About

Matchlike Syllables is the website for poet Anna Morrison. Look for her poetry in journals such as BOMB, Fence, Lana Turner, Interim, Baest: a journal of queer forms & affects, and Puerto del Sol. Her poems won the LUMINA and Prism Review poetry prizes, and her chapbook Water in Three Acts is forthcoming in November 2020 as part of Newfound’s Emerging Poets Chapbook Series. In her Journal, she writes about poetry, art, and poetic process.

She served as a Senior Editor for Kelsey Street Press, a publisher of innovative writing by women and nonbinary authors, editing and/or producing books such as recombinant by Ching-In Chen (2018 LAMBDA winner for Best Transgender Poetry) and New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (a bilingual edition of poetry and art spanning decades). She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Saint Mary’s College of CA in 2019. Originally from New Jersey, she now lives in California.

Ars Poetica

The first poems I wrote were hymns, and what some might consider the musical artifice of a poem seems more artery than makeup to me. I think of how rhyme and other kinds of phonic repetition prompt me to repeat physical gestures—movements of lips, tongue, teeth. Even tracing the lines on a page with my eyes or fingers, wading through the silence of whitespace: I perceive poetry as inherently corporeal.

And form—patterns and departures from them? I don’t seek master diagrams (for me, they can become elevators that provoke claustrophobia). Instead, I look to form as a reminder that there is always more I cannot comprehend: an inkling of what’s beyond, a shiver at symmetry. A poem produces a charged overlap, linking my body and what-is-beyond-me through the pleasures of pattern and mystery. When I experience this in a poem, I feel the room I cannot see. There’s a draft from the open window, even if I’ve closed my windows.

After I moved to California, I began to reconsider buildings, specifically what constitutes sturdiness: a structure is more seismically sound if it shakes with an earthquake, rather than remaining rigid. I work toward poetry that demonstrates resilience through that kind of flexibility. I would move with an impact, but stay loose-limbed enough to retain my structural integrity. My poems often transpire along the pulse between emergency and emergence—of the personal, political, spiritual, ecological—exploring how survival activates transformation.