Angela Peñaredondo’s book, nature felt but never apprehended was published this past March by Noemi Press, and has since garnered high acclaim. Featured on Community of Literary Magazine’s recommended reading list for Asian Pacific Heritage Month, and on Small Press Distribution’s February and March 2023’s Bestseller List, nature felt but never apprehended traverses historical landscapes of the colonized Philippines, personal and communal legacies of survival, and queer Filipinx futurities.
I had the pleasure of meeting Peñaredondo during one of their book tours at San Francisco’s Medicine For Nightmares, and I was excited to speak with them further about their work and their process. Here, we talk about strategies of grammatical and formal constraint, the relationship between hover and prayer, and the haunting qualities of their book’s recurring visual element. I had sent Peñaredondo a small handful of questions and observations to consider before our interview, which took place over Zoom while they were attending Hedgebrook’s Writer-in-Residence program on Whidbey Island, WA.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Simone Zapata: From the beginning of nature felt but never apprehended, I was immediately drawn to the bracketed titles of each poem. I’m thinking about how bracketed text typically appears in Western writing as a modification—or to add missing information—to a source text. It reminds me of what scholar and theorist Jennifer DeVere Brody says in her book, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play, “Punctuation appears in/as writing as a means of inscribing bodily affect and presence imagined to be lost in translation.” How are you thinking about the function of the brackets?
Angela Peñaredondo: Thank you for offering that quote. There are a few reasons why I decided to use the brackets, and they didn’t come to me immediately. Prior to thinking about brackets as this grammatic or aesthetic mode, I was reading Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Ending in Planes, Chaun Webster’s GeNtr!fication: or the scene of a crime, Muriel Leung’s Imagine Us the Swarm, as well as many other writers who have written in much longer experimental works such as Bhanu Kapil, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Divya Victor, Douglas Kearney, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I liked how these writers didn’t depend so much on providing a title for each body of work, even though there were obvious shifts or pivots that could have been created into a new poem or a new piece.
I also deeply respect the function of the title, and how it operates as a preface. In nature felt but never apprehended, I use the bracket as a kind of container where the reader can use it as a doorway or launch pad into the text that follows. To me a title also functions as an accessory of the poem, but doesn’t have to be completely relied upon.
SZ: I love that, the brackets acting as a suggestion for how to engage with the poem. One of my favorite threads that I was following throughout your book is this notion of “hovering.” It was especially poignant in the epistolary form of “[letter to the streets that burned you].” The speaker writes, “dear given name…” “dear sunburst of whipped black webs…” “dear manila at dawn…” in each of these addresses, there’s a longing, a communing, a prayer. I’m thinking about prayer here as a space of affect, and this hovering as a kind of vibration. I’m wondering how you’re thinking of prayer, and whether you consider it as a hovering.
AP: I was really surprised and intrigued by this question, this idea of hovering, and I didn’t quite feel that way while I was writing it, but I found your perspective so fascinating, and I thought, let me lean into this.
When you talk about hovering as a vibration in pieces like “[letter to the streets that burned you],” and similar ones that are written in epistolary form or not, there is definitely a communing with spirit, with ancestors or with ghosts. If I’m thinking about the supernatural or the non-human, there is this very ethereal, intangible thing. Even though “[letter to the streets that burned you]” is inspired by a film, I had to do some research about Walterina Markova, and at that time, the “comfort gays” during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II. And these are intense subjects and histories of violence and war, obviously.
I think also culturally, the way I was raised, prayer was a huge thing, even though I resisted it so much. I was raised Catholic; I don’t identify as Catholic now but being raised in a very strict, first generation, immigrant Filipino household where prayer was embedded and sort of demanded of you on a frequent basis… it’s still in you, even though you think you’ve been past all that. So I feel like some of that vibration that you speak of is very influential and somehow seeps into the work of “[letters to the streets that burned you].”
SZ: Two things are coming up: this hovering in regards to the afterlife, with ancestry, with the supernatural, but there’s also a hovering with history, right? You’re talking about hovering as a vessel that you’re using to access the unknown, to reimagine. When you’re conjuring these violent landscapes of the occupation during World War II, I can feel you holding this history. As a reader, that became a kind of hover as well.
AP: When I’m thinking of similar modes to hovering, I’m also thinking of time travel, which is something I’m engaging with in my own imaginary. I think when someone time travels, there’s never an accuracy of when you arrive, how you get there or what you experience. It’s very similar to memory, where it’s never quite as accurate, but it’s still someone’s truth. So I do think of hovering as part of this experience. There is a moment where I feel I am at the intersection of different worlds.
