Process Note #68 : Maria Nazos : “How the rule I broke was the one I needed.”

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Maria Nazos are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

In 2017, in Fred Marchant’s workshop at the Colrain Manuscript Conference, we were asked to illustrate our manuscripts without using words.

At the time, my manuscript was titled “Change in Altitude.” I drew a plane in the air—something hovering between sky and sea. I drew a heart.

Then, I drew a whale watch boat off Ptown, where I once worked, and the long Atlantic horizon behind it.

And, without consciously deciding to, I drew the Pulse Nightclub, fanned by palm trees, to represent a cornerstone collage poem in the collection, which includes a love letter between one of the shooting survivors and his on-and-off-again lover, who was among those killed.

The point behind the poem was to demonstrate that, in the face of undeniable devastation, there was also love. Hence, the concept examines the life force behind what keeps us going, even in the face of the violence and madness that have become our daily lives.

When it came my turn to show my drawing, Fred smiled and said, (I’m paraphrasing) playfully, “Isn’t it interesting that you’ve already broken the one rule you have to follow?”

I looked down, mortified. He was right. Although we’d been specifically instructed not to use words, only images, I had included one.

Ever the diligent student, I began apologizing. He stopped me, laughing. No, he explained. This was the interesting part. Why had I written that word? Why had I disobeyed the constraint?

The only word in the whole drawing was “PULSE.”

He told me to look closer.

The manuscript that would become “PULSE” was born in that moment of “error.” Or maybe it had been trying to be born all along.

What follows is the longer pulse line—the arrhythmic, stubborn, fourteen-year throb behind the book.

---

 

2002–2007

I finished my MFA in New York City, certain I would conquer the world. Instead, I collected rejections. I worked every job imaginable and survived on food stamps. I moved to Provincetown and spent eight years cleaning hotel rooms, working as a whale watch attendant, selling sunglasses, and teaching at a community college. I learned the tide charts of survival.

2007–2012

A stalking ex. A year and a half of fear. A year and a half of homelessness, couch-surfing. PTSD. Odd jobs. I applied to PhD programs and was told I wasn’t cut out for academia—dyslexia, poor test scores, the wrong temperament.

I found a program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln that didn’t require the GRE. They offered me a full fellowship. I melted down my gold jewelry to afford the move and drove west.

2012–2017

In Lincoln, something shifted. During my PhD, I published in The New Yorker—a moment that, from the outside, looked like an arrival. I met my husband. I fell in love. I stayed.

Ten years after my first book, I gathered the poems that would become my dissertation, tentatively entitled “Change in Altitude.” People said my career would explode. It didn’t. The manuscript became a perennial finalist in almost every contest. Always close. Never chosen.

In 2017, I attended Colrain and drew the cover in my mind. The heart. The nightclub. The whale watch boat. The air between altitudes. The word I wasn’t supposed to write.

I began to understand that the book’s architecture was never about ascent; it was about listening to what keeps beating despite rupture. About queer grief and survival. About breath. About salt water and inland plains. About how a body carries both violence and love.

“Change in Altitude” was too gentle a title.

The book had always been called PULSE.

2017–2023

I finished my PhD and left academia. I built a career in digital marketing. Agents were interested in PULSE—then they weren’t. Publishers were interested—then they weren’t.

The manuscript kept making finalist pools.

I put poetry away for a year. I told myself maybe that chapter was done.

But a pulse doesn’t ask permission.

I returned to the poems with less desperation and more ferocity. I cut them deeper. I let them breathe. I stopped trying to make the book legible to gatekeepers and instead made it make sense to my own nervous system.

Then, the unthinkable happens. A madman is elected president. We hope it is a fluke.

A temporary rupture in our nation’s moral consciousness. Maybe we can sew it up again. We tell ourselves that the change in altitude, the rarified air, the crash-and-burn of our collective consciousness are necessary, that we need to hit rock bottom before we ascend again.

For a minute, it seemed true.

2023–2024

After a brief respite, the madman and his painted clown car flood the bloody circus that has become our nation.

They are no longer funny. They are Stanley Kubrick-meets-Stephen King hauntings that rise up again from unhealed wounds in our nation’s cracked consciousness. And they keep emerging, one after another.

I sent the manuscript to Rusty Morrison at Omnidawn Publishing.

2026

Now, this spring of 2026, they will publish “PULSE.” Rusty—poet, editor, teacher—has met the book with rigor and care.

Together, we listened for its strongest rhythm.

If this sounds like an “overnight success,” I assure you: it is not. It is sixteen years after my first book. It is homelessness and fellowship. It is whale watch boats and Midwestern winters. It is rejection layered upon rejection until the only thing left is the beat itself.

