10 Questions Caroline Harper New
I used to have a house
full of sisters and a dress that smelled
like oranges. I used to have a braid
—from Caroline Harper New’s “Loom,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wrote my first poem in 5th grade about a purple polka-dot hippopotamus named Peggy Sue. It was silly and I was surprised anyone wanted to read it, but when it won a contest, I think that inspired me to keep writing. I started hiding a leather journal full of poems in a loquat tree in our backyard, but I think Peggy Sue was the only poem to make it out of my journals until college.
More recently, I think the “Searching for Amelia” poems in my book A History of Half-Birds were a gateway into the longer, narrative poems I’ve been focused on recently. They tell a story of finding Amelia Earhart in the belly of a whale as a way to work through family secrets. This form feels very close to home, similar to narrative folk songs we listened to growing up, and is one of my most natural modes of writing. It took a lot of work to make this poem coherent to readers, but it helped me give myself permission to write “long” (something I am usually working against) and give into strangeness without relying on simplification.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I didn’t really take my poetry seriously until 2020 when I began my MFA. I thought I was applying for fun, in a year when I could have my application fees waived, and I had no plans of being accepted. When I was, I panicked the summer before that I didn’t know anything about poetry (because I didn’t know anything about poetry), so I googled “top contemporary poetry books” and ordered a few. That was the first time I really paid attention to what I was reading. I fell in love with sound reading Anna Journey; I fell in love with meter reading Patricia Smith.
Today, there are a few books I turn to over and over: Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod by Traci Brimhall, and Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky. They each create and inhabit their own bizarre and wondrous worlds, and when I grow bored of my own writing they remind me of what’s possible in poetry. I admire them endlessly.
A couple of years into my MFA, Fred Moten very generously read my work. He was the first person to place my poems in a geographic genealogy—Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Stevens, McDaniel Mackey, Nourbese Phillip, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner—none of whom I’d read at the time. He named us writers of “weather, swampy weirdness, and magical realism” connected by the cultures that ring the Gulf of Mexico. That conversation made me feel like I wasn’t just writing about my own silly troubles, like I was part of translating a whole world. It gave me a conviction about many of my poems that would otherwise never see the light of day.
What did you want to be when you were young?
I was obsessed with animals. I raised show pigs growing up, and my first job was a stablehand (a.k.a. a poop-scooper) at a horse barn. I loved every second of both—even unpaid I would go to the community barn and clean other people’s cow pens just to be around the animals. When I grew up, I wanted to be a vet, an animal trainer, an animal therapist, a pet-sitter, a wildlife rescue worker. I planned to study animal science in college, but in my first semester I met an anthropology major on a hike, and as soon as she explained the field to me I was hooked. I declared anthropology as my major that week, never even having taken a class. I was fascinated by evolution, by the idea of spending time with primates in order to learn about humans, and I really wanted to study something entirely new to me. But at the time, I also thought studying art or writing felt self-indulgent—I think it’s taken me a while to accept that they will always be the mediums I work in, and that moving people to notice and care for the world matters immensely.
From there, I fell in love with cultural anthropology (no primates, just humans) as a field where the insight is drawn from interactions, from stories. To me, ethnography and poetry require the same input—the obsession, the attention to detail, the long meditation, the associative leaps—it’s just the translation that differs. And I still get to think about animals all day long, but now I write about them instead of scooping poop.
What inspired you to write this piece?
I took a course with Khaled Mattawa on ancient poetic traditions—Mesopotamian, Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil, Chinese, Egyptian, etc. We had to write an unconscionable number of poems inspired by each region, and “My Love for Geography…” was inspired by the Hebrew and Arabic traditions, in which I imagined Lot’s daughter traying to commune with her lost mother via salt. That poem spiraled into a longer series of visual and poetic experiments on how to reach the deceased through their material traces.
I originally wrote this series purely out of fascination, almost a way to pre-emptively work through the grief of losing my own mother one day. (She is still very, very alive). “Loom” thinks about sister relationships after a mother has passed and sets up the tension with the family dynamics that carry throughout the rest of the series. But now that the collection is being published as a chapbook in 2026, my hope is that it helps connect biblical stories, which are being used to justify Israeli violence, to the grief of what has been happening in Palestine. You can’t write about fleeing a city without thinking of the displacement of Palestinians. You can’t write of meteors without thinking of bombs. You can’t write of lost mothers without thinking of all the orphaned children. It feels heinous to write about ancient stories without acknowledging the present-day parallels.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Like most writers, I write a lot about home, which for me is the Georgia-Florida swamps, salt marshes, and sinkholes. Writing into landscape has been a way to reach the people who came before and imagine how the world has come to be. Human life changes so rapidly, but our interactions with the natural world are some of the moments I know we still share. I like to imagine these places not only across generations but across scales, which can mean expanding from the Gulf Coast into the Sargasso Sea, or shrinking into the sap of a slash pine.
