Interview by-Rachel Sahaidachny
Natalie Louise Tombasco is a poet from Staten Island, NY. She holds an MFA from Butler University and a doctoral degree in creative writing and gender studies from Florida State University. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tampa where she teaches first-year writing and serves as the Nonfiction Editor of Tampa Review. Recent work can be found in Best New Poets 2021 (selected by Kaveh Akbar), Verse Daily, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Tombasco is the winner of the Bertram and Ruth Davis Award for Outstanding Career as a Graduate Student and Copper Nickel’s Editors’ Prize. She was named a finalist for the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize, Levis Prize, Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes, The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Robert and Adele Schiff Awards, and the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize.
RS: Congratulations on Milk for Gall, winner of the 2023 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, published by Southern Indiana Review Press, and a finalist for a 2025 Midwest Book Award. What does it feel like to have your debut collection be so well-received? Did you have a vision for how the book would land—or has its reception surprised you?
NLT: Thank you so much, Rachel! I try to move through life with zero expectations, so I’m just thrilled to have people reading the collection and grateful to be considered alongside very talented finalists.
RS: As I was reading, so many of the poems struck me as visceral and meaty: like a room (or ferry) of crowded bodies coming to life with language that feels decadent—plush, lush, overwhelming in the best way. At times it’s flirtatious or flippant, then suddenly biting or brutal. What drove you to “push the line” this far into excess? How did you know when a poem had reached “enough”?
NLT: I would probably align myself with a maximalist approach for sure. My poetics is a product of being overly stimulated, overly caffeinated, abundant with distractions and bingeing everything like a good little American. It may be entangled with my interior design aesthetic. I’m so bored of the monochromatic color drenching of “Millennial gray—” an aesthetic that prioritizes limited personality and future resale value. If we think of suburban sprawl across the country, housing has been stripped of ornament and individuality. It’s so silly, but if you compare the differences of street lamps, park benches, or doorknobs from the Victorian era to now, you’ll see how ordinary things have shifted from craftsmanship and beauty to standardization and usefulness. What is the purpose of ornamentation? George Orwell’s “Why I Write” articulates the conflicting impulses between the “non-utilitarian” description and “political” agenda of writers and this is a balance I’m working on.
Being decadent is a way to rebel against my Apartment Complex Lord in ways I can’t physically (at risk of the deposit!). Every nail in the drywall to hang a baroque frame is a way to “leave a mark.” The poetic space, for me, is cluttered with tchotchkes—words that I picked up here or there. I tend to be a word hoarder, collecting bits from passing conversations or whatever I’m reading from JSTOR articles to cookbooks. There’s a lot of experimentation and play in my process by placing words side by side and thinking of how textures, sounds, or tones juxtapose in neat ways. I invite the mind to do its weird associative things without self-editing. I turn on my Marie Kondo brain much later to think of how to tidy the line or find an organizational principle, so I suppose that’s where minimalism comes in handy as I consider which language “sparks joy.” Some words or ideas will get tossed in the junk drawer for later. It’s not always obvious, as I become overly attached, but that’s when having a trustworthy group of poetry comrades to help sift through what’s working or not is helpful. Often, I find I’ve veered into a whole new poem, so I find ways to eject and start anew.
RS: In the poem “Dream Vision Descending into Dickinson” your use of the exaggerated quotation marks brought to mind Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, about which Notley has stated that one of her primary goals in writing said epic is to take the form away from men. In your poem, I also encounter echoes of Alice in Wonderland, but peppered with the language of Dickinson, and imagery of a descent into another realm, and an escape (also reminiscent of both AIW and TDoA). In fact, with its “descent” this “Dream Vision” poem seems to work a little differently than some of the others. How does this poem help signal the speaker’s passage through the realms of the book? And what does that descent add to the collection’s larger conversation around the feminist epic?
NLT: Ahh, yes, thanks for catching the ~intertextuality~! A collection that rocked my world in Alessandra Lynch’s long poem workshop was Notley’s The Descent of Alette—a revisionary myth of Dante’s Inferno, postmodernizing and gender/genre-bending the epic for a female quest. Something I have in the back of my mind is Theodore Roethke’s important question: “What to do with our ancestors?…the devouring mother, the furious papa.” Notley responds with the essay, “The Poetics of Disobedience,” where she describes her epic poem as “an immense act of rebellion against dominant social forces, against the fragmented forms of modern poetry, against the way a poem was supposed to look according to both past and contemporary practice.” Notley chooses to disobey Roethke’s “Great Masters” of the past. Alette’s dreamy descent deeper and deeper into the subway system to kill the “boyish, / lanky” Tyrant serves as a model for the Tyrant of Milk for Gall, who shapeshifts as ex-boyfriends, priests, Nabokov, etc.
