Renee Hollopeter: The thematic flow of your poetry collection, Good Girl and Other Yearnings, is seamless. You take the reader through a journey beginning in childhood and navigating girlhood, coming of age, mental health, and work, eventually widening the scope and landing in this almost spiritual realm. It’s truly a delight to read from front to back. Can you share a bit about the five sections of this collection and what you see as the central concentration of each? 

 

Isabelle Correa: Most contemporary poetry collections focus on a feeling or circumstance—grief, addiction, identity—but it was clear to me from the beginning that Good Girl covered a lot of ground. When people asked me what it was about, I said, “my whole life up until sex and romantic relationships.” Sex and romantic relationships are the next book (which is done/has been done/is in need of an agent (wink*wink*)). 

 

I think it came about this way because I originally wrote creative nonfiction. The first epigraph in the book, the quote from Emily Dickinson—”Tell the truth but tell it slant”—was in my head because of Suzanne Antonetta’s life-changing nonfiction class at Western Washington University (WWU) and her book, Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. I was twenty and living on the other side of the Cascades for the first time, away from my family, and suddenly I had this new freedom to make sense of my complicated childhood and subsequent struggles with depression, CPTSD, and this driving force, this desire to be good—that if I could just be good enough, I would be safe. These essays are not in the book, but they informed the poems I wrote for it many years later. 

 

As for the central concentration of each section—section I is about childhood and family. I find section II the most challenging to nail down; sometimes I say it’s about womanhood and the political body; sometimes I say it’s about things that piss me off. Section III is about mental health, especially suicidal ideation. Section IV is about work, both the corporate job that I hate and the work of writing that I love. Section V is like you said, the zoomed-out spiritual realm. And I do see it that way—zooming in on a little girl and zooming out to the cosmos, with the last poem being “Self-Portrait as Saturn in Pisces.” 

 

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RH: One of the most interesting throughlines in Good Girl is how you approach breaking the fourth wall. You write about “telling it slant”; there’s a three-part series of poems titled “It’s Not Confessional Poetry If I’m Never Honest” and an ode to your pen name. In “Sellout,” you directly acknowledge that you “write sad poems about longing.” It all feels a bit meta to me—do you agree with this framing? 

 

IC: I do agree. I have always had this infatuation with audience. There are probably several reasons for this. One is that it makes me feel less alone. Another is that I recognized the magic communion between reader and writer when I was a kid reading Shel Silverstein—I would never meet him, he’d never know my name, but he was sharing something with me, something I’d carry with me forever. As I got older, I recognized this magic again and again with other favorites: Miranda July, George Saunders, Tom Robbins, Virginia Woolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, Frank O’ Hara, Diane Seuss. 

 

I want it to feel intimate when people read me. Not just because I share details of my life (as I often do) but because I offer precious gems the reader can carry forever. To contain and be contained (from “Depression Flipbook”). 

 

In this breaking of the fourth wall, I write a lot about truthfulness, like in the confessional poetry series you mentioned. Because poetic truth is not the same as raw truth. Writers don’t owe the reader the raw truth. Also—how boring if they did. 

 

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RH: I think the thing about Good Girl that feels meta is how you directly address the craft and process of poetry itself—what it offers the writer, what it can and cannot do. A great Didion quote introduces section II and sums up a central theme of the collection: “I need a story / in order to live” (18). The collection begins with the speaker addressing the muse, pleading, “give me meaning / in the shape of this loneliness, / make the world a mirror, make me beautiful” (9). And then toward the end of the collection: “I remember is another way of saying I am” (80). Can you expand on the idea of poetry as transmutation and why it’s so central to your work?

 

IC: There was a lot of joy and love in my childhood, and from the same person, there was a lot of violence and unsafety. This was confusing in such a lonely way. I wanted to make sense of my childhood. I needed to, because chronic confusion is terribly painful. It stunts and muffles the soul. 

 

But even if I didn’t have a laundry list of bizarre, traumatic experiences, and even if I wasn’t raised in the church, I am convinced I would still have been a strangely existential kid. I was, and am, terrified of meaninglessness. And I believe anyone who says they aren’t terrified of it is either lying to themselves or hasn’t given it enough thought. We all need a story in order to live. We need meaning. I love how meaning can be made in poetry; it’s unlike any other genre in its ability to hold paradox, twist and elevate language, and be a truthful lie. 

