Re-

Kristi Maxwell

An extended bio from the author

I was born on a Sunday in June in 1981, two weeks past my due date, in East Tennessee. I first studied poetry with Marilyn Kallet, Richard Jackson, and Arthur Smith at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and Chattanooga. The poems in Re- signal a shift for me, in my thinking. They’re more formal in nature than my earlier poems, even if their formal aspect is not immediately recognizable. They are the first poems I wrote after completing an MFA in poetry at the University of Arizona, where I worked most closely with Jane Miller and Tenney Nathanson, and after beginning to learn Mantis-style kung fu—which had me thinking about bodies in very different ways than I had before and which consistently reminded me how located I am in a body, curbing some of my cerebral tendencies. I’m no longer taking kung fu classes, but its lessons remain with me. These poems are very much about bodies interacting in the world, with words identified as some of those bodies—textual bodies. Drafts of these poems were written in 2005 and 2006, during which time I tutored at the Strategic Alternative Learning Techniques Center, evaluated essays for the Gorman Learning Center, and volunteered and taught at Casa Libre en la Solana, a community writing center in Tucson. I was doing equal amounts of walking and biking—which always affects how I think compared to when I’m in a position to be mostly driving—and watching a fair amount of movies at the drive-in, which closed sometime after I moved to Cincinnati. Also during this period, and relevantly, I adopted my first animal as an adult—a stray cat named Poly after her polydactyly. Happily, she made me renegotiate my notion of what forms intimacy takes. I was living in the back of a duplex recently vacated by one of my MFA peers and friend Theresa Sotto, and my desk, which had been Theresa’s desk, was kitty-corner to another poet’s desk. I don’t have this desk any longer. On the wall, there was a handwritten note meant to remind my partner and me of the project of relentlessness we were both quite invested in at this time; it was supposed to read: “You Are a Savage,” but it looked more like “You Area Savage,” which we liked. I took it from the wall and packed it when we moved to Cincinnati to pursue PhD study, but I don’t think it ever got unpacked, or it did, but was no longer positioned where I saw it daily. In addition to relentlessness, I was proclaiming “creepiness” as a favorite quality in poetry, possibly influenced by all the Carnivale I was watching or by my fascination with Night Watch, the first film in the what’s supposed to be a trilogy by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, and the films of Takashi Miike; I still favor this quality, though now because of a more general investment in the uncanny. Unlike my other poems, most of the poems in Re- were written outside. All of these things consciously or unconsciously factored in to what Re- became. These details are the context for the text of Re-, though I’m sure there are other details I’m forgetting. In 2010, I received a PhD in English & Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati, where I also completed a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In 2007, I was the recipient of the Greta Wrolstad Scholarship from the Summer Literary Seminars, which allowed me to travel to Russia and to write and move around there for a month. My other books are Realm Sixty-four, published by Ahsahta in 2008, and Hush Sessions (Saturnalia, 2009).