In Notley’s text, Alette enters different portals (new subway cars, doors, tunnels, antechambers, archways) to a labyrinth of caverns: “‘a soft cave,’ ‘soft to the touch like flesh.'” Notley’s urban caves can be read as a confining image, much like Plath’s “grave cave,” or even a tomb. However, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have alternatively described the cave in Freudian terms as “a female space, a womb-shaped enclosure, a house of earth, secret and often sacred…The place of female power, the umbilicus mundi, one of the great antechambers of the mysteries of transformation.” I often play with this cave/womb symbolism and celebrate the disobedience of female poetics—a tradition that aims to, as Lynn Keller puts it, “destabilize the master narratives.” The collection seeks a rich female literary history as it wrestles with the lack of literary foremothers.
“Dream Vision Descending into Dickinson” couples Dickinson and Notley to submerge the reader within the insomniac chatter of Notley’s innovative quotation marks. I loved how they created a new rhythmic unit, similar to Dickinson’s em-dash. Both poets mutate traditional verse and grammatical rules. As Dante was lost in the dark woods in Canto I, Notley opens, “‘One day, I awoke’ ‘ & found myself on’ ‘a subway, endlessly.'” As if awakening from a dream, she doesn’t remember who or where she is.
Notley’s quotations emphasize poetic feet, slow the reader down, and represent the voices of a lost oral tradition. It creates a hesitant cadence as well as space to breathe. It reads like a weaving together of female voices—an underground female tradition—scattered and financially trapped in the subway by the Tyrant. Alette’s destiny isn’t marriage and mothering, but to lift this secret society and annihilate the oppressive, male-dominated art form. The Tyrant explains, “‘All inspiration’ ‘comes from here’… ‘All stories,’ ‘all drama,’ ‘all poetry.'” A central question of the Dickinson Dream Vision is: “Can you remother me?” Asking Dickinson to remother the hero speaks for the desire to nourish, take care, and heal the self with poetry. This Dickinsonian prelude acts as a mirror—an entry point of self-reflection and self-transformation.
RS: Poems such as “Peonies in Utero,” “Lolita Dissected,” “Collective Invention” circle around identity, but in a way that identity can be projected upon what a woman is, versus how she is seen. Like, be soft and beautiful, but underneath is blood and grit. And the speaker seems to identify more with the blood and grit and so is perhaps unperceived…or not fully perceived.
In particular several poems in the collection that are interacting with film and art seem haunted by the “male gaze” and how it has defined the female image/muse as perceived through works of art. How do you think identity gets shaped or misshaped in public perception—and how does your speaker resist or rewrite that?
NLT: I believe I intend to find beauty in the grotesque or to create an anti-muse much like Diane Seuss sought to do in Four-Legged Girl, a lush celebration of freakish femininity that rebels against the sublime form of the Apollonian. Instead, Seuss’s uncontainable muse veers toward the disordered Dionysian as she notes: “Some of us claw our way to the bottom, transcend downward. There at the hub / of the drain we swirl.” Milk for Gall explores these opposed and essentialist sensibilities of man as the well-wrought urn and woman as the chthonian swamp of abjection. Seuss’s influence circles back to my comments earlier on maximalism and descent. Throughout girlhood, you’re told not to be “too much” (i.e., loud, emotional, dramatic, unladylike), and I do think Seuss helped me wrestle with these questions of gender and poetic style. Back to process, I sometimes feel like my accumulation of language—engorging experiences and memories is like a hurricane intensifying over the warm waters. It definitely feels destructive at times—to myself, the little girl I was, or something else. There are several moments of monstrous femininity such as the “bestial babe” in “Lolita’s Dissection” and the hybrid girl/fish of “Collective Invention.” My muses are often girls gone feral—rejecting gender expectations and roles, unafraid of being raw or frayed.
Media and art have constructed the perception and perspective of “women” in this endless feedback loop. Historically, who has shaped those narratives? The director, the painter, the writer. Burned into my millennial brain is the scene from Titanic where Rose tells Jack to “draw [her] like one of [his] French girls.” Beyond the possessiveness of “[his] French girls,” her likeness will only be transformed and made permanent through Jack’s artistic viewpoint, that is, if she’s capable of staying still long enough to be captured by his gaze. One film that I think flips this dynamic is Portrait of a Lady on Fire by writer-director Céline Sciamma. In this historical love story, Sciamma isn’t concerned with pleasing the male eye, but rather, she celebrates artistic expression thriving in the domestic sphere. Sciamma’s portrait provides space for the muse to object, argue, and criticize the artist. It defines the “female gaze” and begs the questions, who is the creator—the artist or muse? What is a woman’s role in this dynamic? What does it mean to be a female director in a male-dominated space?
RS: While I was reading, it struck me that themes in the poems (Bees!, Swampland with Red Solo Cups) connect violence against women with violence against nature—bees, trash, swamps, landfills, extinction. What made you want to build that bridge between the female body/experience and earth?
NLT: If I could backtrack a little to the collection’s title, which is borrowed from Lady Macbeth’s famous line, “Take my milk for gall.” This line contains the idea of “exchange,” a concept essential to Gayle Rubin’s writing on “sex/gender systems” in capitalism and kinship economies, where marriage and childrearing are a means of solidifying solidarity between family units and their need to assert male dominance. A woman’s value is as “bridewealth,” “dowry,” and a “gift.” Marriage as a transaction is rampant in Western narratives (see Portrait of a Lady on Fire). Rubin tethers mobility (a daughter’s passage from father to husband) to the concepts of “traffic” and “exchange,” yet does so with irony, since this transference is ultimately what leaves her stuck, confined, and with limited options.