SZ: Do you feel like when you were getting into these modes, there was a limitation to how far you could go, or for how long you could dwell in these spaces?
AP: Absolutely. I definitely felt a limitation there. I mean, creatively, I’m influenced by all my internal critics or managers bossing me around inside my head. That in itself is a limitation, and can be really exhausting, but also incredibly transformational and insightful. I am of this world, so there’s only a certain time that I can be in that creative space.
SZ: I utilize prayer in my own work too, so I think that’s why I’m kind of fixating on this a bit—the hovering, and the consideration of limitations. I also grew up Catholic (second generation Spanish) and prayer is something that I also rejected throughout most of my youth because it was forced on me. It’s been a journey to come into my own form of prayer, and I’m always interested in hearing about how writers incorporate prayer into their work.
AP: I love that you said that, thank you for sharing! Prayer is a huge influence for me, where it’s both something that I can integrate into form, tone, and perhaps rhythm in a poem, but it’s also this other thing where when you’re trying to engage with something-–whether it’s the muse or spirit—it literally moves into the work. There are moments where I get so lost and overwhelmed by research that I have to reach out to that other essence such as prayer or the spiritual, because if not, that other part of my brain that’s so heavily involved with research takes over and becomes anchored in fact, in critique. So I have to have a part that’s not dependent on those things, if that makes sense?
SZ: Yes, totally. Research can be very isolating. It’s important to come up for air and remember who or what is in this work with you.
I want to talk about the recurring image of the jumpsuit throughout nature felt but never apprehended. Can you tell me about where it comes from?
AP: I pay nods to it in the back of the book, but I’m glad you asked. I’d love to do a dual interview or something in the future with the artist, Claudia Torres-Ambriz. It’s a collaborative image-text piece where I work with my partner who is also a sculptor and metal worker.
SZ: Nice!
AP: That’s a little bit of the background. When I was revising the manuscript, I wanted to keep pushing its textual boundaries. My partner was like, how come you don’t do your visual art anymore? I started off as a visual art student before I studied any kind of creative writing. So that was a seed they planted in my mind. There was an installation piece they did many years ago; it was a jumpsuit that they filled with three hundred pounds of silica sand, so you can imagine the heaviness of that jumpsuit weighted down on the gallery floor. The original installation was informed by the states of mental health of a survivor of sexualized violence, such as depression, paralysis, and forms of PTSD. I felt the image of this sculpture had a relationship with the very first piece in the book, “[mercy ceremony],” because it’s about being in prayer or ceremonial space that speaks to confronting one’s abuser, taking power back, as well as banishing or sending away one’s internalized demons.
So in revisiting the jumpsuit installation, we were like, okay, let’s create a series, let’s also incorporate play into this. And so as we were experimenting with taking what was once a three-dimensional object, and then creating a two-dimensional piece with parts of “[mercy ceremony],” I wanted to continually use the jumpsuit image throughout the book, which became a specter, or in your words, a thing of hover. It was a haunting experience for both of us because it felt like we were recreating the spirit of the original sculpture but also bringing a different life to it. We were freeing it in some way by another dimension in which to exist, whether it’s a kind of disembodiment, or a kind of haunting of itself. It started to have these different and multiple meanings and transformed.
SZ: That’s so cool. I mean, the sculpture as a two-dimensional image definitely served as an anchor for me throughout the book. The first few times I would see it, it would leave my mind as I continued reading. And then when it came back, it recentered the writing in a really wonderful way. It feels very intentional where, exactly, you placed the image.
AP: I’m so glad!
SZ: It’s also really wild to hear that, in the installation, the jumpsuit was originally filled with sand—the image definitely brought up notions of disembodiment throughout the work, but also the disintegration of the body, and its return to the land.
AP: Even though we did play and experiment with the image as we moved further into the project, we were also intentional about it. I also brought that intention to the placements throughout the book. That makes me feel good that you were able to have the experience you had.
SZ: The last thing I wanted to talk about is the practice of formal constraint when the speaker is handling femme experience, and especially queer violence in the fourth section of your book, “naked · strategic · partners.” I’m curious about your process with organizing or sequencing these poems, especially in “[transmitter signals when in proximity to a hole],” where we read about Jennifer Laude’s murder. I saw the compartmentalization within that specific poem as either an attempt at, or a refusal of, sense-making within dominant linear narratives.
