NER poetry reader Tiana Nobile talks with contributor Burnside Soleil about feeling through the natural world, the adoptee experience, and his two poems from issue 45.4.
Tiana Nobile: Since I started reading for NER in 2021, I’ve been fortunate enough to have your work appear in my queue twice. Both times I was struck by how your speaker is so deeply integrated in nature, so much so that the two begin to meld. In “Notes on the Second Horse in Charles Ray’s Two Horses,” you write:
In these woods, I
could be found, a recollection
like cotton grass, blown, becoming itself.
I’d love to hear about your relationship to the natural world and the role it plays in your writing process.
Burnside Soleil: Thank you! I love your first collection, Cleave, so I’m excited for this conversation and appreciative of your words and attention.
I grew up in the country, along what we all thought was a bayou, but it turned out to be a river. My grandparents lived on a houseboat and then later in a trailer right behind the woods in Ricohoc, Louisiana. One time, I remember my grandfather calling all the boys to work, but I hid away in a ditch, covered by this and that weed, probably some small trees. Or I recall it that way. My brother and cousins became capable little mechanics and machinists, but I preferred wandering alone. I got lost once in a forest, which is the impetus for this poem, and for hours no one knew where I was or initially realized I was gone. Another little boy, aptly named Hunter, eventually found me. Years later, in New Orleans, I walked around the Carrollton neighborhood and fell in love with trees, sycamores and oaks, sweetgums, any tree, and while I loved learning about them, especially their names, I wouldn’t say it turned me to ecopoetry. My first impulse isn’t scientific, not to codify or systematize, which aren’t bad things. I’m glad much smarter people do that. My first impulse is all feeling. And that carries over into the writing. I find ideas, end up with a point of view, have something to say, but that happens last and often incidentally to the feeling and music I’m exploring. Also—and maybe I’m sharing too much—I’m looking for a way to belong in the language and to belong in the world. I don’t want to insinuate any kind of great existential suffering or anything like that. Because I’m adopted, I’ve had this peculiar sense of being a part of and apart from, which animates my writing about nature, the self, and place.
TN: Your poem, “In California for Your Birthday, We Saw a Coyote at Dawn,” is peppered with a number of subtle reversals:
“I lived my first life wrong, / or much of it,”
“I see now they weren’t doe / and fawn but yearlings.”
“I tell you everything / and will, always, or try”
You clarify (not the whole life, but “much of it”), describe what something isn’t before what it is (neither doe nor fawn, “but yearlings”), and promise to tell “everything . . . always” before pulling back to simply “try.” Even in your response you write, “what we all thought was a bayou, . . . turned out to be a river.”
The adoptee experience is rife with mysterious reversals and ghostly overlaps. Stories are distorted, untold, and retold, cultivating this “sense of being a part of and apart from” that you mention. How do you see this influencing your speaker and their place in the world?
BS: Last night, I wandered around in this historic New Orleans snow—ten inches in some places—and thought about your question, but misremembered its last part. I forgot you addressed the speaker, not myself. But then I realized my misunderstanding answered in a way. I am the speaker, of course, but also to be in the poem is to assume the role of a speaker. Similarly, or maybe only in my mind similarly, to be adopted is to be the speaker—to assume the role of child, sibling, etc. I’m drawn to that ambiguity. When I was growing up, my belonging was something that could be discussed. I don’t mean this pejoratively, though sometimes the discourse was pejorative, but even when affectionate or affirmative, my belonging was cast in comparative language: “I love you as if you were my own.” Maybe it’s the adoptee experience, but I’m sure this must be true for most: I often feel unlike myself. Family isn’t a given. The self? Not a given. Tentative. Deliberated. The speaker also feels unlike himself. “California” might be a poem about that, the yearning for authenticity without the certainty of achieving it. He attempts to speak authoritatively but doubts his knowledge. Also, can he give himself over to another? He loves and relates to his partner, as I do, but wonders if it’s possible to reveal everything. And that isn’t the only relationship in the poem—there is the speaker and his past self, the character. The former corrects certain misperceptions, but ends up in the same ambiguous place as the character. He has become someone else and wants to feel real. In my forthcoming collection, I never write the word adoption, but I create an entire parish, lore, and family. It’s one way that I belong and feel real. This all sounds so serious, though. Writing is a lot of things, but it’s also fun, fulfilling.