To answer your question in the most roundabout way possible, I was thinking about how womanhood holds a pricetag or even an expiration date. It can be devalued through age, divorce, infertility, etc. Monica Youn’s poetry collection Blackacre also serves as an influence alongside Rubin’s theory, as she wields judicial language for her purposes. Youn’s title is a law term, a hypothetical estate’s placeholder name that is used in will and inheritance contracts. An acre might have a color associated with a specific crop (i.e. Whiteacre grows potatoes). Youn’s Coloracre poems liken a woman’s body to property, landscape, and legacy.
This is where Milk for Gall hones in on the ecocritical exploration of the intersections between nature and femininity. The female body can be flourishing, bleak, fenced-off, rocky, and only suited for specific crops—transformable within a specific “set of arrangements.” We can only yield what’s been allotted to the body. For John Doe to pass property down to the next generation, Jane Doe must be fertile and loyal. The exchange of property depends upon her reproductive potential. The poem “Take My Milk” draws from Lady Macbeth’s replacement of motherly nourishment for a bitter “choleric disposition.” The speaker deliberates upon her own “barter[ing]” of “biological destiny.”
The connection between gender and the environment is something I think about a lot. I mean, it’s definitely gendered that we refer to nature as Mother Nature. A really interesting read on this topic is feminist Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her in which she uses this fragmented and lyrical prose style to collage timbering materials, scripture, and gynecology texts to interrogate the links between violence against nature and women. In the “Land” section, Griffin writes, “He breaks the wilderness. He clears the land of trees, brush, weed. The land is brought under his control; he had turned waste into a garden. Into her soil he places his plow. He labors. He plants….Yet, just as silently, she withholds from him….He is determined he will master her. He will make her produce at will.” The sexual aggression in the language is overt. However, you don’t need to go through all of Western literature and philosophy to find the comparison of women to property. I was watching Jersey Shore the other night and Ron said something to the effect (and I’m paraphrasing badly) that The Situation should give up trying to hook up with Sammi Sweetheart because Ron “already signed the contract to that deed.”
RS: “Nomenclature” in the Spindle Realm section seems defiant in its topsy-turvy play of language and meaning. To me, overall, there is something about this section trying to rewrite language, using alternate words to sense out and to evoke some kind of nostalgia and reason of its own verse…
…Extinction is what
Girl Scouts sell door to door for financial literacy
and badges. Rivers should be hand-rolled and smoked slow
after a long day :: Rivers are contemplative and offer sage advice.
Paradise is an antimicrobial used in the treatment
of open wounds :: Every time I scrape my knees, Momma
pours paradise on the cut and it burns real bad.
And, a phrase like “ferngreen girly girl” (from “The Girl with the Appetite of an Ogre”) feels like it’s both reclaiming and rewriting familiar labels.
There’s a sense that this section is trying to invent a new emotional syntax—using alternate words and imagery to evoke a nostalgia or logic all its own. Can you talk about what’s at stake for you in the language of Spindle Realm? Was there an intentional effort to un-name or re-name the world—and if so, what does that allow the speaker to access or reclaim?
NLT: Poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis celebrates the “secret language we talk. Undertones, overtones, nuances, abstractions, symbols” (5), and asks a key question: how can women deconstruct a language that was never theirs to begin with? I hoped to center the “secret language” of girlhood with references to the domestic, bubblegum pop stars, idioms, inside jokes, etc. If we think about stories like Adam in the Garden of Eden, man was tasked with classifying and assigning names to the natural world. Nature (woman) is a passive, yet chaotic, entity that Adam must bring order and meaning to. Built on these mythologies, biblical womanhood is defined around her secondary status and lack of “manhood.” However, some may argue that being created after Adam, Eve was perfected, refined. Adam was the first pancake of the batch (I’m joking!).
But I suppose my thinking behind “Nomenclature” was to, yes, play with semantics, proportion, juxtapositions, and redefine innocent language to possess more nefarious, and even, dystopian underpinnings. Part of the payoff for writing is if I can just make myself laugh: “Paradise is an antimicrobial used in the treatment / of open wounds.” Can you imagine a product like this? Capitalism would do this! This questioning or challenging of tradition, mythologies, and the status quo is something I aim to do throughout Milk for Gall, but especially in the opening poem “Drawbridge + Moat” when the speaker states, “My sex is a semicolon— / I will never / Properly know how to / Use it. Who doth make the rules?” Poetry is a good space to experiment and break those strict rules of not only grammar and form but also conventional ideas centered around identity. I think my future poems will lean further into that experimental nature and playfulness to see how far language can bend.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2006. Print.
Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. Counterpoint, 2016.
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Veritas, 2020.
Keller, Lynn. Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Print.
Roethke, Theodore. On Poetry and Craft. Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2001.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward An Anthropology Of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Print.