Black Swan Theory by Kyle Marbut was one of my favorite debut poetry collections of 2025. Scratch that. One of my favorite books of 2025. I read it twice in two months, which is rare. The symmetrical and inventive book is arranged with three untitled prose poems followed by an untitled four line poem. This repeats for 100 pages, with an opening/middle/ending featuring a single eight line poem. It's beautiful. It's strange. It's playful. It's untouchable. It has me in a chokehold. Get. This. Book.
Along with this incredible collection, and along with participating in our explosive Obliterat poetry experiment back in 2022, Marbut and I have been sending chapbooks back and forth over the years. While mine are often made through other presses, Marbut makes their own chaps by hand, along with chaps for friends and fellow poets under the Fresh Hell Press imprint. I emailed Marbut sometime last year (what is time?) and they responded a couple months later, and now I’m publishing the interview a couple months after that. We chatted about process, prose poetry, hand-making things, swans in dreams, Scooby-Doo, and so much more.
[I often pull a quote to use as the title for my interviews, and I almost used “I am a liar who loves lying” and I almost used “Kinda funny, or blue.” Strong contenders. I thought you should know.]
Congrats on the release of your new collection! It might be my favorite collection of 2025, and the only book I've read twice last year. Can you talk about the process of writing and assembling this book?
Thank you for reading!! I had to pull out my old notebooks, because I really don’t remember intentionally starting to write these poems. It appears they started to emerge one by one while I was in the middle of a more narrative project, a romantic comedy in jagged couplets about a wedding in hell, or Ohio. I’d been getting bored and frustrated with it, relying too hard on old tricks to keep going. Ended up tossing it in the trash (womp womp) once the prose poems began to occur with greater frequency and overtake my imagination. I went pretty far back, and a handful of the prose poems predate this big shift (the anatomy lesson, the laundry room, the snow globe), but there’s a moment where I spent many pages and days working and reworking one prose poem almost obsessively. After that, the very next entry begins with a swan, which I remember I had been visited by in a dream. It had a human face and lived in a palace or a cage-like cloud. A lot of fragments and poems arrived in a flood after that.
Your book is full of untitled prose poems, as well as four line poems and eight line poems. Given each sequence, it's perfectly symmetrical. Was this always the plan when writing these poems or has this book seen many variations?
I don’t know, it kinda just ended up that way. I’m not much of a planner. I had a stack of prose poems and a stack of very short poems and then intertwined them. I can’t remember another shape. I thought three prose poems at a time was probably enough. Mitigating the overload. There’s a kind of loose narrative logic that stitches the whole together, as well as the shorter pieces bridging the gaps with an aside here or an insight there, but it’s not really linear or plotted. More of an accumulation of events than a single story that begins and ends. A lot of its movement or any sense of progress depends on contrast. The overall guiding principle was kinda vague, like moving some paintings around on a wall until the arrangement feels right. Poems appeared, disappeared, and changed a lot over the book’s life, but the general shape never changed once the initial pattern emerged.
When writing these poems, were you working toward this full-length, or was there much more of an assemblage/mosaic going on after the fact?
A little of both maybe. Or some other kind of process. It was initially more of a persona or feeling that I was writing through until I had quite a few poems lurking around. At that point I started to arrange them, and the associations that emerged between the poems-in-arrangement began to produce new poems and then I was like, “Oh, I am writing a book probably, sort of, actually.” And then I would shuffle the order of the poems around again including the new ones, and the process would repeat.
When did you decide to remove the titles? Or did the titles never exist?
I probably took them out around the time I first arranged the poems in the 1-3-1 pattern and the book started to form. At a certain point I was writing poems faster than I could title them, and it felt like titles would be an unnecessary interruption to the voice of this book. Too determinant, too much of a partition, each poem neat and sliced, separated—instead of flowing as one movement. A title can imply an ending, or at least anticipates its own reflection in the text, a kind of completion, closure, whatever. All that stopping and starting would have made me motion sick. Only a few of the poems had titles to begin with, so it was pretty painless to yank them off and store them. For later, or not. I keep a ledger of unused titles that I visit when I want to have a feeling without a thought or vice versa. I like poems without titles and titles without poems. Non-exclusively.
I shared one of your prose poems on social media and you said, "The Mom Suite is very important to my heart." Can you elaborate on / explain this suite to the reader? Or if you'd like to keep the writing mysterious, perhaps you could talk about the craft/assemblage? Or both!
My mother’s recurrent cancer reached its terminal stage the week the book came out. Or that’s when the doctors got around to calling it. There’s not really one location in the book I would point to, since there are a lot of overlapping zones of feeling, and those feelings loop and recur, but there are moments that try to navigate the parental relationship, what it is to be someone’s child, which is lifelong, and a self, which is inconstant, blurred. There are a few loose threads in the book that I wouldn’t exactly call autobiographical but contain the shadows my ideas about life cast on an imagined wall. Not necessarily abstracted but at least stripped of their context, allowed to veer or change course. They still feel personal, or important to my heart, relating to certain people and things. The emotions whirling through the book have to do with, I think, the part of love, or grief, that is learning to go on without someone, that certainty and stability, even if that someone was a version of a self, if that’s possible to learn, and the changes it makes to the light, versions of a life.
Your writing seems to pull from the autobiographical while (almost always) taking a turn for the surreal. Is something factual/realistic a way to get you on the page and allow your mind to run wild? Has surrealism/absurdism always been an instinct/interest with your own writing?
I just watched too many cartoons or something. Played too much pretend. I don’t really think of my work as autobiographical in a totalizing or even partial way, but I might be dallying with real life. Mostly I am a liar who loves lying. In an escalating fashion. It’s sort of true that things happen to me and others. They might happen in a poem and/or in the world. I’m not that concerned about what leaks in or out, or if it happens to be real. I only hope that it’s kinda funny, or blue.
