Remembering Joy: An Interview with Susan Leary about Dressing the Bear

Sneha Subramanian Kanta: It is wonderful to be in conversation with you, Susan. Congratulations on your collection winning the 2023 Louise Bogan Award with Trio House Press. There are four sections in Dressing the Bear, akin to the seasons. These represent to me fragments of continuum. What was your idea in sectioning your book with these trajectories of interwoven narratives?

Susan L. Leary: I think organizing a collection is equal parts instinct and intention.

I never planned on writing a book-length elegy to my brother. To love an addict is a maddening kind of witness, and the possibility of his death was always very real. I was often on high alert, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But oddly, when that shoe does drop, it’s still unbelievable. So, when he died, I started writing compulsively from this raw, open wound. I was also dreaming a lot, and in those dreams, there was always this unbridgeable distance between myself and my brother, a distance that provided the images for the earliest poems to explode into existence. My brother was also a smart, very communicative person, and I found myself relying on his language and creative turns of phrase to guide the initial work. All this, I think, is the instinct part of assemblage.

Eventually, deliberation kicks in. I believe a collection should have an arc, not necessarily a narrative one, but I want the poems to journey and to transform. There’s an emotional landscape the reader is moving through, and sectioning a book is helpful in creating these various seasons, as you say. I should add that most of my poems come from a place of feeling a little bit stumped, not entirely curious, but rather completely befuddled by certain particulars. For this reason, I prefer an inquiry-based approach to assemblage. In other words, what questions is a collection asking, and how can I use those questions as an organizing principle? I want to sit inside possibility as much as the imagination will allow me, seeking and seeking and seeking while never answering, which speaks to the interwovenness and layering you noted.

My approach to the first section of any collection is always the same: What 10-15 poems provide an overview of the collection, and what questions might I focus on to identify those poems? In the case of Dressing the Bear, those questions included: Who is my brother? What is his story? Who loves him? Who grieves for him in the aftermath? What does this love, this grief look like?

I found I was very much chasing the afterlife in these poems, as well, and there are continual questions of faith. I want to believe my brother is somewhere, that he knows he’s dead, that he lives on, and Section II is asking if poetry can be that bridge. Can I harness language in a way that convinces myself I’ve reached him? Is my brother my audience? Can he hear me?

I think Section III is very much an attempt at unraveling history. What is my brother’s origin story? What factors and conditions shaped his experience? How can I understand his past? How did we even get here?

The final section of the collection, Section IV, is dedicated to the future. What now? How do I persist as grief changes shape? How does my brother continue to evolve and persist? What beauty, what light still exists?

Sneha: In “When the Belly of a Thing Is Cut Open, the World Must Repent of What It’s Ravaged”, there is a lengthy narration of trysts with medicine. The lines “Under the medical examiner’s // lamplight, everyone a tiny shipwreck on icy slab. / As towards the end of the dream, I find my brother / bent over a body, seriously in task, his back to me // & his knife slumbering against his thigh.” are particularly vivid. How do you utilize metaphors which signify an aperture of silence before the truth?

Susan: This poem is centered around my brother’s autopsy report, which contained specialized medical knowledge beyond my scope of understanding. It was meticulously detailed, and I wanted to draw on that extreme, rigorous attention, while also allowing the text to breathe, to discover its humanity. On the initial report, the examiner also misspelled my brother’s name and got his age wrong. He was listed as 59 years old instead of 29 and those mistakes made me question the truth of the entire document. I was on the hunt for accuracy, whatever that even meant.

I am really drawn to your phrase, “aperture of silence,” because I wanted this poem to unfold incredibly slowly and to capture the energy and emotionality of an ellipsis. I wanted the speaker of the poem, as well as the reader, to linger in the presence of my brother’s body, to slip into reflection and patiently wait as each limb, each organ reanimated itself amidst the silence of the room. The entire poem asks that you exist on the precipice of knowledge and wait for my brother to speak. Of course, despite every attempt at listening and discerning more wisely, my brother reminds us at the close of the poem that we still got it wrong, his “no” echoing throughout the poem’s architecture. His truth—the truth of the poem—is one we can never fully grasp.

Sneha:

I know you’ve said one of the most difficult poems to write for you was “Clean”. I believe your poem traces the tradition of docupoetics with description at its core. The words “Because he looks / so clean”, “tiny shovels for thumbs”, “summery & sand-colored with splotches of blue”, and “the good clothes in the house are clean” most exemplify this. In what ways do you navigate the grief of mourning while you bring its narrative on the page?

Susan: Poetry doesn’t lessen or diminish grief, but it certainly listens to it and wants to be accommodating. It’s willing to hold your grief for a while and find a shape or container for what, at the moment, feels unmanageable. Poetry is also very much interested in innovations of language; it’s about surprise, that wildly unexpected image or metaphor or arrangement of words. It’s clay in your hands. Every poem begins as new territory and ends as new territory because you’re making discoveries and leaps as you write. For me, grief also conjured this feeling of new territory. It was a sensation I hadn’t experienced before, and it was, and is, peculiar and disorienting. The loss of my brother was a thousand other losses: the loss of his face was the loss of his voice was the loss of his humor was the loss of our togetherness was the loss of myself. It was a total annihilation of all things, and I think the unprecedented nature of both poetry and grief allow them to facilitate one another. Grief and poetry both begin as blank slates. There is potential inside of grief, and I think the poem knows that.