TN: Your statement “I often feel unlike myself” reminds me of the whipgraft delusion, a term I learned last year, which refers to the moment you see yourself in the mirror and feel as though you’re looking at a stranger. This has me thinking about the poem as a kind of reaching out to that reflection, to bridge the space between observer and observed, between what’s seen and what’s felt. I’m curious about your process of creating lore and family—two things that are traditionally passed down through the generations. Where do you begin?
BS: Yes, I love that term! It relates to creating lore and family. Since a whole cast of characters populates my book, I introduce them at the beginning to avoid unnecessary confusion, which means friends are in there, family members, too, sometimes an amalgam. They may recognize themselves; they may seem strangers to themselves. My kids and partner—they’re present. But my mother and father figures (along with a few others) are figments, or meant to be so at least. I wonder how you handle this issue: even when making up an incident or a person, I have to drop something real in the poem. I don’t need to highlight the autobiography, but somehow, if I can pull it off, the inclusion makes the whole poem feel authentic. I did this on a grander scale with the history and ancestry of this parish I invented, Berceuse, most of the names drawn from my ancestors, which maybe ironically I found via Ancestry.com (not a plug). Sometimes, I was lucky enough to learn a detail or two about their lives and would integrate that into the text, like one great-great-great aunt who drowned at sea. I don’t know her, of course, but won’t forget her. So in the book I wanted this effect in which almost everyone is fictional yet has also lived. I created the story that has never been passed down and couldn’t be passed down, and for six years when writing Berceuse, that was my home and lore. I’m the outsider now, which is funny—to be that close to your own book, and then, one day, it’s no longer really yours.
TN: Congratulations, by the way, on your book! Publishing a book can be simultaneously thrilling and daunting. How are you feeling about putting your work out there?
BS: So many feelings! The process has been humbling and exciting, to be one voice among many in this conversation. It is daunting, too, you’re right: the promotion, events, etc. I don’t really know much about that process. Readings can terrify me, so I joked with a friend that I would hire an actor to take up this name and perform in my stead. But, really, I know it’s all about the work, so I live toward the next poem.
TN: We are both lucky to live in New Orleans, where Carnival season has officially begun. Do you have any Mardi Gras traditions?
BS: I feel very lucky to be in New Orleans. I love that my two kids get to grow up here, to be part of something wild, big, and vibrant. We aren’t parade folks so much, but we attend the Red Beans and Dead Beans, along with some of the other weird walking krewes in the Bywater and Marigny, which is where we go on Mardi Gras Day. Pure and ecstatic fun and imagination. Everyone should come.
Burnside Soleil grew up in a houseboat on the bayou but these days is a pilgrim in New Orleans. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. His first collection, to be published by Texas Review Press in 2026, is entitled The Berceuse International Youth League & the St. Herménégilde Society for General Upkeep & Social Benefaction Presents a Melancholic Fantasia in the Tradition of Lonely Swamp Pop, a Collage of the Culture & Peculiar History of Our Parish as Figured in the Tragicomic Soleil Family, Especially Our Unofficial Town Poet Laureate, Burnside Soleil, in Conjunction with Gus Babineaux, an Historian of Dubious Origins & Compiler of This Fine Book, Berceuse Parish.
Tiana Nobile 문영신 is the author of Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021). She is a Korean American adoptee, artist, educator, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, and Southern Cultures, among others. She lives with her family in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com.
Photo of Burnside Soleil courtesy of Shelby MacRae