AP: “[transmitter signals when in proximity to a hole]” was written shortly after Jennifer Laude’s murder (2014) by the hands of a United State Marine corporal. This poem has existed for a while. Initially, I was self-conscious about how I would integrate “[transmitter signals when in proximity to a hole]” due to its subject matter. With some self-reflection and dialogue with others, it felt vital to include it in this book, especially at a time where we continue to witness interpersonal and state violence on the rights of trans and gender non-conforming people in our own country. I felt it necessary to view these issues on a global level, meaning what also happens outside of our U.S. borders.
To circle back to your questions, I value the fragmented text and its relationship to alternative ways of telling a story that are non-linear and unsystematic. I feel this form of storytelling engages with the lamentation in memory, most especially painful histories influenced by violence—in the poem’s case it’s empire, misogyny, trans and homophobia. The fragmentation gave me permission to center my own emotional intelligence and the non-sequential order of memory.
When I was drafting “[transmitter signals when in proximity to a hole],” I was spurred to research Laude’s story. In the process, I saw very little published articles at the time that critically exposed the frailty and falsehood between militarization and security or rape as an act of war and subjugation or the cultural connections between militarism and sex work. The fragmented text allowed me to take part in these conversations that didn’t feel cold or prescriptive. The poem took on many shapes before it arrived to its final form, which looks like block-like stanzas that toggle back and forth across the page. The shape gave me the chance to create my own perimeters to encapsulate the fragmented language.
Later on, I encountered a poem by Barbara Jane Reyes about Jennifer Laude, as well as a video piece that mentioned Laude by Dawn Lundy Martin during a literary conference. I wanted to continue the discussion that these writers opened up by integrating my own personal perspective as a queer, non-binary Filipinx person, who is a U.S. citizen not born in the United States.
SZ: Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I also really appreciate when, in the lack of “official” documentation, we can turn to other poets and artists who are also interpreting the limited information available, as a way to deepen and extend our own stakes.
In “[transmitter signals when in proximity to overturning domestic imagination],” the speaker says, “nature exposes a crescendo / when we allow ourselves / the final feel of our enormities.” To me, this feels very queer, and also dangerous. I’m hoping you could talk more about this enormity, and our capacity, as queer folks, to embrace it. I’m thinking now, too, how these three lines feel almost like a reflection on form in “[transmitter signals when in proximity to a hole].”
AP: I appreciate your lens on this part of that poem, and how, for you, it felt like it was referencing a queer experience. What I can say about this is, I was thinking about the enormity of one’s capacity to hold and to experience so much due to the embodiment of multiple positions and identities.
I was contemplating the enormity of that and what it means to radically accept that kind of capacity. And at the same time, there is a dangerous aspect in that radical acceptance or awareness of that enormity, because there are elements outside of ourselves that are weaponized to harm us. It’s almost like this contradictory existence that is happening simultaneously. On a personal level, I feel equipped and empowered, but also faced with so much in front of me. That section of the poem isn’t so much trying to produce an answer, but to acknowledge deep awareness of that simultaneity.
SZ: I feel like this sentiment also echoes the title of your book; amongst the multiple selves that comprise us, and the different modes that we move through, there is still that space, or that aspect of ourselves that can never be fully apprehended. There’s always some aspect of our own selves that we’re continuously learning to fill.
AP: For sure. I don’t know if it’s comforting—but there’s something I surrender to in that truth. There’s this other part inside of me that opens up. I don’t know what that part is, but I know something is working inside.
ANGELA PEÑAREDONDO is a queer Filipinx interdisciplinary writer and educator. They are the author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, Winner of Hillary Gravendyk Regional Prize) and the chapbook, Maroon (Jamii Publications). Their work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, Pleiades Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. They received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, and Macondo; and awards from TinHouse, Community of Writers, and others. They are an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University San Bernardino. They live in unceded Gabrielino/Tongvan territories, also known as Los Angeles with their partner and many clingy, cramped plants.
https://www.angelapenaredondo.com
IG @domainedenarwhal
SIMONE ZAPATA is a queer poet and educator from San José, CA. Her work has been supported by Community of Writers and the REEF fellowship, and her poems can be found in Foglifter, The Vassar Review, and Reed Magazine, among others. She is a poetry editor for MAYDAY, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts.
IG @_rebelgreen