I used to be embarrassed by the mess of my biography. Now I understand that the mess is the method. The poems came from living long enough in chaos to hear what remains constant.

At Colrain, I thought I’d broken the rules.

What I had done was tell the truth before I was ready to admit it.

Keep listening to your PULSE.

 

 

 

 

Cape Cod Pantoum

Tonight, you’re loaning Billy your car, a brand-new

seal-gray Volkswagen Passat with four doors,

though last week at three a.m., he stole your canoe

and sank it in the autumn sea, then swam ashore.

 

Tonight, you’re lending Billy your car—it’s brand new—

and he’s a well-meaning, blue-eyed Byronic drinking man,

who last week, at three a.m., stole your beached canoe,

and when it sank, he blamed it on a dolphin.

 

A well-meaning, blue-eyed, Byronic, hard-drinking man

whose phone calls you take, no matter the hour,

who sank your canoe and blamed it on a dolphin,

and the young man with him, whom the sea sadly devoured,

so you’ll always take Billy’s call, no matter the hour.

Because, you sigh, his mother’s dying too, and he’s drinking again.

He’s no longer a young man (he’s sad, and he’s drowning),

and neither are you, and all friends sometimes sin.

 

Besides, you sigh, his mother’s dying too; that’s why he’s drinking.

She wasn’t a beauty—she came on to you long ago.

And he’s not a young man; he’s drunk, and he’s drowning.

So, you press the phone to your cheek, stare out the dark window.

Who hasn’t come on to you? (Who wasn’t lovely long ago?)

(Even Billy did; his tragic need, his blank blue eyes.)

You press the phone to cheek, stare out the dark window,

and listen to him make a mess of our peaceful lives

Now, back in bed, we return to our disrupted romance. Although last week, at three a.m., he stole your canoe,
you set a sinking man adrift in the sea of second chance:
tonight, you’ve loaned Billy your car again, brand-new.

 

 

 

Cash Register Sings the Blues

This isn’t my dream job. As a young sheet

of steel and plastic, I dreamt of being melted

 

down into a dancer’s pole in Vegas. I wanted a woman in a headdress glossy as a gossamer 

to wrap her lithe limbs around me. I wanted
to be strewn in lights, smell her powdery perfume. 

But I’m a squat box crouched behind the counter,

noticed only if someone robs me. I’m touched all day,

 

but never caressed. Listen: somewhere, gold tokens spew

from slots. I want to drink neon martinis on black-

leather sectional couches. Watch tipsy women with acid-
washed jeans and teased hair, dreamily press their faces 

against slot machines, while people treat currency

carelessly as spit in the wind.

I’m everywhere you look, ubiquitous and ignored.
I’m the container of your dreams that tossed away my own. 

I’ve kept my clean, sleek lines, but you never say a thing.

Feed me, feed me with the only love we know.

 

 

 

 

Bungee Jumping

 

Before the woman leaps off the 160-foot platform, she sees

the tear-colored ghost of her body.

 

Far below her, a man watches from the ground. He has gracefully

hauled her sweaty backpack, weighed down

 

by novels and heavy crocheted dresses bought for her by the man

 before him. He has come this far

 

but will not ascend the platform to jump with her despite

her brief begging. He puts a bandana

 

over his eyes, either to shield the heat or hide from his fear

of what happens next.

 

She calls down again for him to come up. But he won’t.

Whether he’s too wise or weak remains to be seen.

 

Whether she’s careless or fearless is beside the point. The point is this: from that height, it’s so bright

 

she can see the city below her toes. Suddenly, she’s jarred back into her body, that is my body.

 

Mine and mine alone. Now I am back, looking down at you, back to that time of perfect paralysis.

 

It doesn’t matter what sadness happened from there.

How your pull exerted too much gravity.

          How I wanted you to ascend to greater heights. When it came time
                     to jump alone, the distance between us

had become natural as air but sad as a last breath. So I took           that breath and begged the assistant behind me,

 

Just push me, push me, push.

 

 

 

 

 

Maria Nazos is a Greek American poet raised in Athens. Kaveh Akbar chose her work as a Palette Poetry Contest winner. Her poetry, translations, and essays are published or forthcoming in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. She’s the author of PULSE (Omnidawn, 2026) and The Slow Horizon that Breathes(World Poetry Books, 2023), a translation of poems by Greek poet Dimitra Kotoula. She has worked every job imaginable, including a disastrous, three-day stint as a table dancer in Mykonos. She quit after she realized she’d lost too many friends. Find her at www.marianazos.com. 