 

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RH: One of the themes I took away from Good Girl is that for women and girls in patriarchal culture, yearning and wanting out loud are radical acts. In “Big Sister,” you write about this theme of wanting it all: “Your voice in my head, real like grains of salt— / not every moment can be pure / peace or pleasure. / In my head I ask— / why not?” (32). To me, the poem “Girls Only Want One Thing” is arguably the volta in how this collection explores gender, despite it coming pretty early on:

 

[…] to bend like water. To break 

hearts and bread. To be girls and women and men and lovers

and inimitable fathers of unnameable creatures. To never smile

when they don’t feel like smiling. To bury the word sorry

and see what grows. Perhaps a tree will grow. Perhaps the bark

will know the future and the fruit will taste like the history

of all this wanting. Perhaps they will eat it and offer you nothing.

 

What do you see as Good Girl’s contribution to the body of poetry that explores the female experience in American culture? 

 

IC: I was having a hard time answering this important question. I had an idea to talk about violence in the U.S., how, in my time traveling and living abroad, it has struck me over and over how violent American culture is and how in denial we are about this. And then today, someone posted a picture of a little girl reading my poem, “Girls Only Want One Thing.” The person who posted it has a “poetree” in her front yard where she puts up poems for people in the neighborhood to read. That’s the contribution I want to make. I want a kid in a bike helmet to read the lines about being “girls and women and men and lovers and inimitable fathers of unnameable creatures.” I hope she feels a little braver when she reads that. Stronger. Freer. 

 

To add to that, I read recently that autoimmune diseases are drastically more common in women and that this can be linked to a suppression of heavy emotions like anger and grief. I consider “Big Sister” a grief poem and “Girls Only Want One Thing” an anger poem. I hope that those poems, and the book as a whole, help people feel out loud. 

 

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RH: “Sellout” is one of my favorite poems in the collection. This line stopped me in my tracks: “Work soldered my bones. / I was industrial and full of it, / foaming politely.” In the second stanza, the speaker adopts this quiet, pleading tone that’s incredibly effective:

 

How much do I need to pay you

to tell me

I’m not a sellout?

I’ll do it. I need to eat dinner.

I need to describe the skyline like it’s my job

because it’s my job. I’m plateauing 

like a good girl. I time travel 

only when it’s absolutely necessary.

 

What does it mean to plateau like a good girl?

 

IC: To plateau like a good girl is to stay put where you are. To be complacent. To settle. This poem is in section IV, the section about work, and I wrote it when I was sharing a lot of my work on Instagram, marketing my chapbook, Sex is From Mars But I Love You From Venus, and working my day job that I desperately want to quit, but can’t afford to. 

 

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RH: You wrote a Substack essay last month about Severance. You also have a section in Good Girl about work. I’d love to hear about how Severance may have inspired you creatively. How and why does the theme of corporate work appear in your poetic scope?

 

IC: My go-to bragging point about Severance is that the writer, Dan Erickson, also did his undergrad in creative writing at Western Washington University. I didn’t know him (he was a couple years ahead of me), so it’s not actually all that juicy. But I am proud of that. I liked my time at WWU (clearly). 

 

I was immediately in love with Severance. When the first season came out, I had just moved from Vietnam to Mexico and was teaching my Vietnamese students online at 3 or 4 a.m., often half-asleep, sometimes fully asleep—I’d just doze off mid-sentence. I joked that it was almost nice because it felt like I wasn’t working at all, like I was severed. 

 

For obvious reasons, I didn’t work those hours for long, and eventually got a job in Mexico with an education consulting company. I was an ESL teacher in Vietnam for six years, and before that, I was a waitress. Teaching in Vietnam was a part-time dream. So my job in Mexico was my first 9-to-5. It was my first time using Google Sheets, too, and that’s when I wrote my spreadsheet poem, “I Wrote This Poem on Company Time.” I am still at this job (I’ll quit when writing on Substack pays my bills (again, wink*wink*)), so don’t send this to my boss, but I often think of the word root “corp” meaning “body” and how working this job feels like being part of a parasitic body, or an invasive species. 

 

It still blows my mind that in order to pay rent and eat, we have to sell our time. And not even a small portion of it! I love that Severance so expertly addresses that abnormal normality and the hilarity of corporate culture. It’s such a poetic show, too. 

 

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RH: I, and surely many others, would love a Good Girl and Other Yearnings recommended read/watch/listen list. What are the essential texts that informed this collection? 

 

IC:

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• The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck 

• The White Album by Joan Didion 

• Barry — HBO 

• Severance — Apple TV+ 

• Hacks — HBO (because it’s a brilliant show about the nuanced relationship between two women, and it’s hilarious)

• The Chani App 

• Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Susanne Antonetta

• No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July 

• Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara 

• Midsommar — Ari Aster 

• Annihilation — Alex Garland

• Tenth of December by George Saunders 

• Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil 

• https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5TG2ACajCJV3Wjn58zQkUP?si=791466631038494a​​