A Conversation with Natalie Louise Tombasco on Milk for Gall by Amie Whittemore
Amie Whittemore: Natalie, I love Milk for Gall so much. Rereading it to prepare for this conversation was such a delight. Your way with language and image makes me want to read every poem out loud to myself. There’s a lusciousness in the diction and syntax that just leaks and leaps off the page. I have a lot of questions percolating for you, but let’s start with the big picture: how did this book evolve? I’m particularly curious about how it found this final shape, composed into three realms: concrete, spindle, bulb.
Natalie Louise Tombasco: I’m a sucker for poems or prose that submerge us within a physical location. The settings within Milk for Gall range from real places such as Dyker Heights to imaginary ones like Fenneltown, frequently destabilizing the reader between those different planes and denying them a place to hang their hat. When thinking about the book’s structure, it’s my spin on a coming-of-age narrative so it tracks life stages from pre-birth to ghosthood. Upon situating the reader within a kingdom, I began considering territorial units, hierarchies, the nature of government. Each realm opened to a new dimension. But what if it’s a kingdom of the self in flux? A land where pink ribbons and switchblades coexist. This is why my Spotify Wrapped was dominated by Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo, because they embody the tension of femininity that’s post-bubblegum pop—the soundtrack of my girlhood. There’s a dark humor present in their songs necessary to function (cue “the horrors persist, but so do I” meme where a hamster in sunglasses drives off in a car).
This is why my Spotify Wrapped was dominated by Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo, because they embody the tension of femininity that’s post-bubblegum pop—the soundtrack of my girlhood.
Many of the poems were written after 2015 if that places the collection within any relevant political moment that’s all Nick Fuentes “your body, my choice” vibes. The kingdom was a space to regain control over who I was and who I’d become, not only as a woman but as a poet. The three realms are meant to progressively enact what Elaine Showalter outlines in A Literature of One’s Own of writers becoming first Feminine, then Feminist, and finally, Female. The “feminine” stage requires imitation and internalization of male tradition (an absorbency); the “feminist” stage is an act of protest and advocacy against tradition (a volcanic destruction or devouring impulse), lastly, the “female” stage of self-discovery of her body, erotic desires, and mother tongue that doesn’t translate itself for the male gaze.
AW: The way your realms build on Showalter’s stages segues nicely into my next question. Femininity/gender is one of the central themes in the poems, particularly in the first section, “Concrete Realm.” In the collection’s opening poem, “Drawbridge + Moat,” the speaker notes: “my sex is a semicolon– // I will never / Properly know how to / Use it.” In some ways, that seems to be one of the central questions the book explores: how does one “use” (or perform or interrogate or {insert verb}) gender? Furthermore, the poem begins with an epigraph from Marianne Moore and is dedicated to her poem “Black Earth.” Nods to various literary ancestors occur throughout the manuscript (more on this later), but perhaps now is a good time to ask how you see gender at play in your literary heritage; how does it factor in?
NLT: I’m interested in quest narratives like The Odyssey and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—traditionally male protagonists—so I wanted the speaker’s main question “What is my / True utterance?” to be the catalyst for the journey, one that is in direct opposition to epic poetry’s steadfast heroism in how her meandering search for the holy grail toys with action, but then decides against it due to the limiting circumstances of footwear. Mobility was an important aspect to explore—how can she maintain femininity (high heels) trudging through an obstacle course? She aims to consider how gender is constructed by looking toward visual art, mythology, literature, and film created by men and takes inventory that the women in these depictions are usually “the muse”—reclined, stagnant, silent—behind a gilded frame of some kind.
“Drawbridge + Moat” suggests an immediate contradiction of letting down the gates to the female fortress, while the moat provides defense for the “walled city” of the self. Invited in, the reader is exposed to her queenhood: a space of domestic comfort. The speaker’s introductory utterance is a “primordial sigh,” a feminine counterpart to Whitman’s “barbaric yawp,” which is inherently less abrasive, less boisterous, less bestial. A sigh connotes an aimless passivity, erotic desire, quietness in searching for a female poetics that traces back to Sappho’s fragments, unpreserved and unimportant to the Western canon. I was thinking a lot about Hélène Cixous’ literary dispossession: “I look for myself throughout the centuries and don’t see myself anywhere.” This lack of poetic foremothers was clear when creating my reading list for doctoral preliminary exams with the absence and devaluation of female art. I found that anxiety of authorship was apparent in Emily Dickinson, for example, becoming Nobody, or a “supposed self” that’s divided and perpetually shifting from wren to volcano, from loaded gun to daisy.
