Alisha Mascarenhas’ poetry collection, A Catalogue of Risk (2025), relies on a poetic frame that practices risk beyond the individualistic, detached forms of relationship that neoliberal models of connection impose onto our quotidian and intimate desires. Risk, here, is at once prompt, question, and meditation from which language emerges. The poems both contain and unfix the self, excavating the instances before Mascarenhas punctures the seal of risk—the risk of disruption, assiduity, or not knowing. This is a catalogue in which even stillness thrums, an expansive pool for contemplation turned outwards. In this interview, Mascarenhas describes their porous writing and translation practice, particularly the cornerstone role philosopher and psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle’s text Éloge du risque [tr. In Praise of Risk] (2011) played in A Catalogue of Risk. Dufourmantelle posits risk as a crucial aspect of life, in that it is folded into our desire for dependence and community, into our sense of responsibility or freedom, and even into our capacity to dive fully into feeling, to experience emotion. We touched on how Mascarenhas has co-constructed and catalyzed each poised sliver of thought with Dufourmantelle’s voice among a rhizome of others.
Aishwarya Marathe: I want to begin with the form and process of A Catalogue of Risk. You’re blending Steven Miller’s translation of Éloge du risque (Anne Dufourmantelle) with your own and grafting the poetry onto it or beside it, an interlocutor.
Alisha Mascarenhas: I find a lot of my intentions arrive to me after the fact. I remember talking with my friend Asiya Wadud about some early formal ideas I wasn’t sure where to start with, and she referred to a book by Terrance Hayes, To Float in the Space Between. Hovering somewhere between free form and a more rigidly structured procedure allowed me to begin. I wanted to spend time with Éloge du risque, and to write in relationship with the occasions of risk Dufourmantelle explores. It was important that the text be an opening. For example, I would read “At Risk of Beauty” and then as I went into the world and experienced some beautiful phenomena, sunlight on a blossoming rose, whatever, I would pay attention to how I responded. Could I open to this beauty? What would such an opening risk, as in expose or make me then available to? After I spent enough time with the book, I would come upon the same passages repeatedly, so they started to become static and familiar. When I finally got my hands on the original French, it made me want to translate, to make it mutable. The translation started to work its way in as a way for me to defamiliarize the book and interact with it, establish a more active relationship with it.
Aishwarya: The ‘weaving’ of translations defies or contradicts the cleanness of distinctions between you, Dufourmantelle, and Miller, and your poems often run contradictory to both. How did this mode of (re)translating alongside the writing carry risk, namely that of your words fusing with another’s in a way that constitutes a kind of erasure or loss?
Alisha: Writing in this way, where my own voice went alongside this weaving and embedding, was actually mitigating and containing the risk of writing. I could always have someone else’s thinking to lean into; my own was less bare. The different forms of containment I was seeking in writing these poems then allowed me to explore a subtler register of risk, because in inviting clear bounds, I’m able to let things open up more inside of them.
Aishwarya: What I’m hearing is that Dufourmantelle’s text and Miller’s translation were a sort of cushioning, a soft place to land?
Alisha: They’re not soft! Maybe I resist the softness because it’s something that doesn’t change, that doesn’t move. The two published texts actually feel quite hard and fixed as a holding structure. The image that comes to mind is a house you can enter—a lot can be moved, introduced, or taken out, but you’re not fundamentally altering the structure that is already built, considered, lived in.
Aishwarya: That’s a lovely analogy. Risk as a frame for the text feels quite harsh, but you paint it as something more restorative and suspended. At the same time, to be taking risk, to face it and sit with it, can be disruptive.
Alisha: All of that is true in the sense that my experience writing these poems was one of finding a way to pause and be inside the moment just before a risk is either taken or not, where there’s that choice to proceed or retreat. I experience that as neither inherently safe nor unsafe. There is one chapter in Dufourmantelle’s book about suspense. She describes being in suspense or anticipation before something happens as an experience itself worth attending to. For me, a lot of the charge is in hovering over which action or non-action is being taken. In the space of writing, I could slow that moment down and ask, “How am I experiencing this in my body?” as a site of inquiry. Part of what interests me, too, is that I have these titles and the guidance to begin with ‘At risk of,’ which are really just an opening to the next thing. What comes next doesn’t necessarily even have anything to do with the original impulse.
Aishwarya: In your poems, that ‘moment before’ punctures the seal of risk and transforms it into invitation. Inasmuch as the guidance is grounding, the risk is disruptive. Anticipation is steeped in the unknown. What is unknown invites you to think about what is around you, your role in it. Right now, especially, we are always inhabiting a space of risk, potentially a risk that another is taking. I’m curious how you see your writing reflect or respond to this space we collectively share.
Alisha: I was thinking today about Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism.’ This notion helps me to recognize how our most basic needs are manipulated in a neoliberal context so that we seek out connection, safety, and belonging through conventions like marriage, property, and accumulation of wealth. The cruelty and violence of our pursuit to get what we need to survive is actually what is harming us, preventing satisfaction of those needs. In writing these poems, I was ambiently confronting the way that dominant culture tells us that we’re unsafe, and that to be safe we need to look out for ourselves and our own. There’s a kind of manufactured risk that what we’re in danger of is each other, of the Other, that upholds structures of living that keep us isolated from each other.
Aishwarya: You speak against these structures that govern us, or at least that we’ve come to internalize. There was a level of discomfort that you were inviting me as a reader to be okay with, of not knowing what is outside of those structures. Yet you gesture in their absence to the kinds of entanglements that are possible with one another. The structural underpinnings of your poems are palpable without being superficial. Their roots go deep.
