I had the pleasure of chatting with fellow Identity Theory editor Vic Nogay about her recent poetry collection Naming a Dying Thing (Yellow Arrow Publishing 2025). The book’s main concerns of motherhood, loss, and the forces that can divide us from even ourselves are elaborated within a natural world that resists domestication for often surprising, often precarious connection. I admire how Vic choreographs precision and mystery to render poems unafraid of engaging complex gendered and political violence without being overdetermined by them. Through this collection, I think I am beginning to learn that naming a dying thing is to do more than describe still flesh or demystify machineries of violence. It is to call out into the world, and believe it vast enough to hold both grief and possibility: “You can call me orphan; I’ll call you bereaved. / Rest now. You need not claim me.”
Justin Aoba: One of the things I most admire about this collection is its keen sense of relationality. The collection’s most intimate and reflective moments are prefaced or punctuated by the appearance of a creaturely other to hold and refract our attention: the toad perched on the rock in “Even if I burn,” the deer skull in “women,” the white squirrel in “Folk tale.” These consistent sightlines into nature feel like a foundational element of your voice. Could you talk about how it figures into your work? Who do you find yourself in conversation with when it comes to nature and poetry and personhood?
Vic Nogay: The reach into the natural world absolutely feels elemental to my voice as a poet, at least at this stage of my life. Turning to native wildlife in particular is like seeking out a shadow self, some other, better, truer, more essential, more feral, more self-assured version of the person I have been conditioned to be, living this 21st century American life. I ask a lot of nature in my poetry because I still feel an ancestral connection to it. I am hopeful the revelations it lends my work will serve as a mirror, or better yet, an open door, welcoming me away from all this.
JA: Following the kinds of relations that are made legible in your collection, I was particularly struck by “Kindergarten Graduation.” It’s such an effective piece that places children in proximity with each other (a feat going against the atomized model of the insular nuclear family and parental sovereignty) and, of course, the Uvalde school shooting. From a craft perspective, how do you incorporate sociopolitical dimensions into your work? What political content orbits your writing, and how do you reckon with those forces in your poetry?
VN: “Kindergarten Graduation” was an especially narrow needle to thread. To be a parent of young children, living with the very real fear of gun violence and mass shootings in America, is a political injury I and all parents experience. Losing a child to gun violence, while related, is simply not the same. I wanted to keep it very short, the language precise and distilled, so as not to take up unnecessary time or space in this conversation. I felt three tercets was what I could allocate for myself here. There is also purposefully no “I” in this poem. There is a collective “our” and relational possessives, but the “I” is left out. In political poetry, at least in my own, the “I” will be wielded as a weapon or a shield. If it cannot fulfill one of those roles, it needs to remain an observer.
In contrast, another political poem in the collection is “Testimony.” The “I” is used here as a shield. I “confess” the truth of my miscarriage to protect women who have been criminalized for the same exact things I have gone through. As a white woman, I can use my “I” and my experience for a productive, protective purpose.
JA: In your Yellow Arrow interview with Melissa Nunez, you talk about motherhood as being “like breathing—a constant oscillation between restriction and expansion, limitation and growth.” I was really taken by your criticisms of motherhood as ceaseless expansion and expectations. What kinds of restrictions and limitations did you want to explore in this collection, and are there any you find yourself consistently returning to? What techniques or approaches did attending to these limitations demand?
VN: From the second you give birth in our modern America, the mother’s body transforms from a gorgeous swollen vessel of promise, to an empty, leaking, sack of flesh. There is no more reverence, there is very little care. The internal reconstruction and healing the body must perform postpartum can take up to a full year, and hormonal reregulation takes much longer. In my work, I try to create space for myself to find rest for the body and freedom for the mind—two things mothers have no time for. Sitting down to write poems is a mental and physical embodiment of exactly this. Writing, for me, is defiance of all mothers must or should do. It is my intention to be and do less than is expected or demanded of me, and to be all the happier and healthier for it.
JA: I am committing the sin of asking an author to answer for their blurbs. How do you feel about being placed as an “Ohio poet”? What does that mean to you? I’m asking as a Midwesterner whose eyeballs rolled out of his head when a professor in grad school said, “If you’re not from the East or West Coast, then you don’t matter.”
VN: I fucking love it. It is an honor to be from Ohio, to feel such a strong connection to this place, and to be recognized for that. I am generally a pretty competitive and combative personality, so I’ll fight anyone who talks shit about the Midwest.
JA: I’ve loved getting to know you as both an editor and a poet. In your experience, how do these two roles inform each other, if at all?
VN: It is far more enjoyable to be an editor! It is a privilege to read so much writing (good and bad!), and so fun to curate issues for how the selected pieces speak to each other. Supporting and advocating for my writers is my absolute favorite thing. My persona as a writer is quite different: small, critical, judgmental, tortured. I wish I could merge the two and use my editorial confidence on my own work.
JA: Many of my writer friends are in catastrophic doom spirals that have devastated their writing lives (me included). I don’t mean to build up a mythology of invincibility for you, but what keeps you going as a writer?
VN: Publishing is an illusion; I am absolutely in a doom spiral. This chapbook is many years’ worth of selected pieces, and I honestly haven’t written much poetry in several months. I’m supposedly hard at work on a novel, but that’s also slow going. I don’t know. I think I hold the title of “writer” as just an indelible part of me. There’s no honor in it, nothing to be congratulated for, it just is who I am. The periods of my life that I spent not even trying to write, I really lost myself. Now I know that even if I’m not writing, I’m feeling like shit about it, so that means I’m still a writer, and I’m still on the right track.
JA: “Appalachians” is such a perfect ending and anchor for the collection. How did this poem come about? Was its place in the chapbook always clear to you? Could you talk a little bit about selecting and arranging the poems as a whole?
VN: “Appalachians” was one of those unicorn poems that came out fully formed in one go (almost—I did go back and fine tune it a few times, but the bulk of it came out all at once and very quickly). It was also the last poem I wrote for the collection. I wrote it specifically as the anchor piece that was missing, so I’m glad to hear it struck you that way. It was a poem that had been brewing for a long time, and I knew I finally needed to sit down and write it.
Selecting the poems was much easier than arranging them. Looking back on the work I had written since 2020, it was clear that there were some driving themes: motherhood, pregnancy loss, isolation, and the natural world. Pieces not in that range were clear outliers, so I didn’t include them. I like to think of collections and chapbooks like music albums—I want each poem to lead into another in a specific way, either to be touching on very similar or very disparate topics, to contain similar imagery, to have a nice balance of heavy and light, leaving spaces for the readers to breathe. I think it worked. It works for me, anyway.
More About Vic Nogay
Vic Nogay is Identity Theory's micro editor and associate poetry editor. Her chapbook Naming a Dying Thing is available at bookshop.org. (The FTC insists we tell you that's an affiliate link and we might get like a few cents if you buy her book.) Visit her at vicnogay.com.
