themes, and that’s how it was broken down and how I started ordering it. I tried to order it twice without any sections, and she kept suggesting that it needed to be in sections. I was a little reluctant at first to put it into sections until I found the quotes. I had found them throughout writing these poems over the course of the two years that I was working on the book. And I find that when I’m writing, whatever I’m writing immediately connects to what’s happening in my life. I’ve also admired Aja Monet for a while; her collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter really speaks to me, especially in its themes of matrilineal lineage and inheritance. In the first section of the book, which opens with an epigraph from Monet, I felt the quote encapsulated the searching that the speaker is going through—acknowledging what is being expected of her by the people in her life, and she’s coming to terms with how other people are viewing her, and therefore how she’s viewing herself. The second section opens with an epigraph from Franny Choi, whose work and career I’ve been following for a long time. She started out in spoken word, which I also started out in. And the epigraph is from her poem “Turing Test” which is one of my favorite poems of all time. It felt necessary for the second section, where the speaker has dealt with what people view her as, and she’s acknowledging that she’s not just one of these things and is multifaceted. What does that look like, for her to be split into all these different parts and still want to come out looking whole? And I think Franny Choi does a really good job of analyzing the self. The third section opens with a quote from Kaveh Akbar, and I loved it because the third section is about self-love and coming into your own—coming to terms with, even in the face of pain and grief, finding joy. I found that the quote encapsulated this section, which ends on a more lighthearted note. The speaker doesn’t find a solution to things that she’s dealing with, but is making a move towards self-love and joy, and choosing joy in the face of everything else.
VM: It’s interesting how these themes and positionalities converge through the epigraphs. How do you find spoken word, and your experience with it, to be in conversation with this collection, and how did it influence your poetry?
JNR: I’ve been writing poetry since I was 12 in a spiral bound notebook—like unrequited love poems, which I have lots of that never saw the light of day. When I got to college, I was introduced to all these spoken word poets. Sarah Kay was the first one that I was introduced to, and I watched her poem “Point B”, and I was so moved by the way poetry acted on stage that I joined the spoken word club on my campus. I got involved with them very early on—I didn’t love the poetry classes offered by my university at the time, but I was a creative writing major. I ended up focusing on creative nonfiction formally in school, and my poetry came from the spoken word club I was in. We met every week, and we would watch a poem, have a prompt, and we would write for twenty minutes with music playing or in silence, and share first drafts with each other. It was a very nurturing space. By my second year, I became one of the exec members of it, and I hosted open mics and got to the front of it, and liked being on stage and performing my poetry for an audience. It felt like the most immediate way to get my work out there and to get feedback from people.
I found that I’ve carried some of the nuances of spoken word into the work that I do now. In particular, repetition is one big thing from spoken word I’ve carried. In spoken word, you know you’re only going to get to perform once—you know your audience is only going to hear a thing once, so you use a lot of repetition so that it sticks. You don’t necessarily have to use that kind of repetition in written poetry if you’re not expecting to perform it. I found that I had to filter a little bit as I was writing—I would say something in three different descriptions in a very rapid-fire pace. My editors would say that I didn’t need all these descriptions. But they all worked, and I would want to keep them. I’ve found a happy medium, where I keep some of them if I feel that I want that emphasis, and I’m okay with it echoing back to spoken word in that way.
Another way I’ve utilized spoken word is through backslashes in the prose poems. One of the first poems I wrote in that form was “I am unfit to raise daughters,” which was written after Hieu Minh Nguyen’s poem “White Boy Time Machine: Software.” I saw that form used there for the first time, and then started writing my poem in the form of backslashes and it felt like spoken word to me because I could control the rhythm and the way that my readers were reading the poem, which was important to me for that poem in particular—where I want the reader to pause, to take a breath.
I’ve also been told that my endings are strong, which is a thing spoken word does really well—you have to end really strong. I’ve never really had a problem with finding the endings for my poems. I’ve been told that they’re not soft endings—they’re purposeful, and sometimes, hard endings. It’s always interesting to hear how people perceive my own work, because sometimes I don’t think that it’s a hard ending, but someone feels that it’s a gut punch ending. It’s been interesting to see that holdover from slam poetry for me; the ending is important to me because I want it to be something lasting that sticks with my reader afterwards.