At the same time, my brother’s death made me incredibly skeptical of metaphor. I became obsessed with literalness, with the starkness and sterility of fact. My brother is dead. How terrible. Life sucks. Why try to reframe or dress that up? I think every book needs that one anti-metaphor poem that emphasizes straight description, details that are uncontestable—I am so happy you noticed this by the way!—and in Dressing the Bear that poem is “Clean.”

For those struggling with addiction, the concept of “clean” can also be an unkind, faulty measure of humanity and success. Whenever my brother was asked, Are you using? Are you clean?, the entirety of his personhood was reduced to his answer to that one question. In this poem, I am trying to reclaim and reimagine that word on my brother’s behalf. Clean is a deeply personal concept: it’s intimate and speaks to the fundamental self—the naked, pure, vulnerable self—and, in these terms, in no way was my brother not clean. He was this beautiful person, my favorite person, and there were many ways he was clean inside his living.

This poem also illustrates the ways in which the rare, aberrant, anomalous moment—my brother dead in a box—holds inside it the beauty and routineness of the everyday. There he was in his final sleep, but he also looked as he always did on the couch, mid-nap, listening to Johnny Cash.

Sneha: One of the most interesting things to me about your book is how you incorporate sections in the book. The poems “Undisclosed Archetypal Structure” and “This is the poem in which the father leaves” fold into each other. While the former embodies structural fragmentation, the latter encompasses brevity in storytelling. How did you decide to include these synapses within your book in chronologizing poems?

Susan: When writing from a place of grief, emotional resets or interludes are essential to make the heaviness of the subject matter more bearable, at least that’s how I felt while writing these poems. Sometimes, I simply needed less density, metaphorical or otherwise. I love this idea of the poem as synaptic, too, as being able to offer brief, quickfire sets of images or thoughts that heal through their nerve as much as their mystery. Poetry and theory are often seen as incompatible, as well. Poetry is anti-explanation. It sours at that big, impossible question of why? But in these two poems, as well as many of the poems of Section III, I am reaching towards a possible interpretation of my brother’s life circumstances. But it’s not the interpretation that matters, rather the gesturing towards it, which, I think, accounts for the fragmentation and brevity you speak of. I wanted these poems to be felt, but I also wanted them to be fleeting enough to resist my urge to corrupt them with a desire for answers. Here, I was also trying to be simultaneously specific to my brother as well as universal. He often said that “addiction didn’t make him special, even though it did.” His is one of many stories.

Sneha: I return to “Roll Call” ever so often, Susan. The final line “Go now. You are the river in need of a new name.” is astounding. For me, several of your poems as they are chronologized, almost close upon one another through resonances. The next poem “The Birds, They Too, Are Clean” embodies a deft tonality. The second stanza is particularly luscious: “9 times out of 10, it’s the sun that affects the job more / than rain. Here I am absorbing the blow of a new season,”. What was your process of bringing these poems together?

Susan: Thank you so much for noticing the interconnectedness between “Roll Call” and “The Birds, They Too, Are Clean,” which I intended. These two poems, along with “Afterglow,” are the final poems of the collection, and I wanted them to be inseparable, to comfort one another in their similarity and to feel as if they were holding hands, validating each other’s communicative reaches—to be reverberations. So much of the collection is me trying to bridge the distance between myself and my brother, by which I mean myself and the afterlife. I want so badly to believe that he persists, that he is somewhere, and that one day I will join him in that somewhere. But I have my doubts. As the book neared its end, in lieu of certainty, I opted to conclude with a semblance of attachment, nearness, touch—with linguistic and imagistic echoes. And it’s not me trying to resolve all the tension of the book or to be hopeful. I don’t really believe in hope. But I do believe this: language binds. Language is the bridge.

Sneha: What have you been currently working on? There are wonderful poems of yours I read often in literary publications—and I’m so glad to share space in some as well.

Susan: I always love seeing our poems together, Sneha!

I’m super excited about my next collection, More Flowers, which is forthcoming from Trio House Press in February 2026. These poems explore my own interiority and are very much in praise of the female imagination as well as my mother.

I am also at work on a series of poems in response to the journal entries my brother penned while serving 90 days in county jail during the summer of 2020 for addiction-related offenses. More specifically, my brother kept a daily journal with the intent that I would write an accompanying poem for each entry. Though the world told him otherwise, he believed his voice mattered, and we hoped to publish our work together. Given that he passed just eight days after being released, our project and his “text” have taken on new meaning. Part ekphrastic, part documentary poetics, part social justice project, and part collaboration, my intention for these poems is four-fold: 1) to participate in the larger movement of people working against the dehumanization of the carceral state; 2) to document and interrogate the experience of the pandemic in the prison/jail system; 3) to test the limits of poetry as a means for empathy and activism; and 4) to explore the love that exists between the addict and those who love him.

Sneha: Thank you for this illuminating conversation, Susan.

Susan: Thank you, Sneha. It is a joy to be in dialogue with you. Thank you especially for engaging so deeply with Dressing the Bear. You have taken such good care of my heart and my brother’s.

Susan L. Leary is the author of six poetry collections. Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, 2024) was selected by Kimberly Blaeser as the winner of the Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, North American Review, Crab Creek Review, Harpur Palate, South Dakota Review, and Verse Daily. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she taught Writing Studies for 15 years, and she has also taught at Nova Southeastern University and Indiana University. Currently, she lives in Indianapolis, IN and is on staff at Iron Oak Editions and The Arkansas International.