What are some touchstone books (or touchstone authors) that captivated you and helped you early on in your writing career?
I imprinted on Walter Moers’s Zamonia books when I was young and became cringe (and thus free) for all time. Or at least terminally zany. Kelly Link and Angela Carter were big for me as well. Dickinson, Plath, and Oliver were poets I fell for when I was first discovering poetry. Other writers like Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Lucie Brock-Broido, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Alice Notley influenced the shapes my super early work took. But the writing still feels early, even if it’s a smidge (a decade?!) later. I guess it depends on when you die. Current early and/or late influences may include Michael Earl Craig, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Caroline Knox, Chelsey Minnis, Killarney Clary, Marosa di Giorgio, S Brook Corfman, Aditi Machado, Harryette Mullen. If you read Lesle Lewis it kinda gives my whole game away. Her work and my work are on a picnic, forever (to me). The list goes on.
Although your collection is brand new, you sent me an even more recent chapbook, so you seem to always be writing/assembling. Can I ask what you're currently working on?
I haven’t been drafting much new work lately, so I’ve been messing with the backlog of material I accumulated over the past few years. Which might be a lie since my notebook still seems to be filling up. I keep trying to assemble the what feels like a zillion pages into one or more manuscripts but it’s really daunting since I’ve been working in long poems and sequences (?) with wobbly edges and my attention keeps wandering back towards my life. I have one series that’s an overlapping dialogue between members of a crowd. One spoken by a hive mind, part of which has died, communicating with its still-living vessels from beyond the grave. Lots of prose poems too. I’ve been time traveling lately. I’m finding it hard to finish anything. Maybe they'll be chapbooks. Maybe I’ll write some porn.
The chapbooks you've sent me have also been handmade. How long have you been making your own books? Where did you pick up / learn this skill?
I taught myself badly using the internet when I was like seventeen. I wanted to make a clothbound book so bad for whatever reason. Turned into a horrible gluey mess that I learned a lot from. Ended up making one copy of a stab-stitched chapbook years later. That’s the extent of my early attempts. Some years after that, it was Michelle Gottschlich (formerly of Monster House Press, currently and forever of my heart) who really beefed up my DIY practice. We were living in a house together at the time, and one summer day Michelle was just like, “I’m gonna make some chapbooks,” and I was like oh that’s right I forgot you can do things whenever you want all the time. She bestowed me with her advanced knowhow, the pamphlet stitch, and some formatting tricks for printing. So, it was passed down to me from anonymous internet folks and then one of my closest friends, and whoever had taught them, and so on.
Is writing a daily routine/discipline for you? Is the work never done?
It’s more like a mental excretion, maybe. I sift some solid clumps and pieces out of my mind as the day goes on, deposit them on loose paper or my phone if I can make it to the notes app without forgetting. Things accumulate for a while and then I take it to my notebook and see what happens. Sometimes nothing. Every once in a while a poem comes to me whole but that’s rare. There are long periods of quiet. Things might be done when they’re no fun to play with anymore. It might take forever. I don’t know. I have a habit of resurrecting drafts and fragments years after finishing them. I maintain poems in multiple ongoing versions. I am not a reliable source. My practice, of late, seems to be changing.
Outside of your own work, what are some recent reads that you have enjoyed?
I’m still in the middle of it, but loving María Negroni’s The Annunciation. And Blexbolex has a graphic novel called The Magicians that’s in this gorgeous risograph style. Funny and weird. Wo Chan’s Togetherness was a recent re-read <3 <3. Everyone should get in on it. Jon Woodward too, been revisiting his books. The Amber in Ambrose is so wacky and new. And Xiang Yata’s Optometry has such a wild sense of the visual’s relationship to reality, or the self’s versions of reality. My favorite thing I’ve read in the past five years and maybe ever is I Know Where I’m Going by Fran Carlen, and I am going to break the fourth wall here (is there a fourth wall? just one? where are we? Ben, are you there?) to say: if anyone reading this knows Fran Carlen or has uncovered clues regarding the whereabouts of further works by Fran Carlen: hello, I am ready to be best friends.
I'll ask the same question, but in regards to recent movies and/or music. What are some recently watched films or recently listened to albums that you'd recommend?
I really like music that’s atmospheric, or maybe chewy. Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness is on loop. Hiroshi Yoshimura's Flora. Kelly Moran’s Moves in the Field. Barker’s Stochastic Drift. Pole’s Wald. The Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack? Always and forever Björk and Fiona Apple. I haven’t been watching much lately, but reruns of Inuyasha and classic Scooby-Doo are usually playing in and rotting my brain.
If you can, provide a photo of your writing workspace or describe with words. What are some essentials while you create?
I have a desk but I don’t really write there. It’s just where I type things up near the end of drafting. It mostly serves as a bookshelf overflow. A lot of language comes to me in fragments and images while I’m taking a walk or dozing or otherwise not sitting down to focus and write. Daydreams, intrusive fragments. It usually ends up in a notebook, unless I forget, which is fine, because it’s fun to try and remember and get it really wrong and end up turned around. The thing that helps me write the most is doing anything else.
For this ongoing author interview series, I'm asking for everyone to present a writing prompt. It can be as abstract or as concrete as you choose.
Go outside.
In closing, do you have any advice for early writers? Or rather, what's something that keeps you returning to the page?
Tell people you love them. Eat good soup. Do what you can to help others. Frequent your local public library. Befriend plants, animals, and other lifeforms. Make things with your hands.
Any final thoughts / closing wisdom / something I might have missed that you'd like to include? Thank you again for taking the time!
I love you.