VM: You said that formally you studied creative nonfiction; how do you see your poetry and nonfiction as similar or different? How do you approach both? Was there a shift from mainly one to the other, or do you still find yourself equally doing both?
JNR: I was introduced to creative nonfiction in college. We were required to take an intro class for all three genres, and so I took an Intro to Creative Nonfiction class. It was the most fascinating thing I’d ever been introduced to. It felt like a form that I’ve always wanted access to. I feel like, my poetry is very confessional in and of itself, but with creative nonfiction, it gets laid bare, even more than that. There were stories I wanted to tell that I tried to tell through poetry, that needed to be told through nonfiction. It was interesting for me to figure out what stories needed to be told and through what mediums—prose is interesting because my prose is still very poetic.
I feel like I tackle heavier subjects in my nonfiction, things that feel almost too heavy for poetry. My relationship with my parents is complicated—I love them, but we’ve had some difficulties in the past, and trying to put that in one poem feels like a disservice to them. Creative nonfiction gives me space to explore that nuance a bit more. I write a lot of hard things in my creative nonfiction, and I do it less frequently.
When I was in grad school, we could take classes outside of our genre. So while I was focused in poetry, I took creative nonfiction classes. My professor, Sayantani Dasgupta, who is brilliant and hilarious, pushed me to write a lot while I was taking classes with her, which I really loved. But yeah, the essays are much harder to write because they require so much of me. The essays that I’ve published are both about sexual assault—I felt like I needed to write the essays to process all of it. I feel like I do poetry for myself and for others, and I do creative nonfiction just for me most of the time.
VM: In the poem “Contract for Assimilation” you write: “I wilt, keeping myself folded & shut.” And in the poem “river woman” you write: “love, I am nothing but excess.” I found the contrast of these ideas particularly compelling seeing the abundance of image in your poems—there’s a beautiful richness of image, whether familial and emotional or material, set against the speaker’s initial folded in self that opens up the more we move through the collection—could you speak to that contrast you’re creating throughout the collection, of this abundance against the speaker’s self?
JNR: Those things happened accidentally as I wrote. I wrote “Contract for Assimilation” before I wrote “river woman,” and when I laid all the poems out, I could see the connections. My brain makes the connections before I do, which I think is funny. Image is really important to me, and I think I write with a lot of them in every poem I do, if not focusing on one heavily throughout the same poem. And even in the moments where the speaker is feeling closed off and they don’t have access to the world around them, or they don’t want the world to have access to them, I think the images are still trying to reach towards that openness in a way. That’s what the abundance is coming out of want for an openness that we move towards as the collection continues, where it’s not that we’re lacking in images at the beginning, but they open up and become brighter as the collection goes on. The poem “From Under the Cork Tree” is in the last section, and that feels like one of the lightest poems for me, even with its content, and I wanted to put that at the end for that reason.
The second poem in the collection, “Unripe Child” also talks about the tomato retreating into rot and holding in on itself as well. I think that image repeats itself enough times for the first section and then the opening up comes later and allows for more positive imagery.
VM: Motherhood and matrilineal inheritance and lineage play a large part throughout the collection; which were some of the earliest poems in the collection that wrote into this idea, and how did this theme change over time as you wrote more of the poems in the collection?
JNR: I wrote a lot of the grandmother poems early on—in early 2021, about midway through working on the collection. “Reciprocity” in particular was one that was important and meaningful for me to write after going home and taking care of my grandmother for a couple of weeks; the year before I went to grad school, I lived at home and helped my mother take care of my grandmother. That was very present in my head, and my grandmother was very present in my head as I was working through this collection. When I started the collection, I thought it was going to be about my grandparents. I think my parents think of it as me recording their history, and I disagree with them in the sense of I am writing their history, but I’m writing my history as well. But when I went into grad school and started writing these poems, they were all about my grandmother. They were all about religion and trying to grasp what was holy, and my grandfather’s death. And it wasn’t until after I broke up with the boyfriend in the book that I started writing some more pieces about my family and realizing the collection needed to be more than just my grandmother and my mother, and it also needed to be about love. That’s where “Contract for Assimilation” came in, which I started writing that to understand what it felt like to not have the same language as my family, what it meant to be upset at my mother. I was very reluctant at the start of writing the book to write anything that cast my mother in a bad light, even though I had qualms with her, and there were things I wanted to address within the book. In my culture, it’s so taboo to talk bad about your parents and about family publicly, and it felt like I was breaking a rule to even want to write about things that were really important to me.