Alisha: It’s interesting for me to hear that because what I’m trying to reckon with is these subtle, hyper-local occasions of risk that arise through intimate encounters. Part of the difficulty lies in trying to live my life in a way where I, like many of us, am trying to get my needs met while being repulsed by a lot of normative models of intimacy and relationship. In trying to create other forms of kinship, it’s harder to feel held in something real and sustaining. I think about this essay in The New Inquiry by Hannah Black, “The Loves of Others,” dealing with the couple form. She writes, “The couple represents an unforgiveable privatization of love, but refusing it doesn’t necessarily make love any more freely available. Despite the efforts of radical groups and the bravery of marginalized communities, it mostly remains the case that in turning away from couple-form love, we are turning toward nothing.” It’s not the whole reality, but it presses me to ask, how do we really turn toward each other and hold each other when are our needs are displaced from the traditions of romantic coupling and the nuclear family?
Aishwarya: One thing that strikes me is that the moment in which this collection has landed is starkly different from the moment in which you wrote many of these poems. The kinds of structures of kinship and community that were so privileged and prioritized during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially with the perpetuation of and resistance to racial violence, feel unsettled. I sense a need for different forms of relation and coalition. These poems speak to that impetus. The void when you turn away is a risk, but quite a generative space as well, because you can create, you can sow new seeds—unfamiliar ones, perhaps, but new.
Alisha: Maybe what appears to be nothing is, like you say, the discomfort of the unknown, and an opportunity to see what other forms of connection are always already there, even though we’ve been trained to pour our libidinal energy into a few very specific forms.
Aishwarya: Sometimes the ways our needs circulate, the ways that connections come into being and dissipate, can be very violent and risky in itself. To take that step feels like venturing further into the unknown.
Alisha: Yes, and I think that how you frame it, in temporal and spatial conditions, reminds me of when I was writing these poems, a time of accentuated crisis in which I felt most clearly, materially, our interdependence on each other. There are different ways we respond to the shock of being thrust into a situation that’s not safe or familiar.
Aishwarya: In terms of relationality, the use of an Upanishad in the text, so singular, struck me. I’m interested in how that came to be part of this text because it does stand out as the only piece of spiritual writing that you draw from.
Alisha: The Upanishad is a text that has been around my whole life. Vedic philosophy and Zen Buddhism have influenced my consciousness and my practices in different ways. How I understand and conceptualize the self as a subject runs through these traditions. That particular excerpt has to do with the divine understanding of the self that isn’t about the individual. A challenge that I’m dealing with in my writing is a different conceptualization of what a self is from a Hindu or Buddhist perspective, contra the self as consumer subject, worker.
Aishwarya: Later on in the text, the utterance of the body or self in relation to others seems to surface more prominently while risk starts to feel more affective, energetic. I’m wondering what role embodiment and corporeality plays in this ‘catalogue’ as a whole. We navigate structures whose function is to categorize people according to who they are, what their bodies do, and what they consume. Why a ‘catalogue,’ then?
Alisha: I experience my inner world as chaotic, unpredictable, fluid and porous, even as the body is rhythmic and cyclical and maintains a general form. That’s also where my poems live. In the language of a catalogue, I wanted both a place to land and the charge of trying to contain what is uncontainable. One of the books in the Passage series is An Eros Encyclopedia by Rachel James, who is now a friend. The book doesn’t read like an encyclopedia at all to me. Rachel’s use of an indexical language for uncontainable content definitely influenced my arrival at the title and the sections that organize the book.
Aishwarya: Absolutely. There is a constant, ever-changing motion, even in stillness. To connect this to translation, you harken to oral tradition by putting together fragments of a translation not exclusively your own. There’s an enactment of unfixing the catalogue as you construct it.
Alisha: Yes, the process of translation was an unsettling of what seemed to have sedimented in text. In written language, there can be a sense of a false permanence and solidity as if these words just live here on the page forever. Miller’s is the only published translation, and is excellent as far as I’m concerned, but as I was reading, I wanted to lift it out of its solidity a bit.
Aishwarya: Ossifying a text in translation or authorship—this is the source, this is my poetry—feels proprietary, and like a means to an end. Contrary to this, your choice of the ekphrastic mode lends itself to the porosity of the poems. Could we turn to the permeability of artistic practice? What can we form together if we remove ourselves from the hyper-individualistic, neoliberal logic of consumerism and turn instead to the collective logic of risk-taking in shared creation and experience?
Alisha: The cultivation of attention towards a relationship that is already always there, that I am always already embedded in, is what serves my life and survival. Of course, citational practices are limited, and the inclusion of others in the work can also be a way of evading my own responsibility to the text—it’s a great way to hide. I also feel some sort of ethical imperative toward the inclusion of other voices. Our ‘own’ writing, our ‘own’ voice is never a singular thing. It’s the endless friction: we are a singular self with our own breath and voice, and we are never only that.
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Alisha Mascarenhas is a poet and translator and the author, most recently, of A Catalogue of Risk (Wendy’s Subway, 2025) and the chaplet Contagion Fields (Belladonna* 2021).
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Aishwarya Marathe is a writer, comparatist, and Kathak dancer. Her plays have been read and staged in Portland and Los Angeles. Currently, her doctoral research in Anglophone, Hindi, and Francophone literature centers questions of conjugality in the diaspora.
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