I also feel like my concept of home has expanded through my writing—along the waters of the Gulf Coast, the nooks of New Orleans where I lived, Appalachia where my mother lives, the mountains and swamps where my ancestors are from. In all of these places, life is still so connected to, and at the whim of, the rhythms of nature—tides, hurricanes, heat, agricultural seasons. Poetry is a way for me to still feel connected to these rhythms. But I’m also trying to let go of this attachment, especially since I’ve lived in Michigan for five years now. In my first collection, A History of Half-Birds, I refused to include any poems that mention snow—silly, I know, but it felt like they were from a different world. Like I would break the spell. I got to a point where I felt like I couldn’t write any more poems until I moved back to the South.
These poems published in MR are part of that letting go. They’re unusual for me in that they stray from my own home into the ancient Levant, but the urge to meditate on sulfur and salt very much comes from my own intimacy with the marshlands of Florida and Georgia. I think, even being so far away, all of my poems are in some way about home, about trying to translate a world that feels impossible to render.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
Total silence. Music has too much control over my body. As a dancer, my muscles twitch. As a piano player, my fingers tap. And as a writer…I can’t fathom how anyone listens to lyrics while they write. Hats off to you.
But when I paint, I usually listen to one song on repeat, sometimes an album. It’s not intentional, but I think it helps keep me in my flow. One summer when I was solely focused on painting, I only listened to “Jezebel” by Iron & Wine, all day, every day. That’s one I return to often. If I ever get too deep into my feelings, “Why You Worried ‘Bout Me” by Rebirth Brass Band pulls me back to earth.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I have a magic chair. I can’t reveal the location, but it’s a big and cushy chair with huge windows in a coffee shop in Ann Arbor. When I go there, the words just spill. I try to use it sparingly, but I get really excited if I have a free weekend night when I can go curl up in it.
Most importantly, it’s open late at night. I’m an adamant night writer, and my brain doesn’t work fully until dusk hits. I think there’s a sort of solitude that only comes late at night when no one has expectations of you, when your mind can finally wander without restraint.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
I have two amazing friends from my MFA at Michigan that are most likely to see my work first. Matt Del Busto is a voracious writer and an incredibly generous reader. I’ve written many of my recent poems just to keep up with our poem exchange, which has become really precious to me in my post-MFA years. Abby McFee is another friend who has one of the most brilliant poet-minds. Her poetic insight is unmatched, and hearing her thoughts is truly a gift.
Some projects call for certain audiences. In its early stages, I showed this series to my dad. He mostly wrote smiley faces, in true dad fashion, but his comment, “[Lot’s daughter] is just you,” made me think deeply about my habit of writing persona poems. Recently, I was working on a visual series that split into multiple options. When I showed the options to a friend, they had strong opinions in favor of one, and so I went with it unquestioned—I felt like if no one in the world understood it but them, that would be okay. Sometimes your work only needs to make sense to one person.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I’ve dabbled in a lot of things. Choreography, playwriting, painting, sculpture, film, ceramics, printmaking—of any of them, dancing is my favorite, and I wish I did it more. I think we should all dance more; we need to remind ourselves we have bodies. My sister is an incredible dancer, and she and I used to spend nights improvising and choreographing together, which is time together I really miss.
There are a couple mediums I will always envy. One is quilting—there’s something ancient about textile art, and I would love to make things that can be used, that can be gifted, can warm people. My grandma tried to teach me, but I found the details tedious, and she’s since passed. The other is the music. I’ve been in love with the violin since I could walk, and people who can sing are sorcerous. I don’t think there’s a more moving art form than music.
What are you working on currently?
I always have multiple projects going at once—I need to be able to pivot often, as my attention shifts or I come to a sticking point. The chapbook these poems belong to comes out with YesYes Books in September 2026, so I’ve been doing the editorial back-and-forth with that, which is a process I love.
I’ve also just finished my second full-length collection, which holds a series of narrative poems that intersect through overlapping landscapes. It inhabits the surrealism of the Southern Gothic, grappling with questions of extinction and loss through fantasy and fixation. I hope to send it out soon, so the monsters in it will stop buzzing around in my brain and let me write new things.
Now that I’ve returned to the world of anthropology, I’m also trying to figure out how that merges with my poetic practice. I’m still not sure what that looks like, but lately it’s meant gathering experiences, listening to my gut, trying to figure out what feels meaningful. My hope is that it will eventually translate to writing.
CAROLINE HARPER NEW is a poet and artist from southwest Georgia. She is the author of A History of Half-Birds (Milkweed Editions), winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and is now a PhD student in anthropology. Her research examines how ecological imagination is formed at the intersection of narrative-making and multispecies entanglements.