“While Making Laddoo For My Cousin’s Wedding” also came during a time I was thinking and writing a lot about food, which was another link to family and to motherhood and to my grandparents. Having a conversation with my mother about queerness was another hard point, something I was avoiding talking about. That’s probably the only explicitly queer poem in the collection, just because I was so worried about what it would mean to put these things on the page and for it to become a book that was going to be in the world. I started dealing with the harder topics the later I was into the book, and then they got shuffled as I was ordering the book, so they’re not in the order they were written in but they all speak to each other in their own way. The last poem in the book ends on my parents’ wedding video, and thinking about them as this thing that feels holy. That took a lot of working up to get it.
VM: In terms of how this collection sees motherhood and daughterhood, there’s a particularly interesting sense of unfolding—as the speaker’s self unfolds to the reader, so does the mother’s self unfold to the speaker. In the poem “earthly gods,” we see this sense of self slowly unfold, all these ideas coming to the center, at once. How do you see this poem as central to the collection, and its formal structure in conversation with the other poems? What was the process of writing this poem in particular?
JNR: That poem took me a very long time to write. The inspiration for it came from a Tumblr post that goes around every couple of years, that you are all the pieces of everyone you’ve ever loved—that you take pieces of all these people that are in your life, and even if you don’t have them in your life anymore, they stick with you through these personality traits and habits you’ve picked up. The poem was originally titled “Catalog of Inheritances”, and I started it by listing things. I tried then to talk about reading for a while, and then eventually I wrote the stanza about the grandmother. I realized through writing that stanza that the poem was more about God and what my family means to me. That was the first poem I had written that included my father, who I don’t write about very much. And the next logical thing was writing about my mother, and I stumbled over it for a little while—what I wanted to say about her, and then eventually I realized that I needed to talk about something she always says, which was this concept of “earthly gods,” and that our parents are earthly gods. And I realized that’s what I was trying to get to through all of this, that my parents are my earthly gods. And that’s what makes all this so complex and sprawling and hard to grasp. What do you owe to the people that you believe to be gods, and what do you owe to your gods? What does it mean to worship someone? I felt like within the collection, I worship my grandmother and mother and father, but that doesn’t mean they’re without fault, which I think is really important with the concept of an earthly god—they’re still human, which makes them inherently different than just a god. That’s what the collection is moving towards, this idea that we can worship the people we love but we can also hold them accountable, and that’s necessary. Once I realized that it became easy to recognize that this was the central poem, what the whole book was about. I also decided that this was the title I wanted to go with, and I’m really happy about sticking with it.
VM: I’m also intrigued by the few poems that vary formally, such as the prose poems where phrases are separated by slashes, and the ones that use a form of address, like when the speaker addresses her mother, and “When the Air is Heavy” in particular, which uses the second person; could you speak a bit about your formal and stylistic choices here, to set these poems apart?
JNR: Normally, I write in free verse. I don’t write with a form in mind—sometimes that means I will do stanzas right away, and other times it’s a block of text. Then, in revision, I find the form that seems to work for a poem. The direct address poems are the ones that come out that way; I never have to go back and rewrite it as a direct address. With “When the Air is Heavy,” I wanted to address myself, so that’s what I’m doing with the “you” there. I like writing in the second person, and I do it a lot in prose. It’s interesting when I do in poetry, because some people will take it as applicable to themselves when they read it. For me, it’s the speaker speaking to themselves and creating that kind of relationship that you have to look at from different angle. Other forms, like stanzas, or quartets, tercets, couples, vary on what I feel like doing. The poem “astral ashes” was originally a sonnet—I tried writing it for three or four years, and I could never get it on paper properly, because it was just so sprawling. Eventually I decided to try it as a sonnet, where I have restricted syllables and lines and see what happened. I was able to write it, but I didn’t want to keep it in the form of a sonnet. I wanted to break it down into the backslashes, because I felt like it was more fluid in that manner which felt necessary for the content. It still feels very tight and condensed in a way that benefits it, but it also is fluid because of the backslashes. Backslashes feel fluid to me because they’re breaks, but they aren’t as full of a break as a line break or a stanza break—it’s just a break and then you keep moving. It’s not that I want the reader to be breathless all the way through it, but I wanted them to feel like they’re moving through it fluidly.