Bluesky: @marianazos.bsky.social
Instagram: @nazosmaria
LinkedIn: Maria Nazos 
Medium: @MariaNazos
Substack: @marianazos 

 

Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com

 

rob mclennan : WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA., by Rodrigo Toscano

WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA., Rodrigo Toscano
Omnidawn, 2025

 

 

 

 

The latest from New Orleans-based poet Rodrigo Toscano is WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA., a curious collection for how he writes so expansively around and through subject, offering precise and careful measures around culture, American history, providing a perspective that Walt Whitman couldn’t conceive of. Set in a quartet of sections—“MAIORIS HISPANIAE,” “IMPERIUM,” “HUMANITAS” and “ARTIFICIA NATIONALIS”—Toscano counterpoints the narrative of imperial glory so prevalent through the United States, focusing especially on its treatment of the Spanish-speaking populations the settlers found living across that southern stretch. He writes of empire, as the poem “Hominae Romanum” begins: “The popular meme is that / men think of the Roman Empire / at least once a day. // Senatus Populusque Romanum / stupendous aqueducts galore / badass sewers to spare. // ‘Yeah man, better to um / swear allegiance now / than drag this on.’”

WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. is Toscano’s twelfth full-length collection, following on the heels of titles such as the Covid-era The Charm & The Dread (Fence Books, 2021) and more recent The Cut Point (Counterpath, 2023), a title I seem to have missed. I’m curious at how he seems to build his books as self-contained projects, allowing threads of ongoing concern slip in and out, but holding each title as a coherent, separate unit; setting, in this new collection, the three cornerstones of his collection full in the title. “Something here,” he writes, to open the poem “Humanity (a meandering raft),” “won’t allow / a simple phrase about Humanity. // Since Humanity is a dream / dreaming us, it floats, fragments. // So maybe this is a fragment / adrift in perilous waters // let’s say, a swamp / at midday, in summer.” Individually, the poems in this collection offer moments, each a kind of stillness or focused action, that accumulates, almost as a photo album, displaying a far larger, and indirect, book-length narrative; sharp for what the book displays, one line, one lyric, at a time. “Baton Rouge,” he writes, as part of the poem “Poets of Shenzhen,” “our state capital / can’t be accessed by high-speed rail // Talk of rails—is 30 years old! / Homeless tents populate our streets // Still, though, poets from Baton Rouge / happily find their way to us. // Which of your poets reads tonight? / What’s the latest styles? What’s the vibe?”

There is a way that Toscano manages such broad reach, such a wide canvas, across a lyric composed of such focused, individual points, and overall, WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. is very much a book about empire, its effects and its counternarratives; of what becomes of those who encounter it, riffing language across a staccato of contemporary and historical references, old gods and gunfire, and whatever peace might be brought through occupation and subjugation. His is a lyric of clipped divinity, unfolding sharp lines and couplets layered upon another, attempting to document and even counterpoint such historic and ongoing violence through a wildly playful gestural patter. “Taylor Swift and uh, the un/ Durability, um, of, uh, those / two words, might (might),” he writes, to open “Pax Americana,” a sequence of fifteen three-line bursts that demands itself be heard, and offers, further on: “Demographics—plural (plural), like uh / The Lefts, The Rights, plural, um / Diplomat Majorette, ok, yeah [.]”

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan is the author of nearly fifty published books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which is the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025). His above/ground press, which now has a clever substack, will be thirty-three years old in 2026.

 

Jérôme Melançon : Underscore, by Julie Carr

Underscore, Julie Carr
Omnidawn, 2024

 

 

 

Reading Julie Carr’s collection Underscore, I found myself inhabiting poem after poem. Picking up the book, reading a bit, each time I would need to step away. As if I had read the whole book. Because I had read a whole, a totality. As if I needed to physically move from one poem to another. With each poem being so different from each of the others, their resonance and repetition of chosen elements gives them force, gravitas, gravity. Perhaps there was, is, something about the moment in which I have been reading the book, placing it back on the shelf, picking it up again – reading out of desire, putting it down out of satisfaction, or lack of readiness and steadiness for the next one. Reading Underscore is a physical act.

I have been struggling with the arrangement of the sections – their meaning, that is, the workings of their relations, for it is so precisely clear that they are related and part of a larger whole. Would it be unfair to the book and its author to say that the four sections relate to each other as four settings might on a microscope, focusing closer and closer? That each poem acts like a different sample, which I had to remove to make way for another? Or would binoculars be the correct analogy, focusing in from a wider field and bringing sharper attention only to some details? Might this movement from one area of closer focus to another explain the feeling that I am dealing with each poem as a totality and feel shaken, seeking focus, as I move from one to another?

