Geraldine Kim in Conversation With Cheena Marie Lo at Weird Sister

What does it mean to become more human in times of disaster? In conversation with Geraldine Kim, Cheena Marie Lo, author of A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters, reflects on Rebecca Solnit's 2011 talk at San Francisco's Anarchist Bookfair and how that inspired the title and content of their debut poetry collection.

GK: A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters feels less traditional “poetry” to me than a cross-genre exploration that includes non-fiction, statistics, etc. How did the form of the text come to fruition?

CML: For me, poetry is a way to think through and around something. I saw Rebecca Solnit give a talk at the Anarchist Book Fair in 2011, about how we become more human in times of disaster–how we don’t panic and turn into animals in “survival of the fittest” mode, but instead, we will help each other. I was interested in exploring the tension inherent of the notion of “becoming more human.” Who gets to become more human? I thought a lot about incarcerated folks, poor communities, and communities of color. And the proliferation of news articles referring to the citizens of New Orleans as refugees, an Other in their own country.

I was also interested in exploring the nature of disaster itself, what constitutes a disaster and who decides what a disaster is? Does there need to be an act of nature for something to be qualified as a disaster? What about the manmade disasters–the prison industrial complex and its disproportionate affect on poor people of color? Social and economic disasters? These things that happen long before the “natural” disaster ever starts, that are often exemplified once the act of nature occurs.

This book is my attempt to write through some of these questions. A lot of the language is appropriated from my research. One of the constraints I placed on the project was using the alphabet as an organizational tool—it is essentially one long abecedarian—as an attempt to find some order in it all.

Read more at Weird Sister.