VM: There’s such a strong sense of place as the undercurrent of these poems, against the more focused images of family and food: could you speak to the places that shape this book and your poetry more broadly? How do you see the influence of geography and landscape on your work?
JNR: When I write about my childhood, I write about New York, because I was born in Queens, and we lived there until I was eleven. My entire childhood was in New York, and I remember it very vividly. My grandparents were the ones that really raised me because my parents were working. There’s just a lot of freedom in New York. We were eight and they let me walk to the park two and a half blocks away, or walk down to the bodega with my younger brother without any supervision. When we moved to Pennsylvania, the closest thing to us was a Wawa a quarter of a mile away, and we weren’t allowed to walk to it because there was no sidewalk. That was bewildering to me.
I remember walking to the end of the driveway when we moved to Pennsylvania and looking both ways and it being pitch black because there weren’t any streetlights, and it was terrifying. I had to sleep with a radio for years after we moved to Pennsylvania because it was just so quiet. So New York holds a very important place in my heart for that reason—it felt like a really formative place for me where I got to be a really involved kid and have a life. Then the drastic shift to Pennsylvania where I was surrounded by pretty much just white people, created such a chasm and had such an effect on me in a negative way. My parents thought we were moving for the betterment of us kids, me and my two younger brothers, and I think my brothers have benefited a lot from it, but I struggled. I hold a lot of joy in New York, so even when I go back and visit now, I feel so happy when I’m there. And I’ve come to love Pennsylvania in its own way, but it still feels like the quieter version of me. When I address it, it’s still with hurt and trying to understand and appreciate it, but still sitting in that hurt. I wrote the collection when I was in grad school in North Carolina. I’d never lived in the South before, so it was a whole different thing to think through. I was 500 miles away from my family and living alone, and Wilmington was such a different kind of place. But the idea of being close to rivers and close to bodies of water, and the Cape Fear River, made me feel like I was safe. I’ve always lived close to water in some way, and it’s made it comfortable for me.
I think you write about the places you’ve left only after you’ve left them. It was very hard for me to write about Pennsylvania when I was in Pennsylvania, but once I was in North Carolina, I was removed from both New York and Pennsylvania and could write about both of them. I was able to look at that life from a little step back and understand it a little bit better once I was in a removed third space.
VM: Who are your influences as a poet?
JNR: Aja Monet is a big influence. Franny Choi is another one. I saw them perform when I was eighteen, and their work stuck with me. They take a lot of leaps in their work. Soft Science was so impactful to me for both its form and its content, and her voice is so electric. Hieu Minh Nguyen is another person I really love. His work is very emotional, and he writes about hard things and you have to sit with it. Chen Chen is another poet I really admire. His voice is phenomenal. He’s so whimsical and thoughtful and does a great job of incorporating pop culture into his work which is something I’ve been trying to do more of. Ada Limon is another influence—her work is beautiful and imagistic but it makes it’s point and it’s accessible. I admire her ability to write something so accessible, that so many people love. Patricia Smith too, as an elder has done so much for the poetry world and I’ve written process poems over the years because of reading her poems and seeing the way she deals with hard subjects and uses form as a container. She’s used form so brilliantly that I’ve stopped being afraid of using form, and started using forms like sonnets and ghazals and sestinas.
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Jessica Nirvana Ram is equal parts poet, essayist, educator, editor, and eyeliner enthusiast. She occasionally moonlights as a fiction writer. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she was also a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Jessica was awarded the Shannon Morton Fellowship in June 2020 from her department for an outstanding first year in the program as well as the Robert H Byington Leadership Fellow award at the close of her second year. Her poem “i am unfit to raise daughters” was one of the winners of the 2020 AWP Intro Journals Project. Over the years Jessica has called Queens, New York, Royersford, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, North Carolina home. She is currently living in Lewisburg, PA. She is a first generation Indo-Guyanese, daughter of immigrants. Her work is often about inheritance, expectations, and radical self love, among other things. Jessica received her BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University in 2018.
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Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Creative Writing (Prose). Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review of Books, Girls on Tops READ ME, the Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
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