I can at least follow Carr’s own through line. She gives a dedication for the book as a whole; she adds a dedication to selected poems to the same two people (among other dedications); she adds a note on these dedications, as well as on the title. “Underscore” refers to an improvisational dance practice – one body, one style, moving in different manners, each movement or series of movements existing as its own moment, breaking stillness. This practice has been brought to the dancer – Carr – by a teacher, Nancy Stark Smith. “Underscore” refers perhaps as well to what a poem can do to an emotional (and, or, comma, slash) spiritual state by centring upon it. This practice has been brought to the poet – Carr – by a teacher, Jean Valentine. Both women died in 2020; the dedications are to both women.

In “The Underscore” (22-23), one of the grandest in the collection, Carr addresses observations to Stark Smith, stretching the limits of materiality through an intertwining of alliteration and assonance in felt images, for instance in: “how the throat beats with blood and voice /     coarsing coarse sore”. The poem finds correspondences in all things, at times too direct to allow sameness, but also held together through the thinnest and most tense of metaphors: “raspberry fingertips    tensed tongues / they test the broken edges    of cups.” So often with space on the page for breath, a movement between other movements. Transforming the “how” of the realization into a question, but by making it into a “who,” Carr interrogates Stark Smith, rendering the mystery of friendly and human presence: “who is missing you today? who turned your camera off?”

In “New Year” (105) our mouth is given beautiful movement: “In whitewashed walls, your hand had curved around its pen. / It was your kitchen where you draw your brows / and the phone rang: your daughter.” A whooshing in one line; a repeated hesitation in another; then a lack of conclusion, all in agitated sharp peaks. Likewise in the poem as a whole, a year passes as the new year whooshes in; Valentine’s memory falters, hesitates; she disappears heading downward, leaving a train or entering a subway station. A movement between moments of presence – just like friendship.

The difference between these two poems is perhaps that of the allusiveness of dance and the depth of expression of language – two different ways of moving in the world, one simply faster and more exuberant than the other.

Alongside Smith and Valentine, we find Gillian, a friend, present throughout; we also find K.J., someone with whom she dances. “Good Morning” (47), one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read as a love poem, is dedicated to Peter – though after reading it over I am not so sure it is a love poem. It might simply be an ode to love, to the openness any kind of love, including friendship, can bring to us once we decide to welcome it. The conclusion of this poem is an instruction how to place oneself in relation to others: “since you are to me what this is / What might seem minimal is really maximal / I position myself toward you for all of it.”

We also find Carolyn Grace, in “1.17.15” (59), or rather we find her missing, disappeared, her death and the solidity of winter leaving a group of friends separated, “torn,” her death a “rift.” And in the undedicated “For friendship” (53), Carr places us gently by a river and its natural quiet, only to tear us away by changing the focus to the wider context, that of the hospital by the river, fully in the city – at the same time as she moves from the inside of the body and what it holds, its desires (“how we buried what we wanted in our bodies”), to the violent unpleasantness of smells as the body moves across the ground (“The soil smelled like shit / as a walked a word into the current”). The speaker here sees herself in the hospital window, or sees herself there, on the soil, by the river, as seen from the window – experiencing the reversals proper to friendship, the closeness and similarity that exist even in distance, even in illness, in the closeness or presence of death.

So many elements run through the collection. The river is one. Five poems titled “River,” numbered 1 through 4, then 10, but not in that order, and not in exact succession, remind us that there are flows that move through what we take to be discrete, separate places. Others appear here, rob mclennan among them. Like a river’s currents and undertows, there is no neat distinction between images and ideas in these poems (as in much of the collection). Human life, animal life, vegetal life, elemental life pass into one another as Carr moves beyond analogical or metaphorical thinking into a deeper sameness she finds in what is shared: “After fat felt markers drew their vapor trails on newsprint, we let them, / uncapped, fall to the earth where the roots, relentless / in their water search, seething, maybe, are.” In these river poems, she is acutely aware of violence, of its presence in an undercurrent in our experiences, so often as a desire – “and to know the sadness is to know the flame / that forms in the hand as if the rodent / beneath the rock broke back into its body / to roam” – and she is aware of the workings of pain and its frightfulness: “the headaches that plague you / flow backward through your skull     to snag the silver maple like / barbed wire at the pant leg of a boy.”

“Night” (97-98) may give us the best statement and illustration of the kind of dance poetry enables within us. In writing “the moss takes my footprint only to release it // back outward to    some blue / heron and some rose //    hips bowing” Carr once again passes through metaphor to what is akin to an elemental language, to move and thus to move us, up, slightly, up, higher, low (with the contradictory movement in “rose”) into what is already downward. In this magnificent flux present in the words and between them (and the placement of these words on the page is worth the effort of finding and holding the book), she ensures that we roll from one part of our feet to others, leap toward other places, and leave nothing of us behind as we pass into other forms of life, floating as if carried by them.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.