When moving into modernism, H.D., Loy, Stein, and Woolf were instructive in how to annihilate tradition, deconstruct language and harmful tropes, and thrive off female-centered subject matter that doesn’t contort itself for male readership. I quickly figured out in workshop that I wasn’t going to be a “pick me girl.” I didn’t care if the boys “got it.” I kind of imagined workshop like that gas station scene in Little Miss Sunshine—like you’re welcomed in the van, but it isn’t going to slow down to a stop. Marianne Moore came a little late in my poetic awakening, but I was immediately blown away by her being an unsentimental and precise observer who chopped and organized jagged lines into intricate syllabic patterns. With this tentacle-like grip, she pulls disparate bits of language from tourist guides, conversations, and articles to form a whole. (Imagine if Moore had the internet?) She finds connective tissue between disjunctive things by steamrolling them into an assemblage, so I began thinking of the female identity as a curation of external stimuli, doctrines, allusions, and influences.
AW: I love that idea of “curation” and identity so much. To dig into “Concrete Realm” a bit more: it deals with the “concrete” elements of living (as one would surmise)—the mischief of having a body, the comforts and complications of place and appetite. I’m particularly curious about your poems on gastronomy, which end this first section of the book. In “Lust-Drunk,” for instance, the speaker uses the occasion of eating a mango over a sink to riff on first dates and Seinfeld, while wondering why “violence = / masculine and nymphomania = feminine…all while at the grocery store, / carrying a single basket containing a single mango.” In other poems, such as “Viciousness in the Kitchen” food’s role in terms of gender is more explicitly discussed: “I must leave behind the domestic sphere, cauldron & dustpan, witchcraft & blackberry preserves in the cellar—all the feminine cultivation I’ve had as a measure of staying alive & creating.” Can you share more on how food and the feminine coexist in your work? Or perhaps how these themes emerged as central to the book?
NLT: Growing up in an Italian American household where everyone is very food motivated, we sit down for a meal and the conversation is centered around the next meal, instructions on how something was made, or remembering the family member who cooked a dish best. Initially, writing about food was a practice in sensory description and the mouthfeel of words. There’s the advice to “write what you know” and food writing felt familiar. Dorothy Chan has a wonderful essay on the intersection of food and poetry. I realized this was one of my poetic obsessions and discovered Marcel Proust’s “gastro-epiphany” (madeleines), Robert Hass’ blackberries, Erica Jong’s onions, Thomas Lux’s maraschino cherries. Food could transport one into memory. It could stand in for a lost love. It could signal identity, socioeconomic status, politics, ethnicity, sexuality, seasons, aging, family, etc. Thomas C. Foster likens sharing a meal as an act of communion; it offers the reader a seat at the table to learn about one’s experiences and cultures. He also notes that a meal scene can reveal tension between characters. The dinner scene in American Beauty exudes this idea when Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening navigate the stifling gender roles of suburban life as their daughter is a hostage audience member to their argument, situated in the center of a comically long table.
Food and femininity are most actualized in “Viciousness in the Kitchen.” Raised in my hometown of Staten Island, NY, within an Italian American and Catholic upbringing, traditional expectations dictate a woman’s place to be a good mother and homemaker and to possess preoccupation with PTA meetings and Sunday dinner lasagna. Of course, our economy demands a dual-income household so many women have to work, but the troublesome notion of “having it all” means the majority of unpaid, domestic labor falls upon women. Nourishing the family with food is one of those tasks and something I learned from my mother. The amount of time, care, love, and artfulness she put into every meal was something I wanted to honor in the collection.
AW: Wonderfully put. Now I’m hungry. Moving into “Spindle Realm,” the second section of the book, there are more poems that investigate childhood and child-having. When I see the word “spindle,” I think Sleeping Beauty—I think of fairy godmothers and absent mothers, of witches, evil stepmothers, and other misunderstood femme figures. For instance, in “Bubbly + Cake,” the speaker asks “What becomes of unmothered girls?” However, there’s a lot of compassion for this “absent-but-there” mother—or at least a strong sense of identification with this figure. In another poem in the section, “The Girl with the Appetite of an Ogre,” we meet a child who’s “chewed the Mother up / real good—her cartilage & sinew—gorged on / her freckles, your own blood.” I’m curious about how these poems (in particular or in the section in general) are in conversation with these tropes about motherhood?
NLT: Sylvia Plath’s final lines in “The Disquieting Muses” are important to me here as the speaker directs anger toward her mother’s negligence in preparing her for secondary status. Adrienne Rich’s angst was similar in questioning, “why our mothers did not teach us to be Amazons?” This “unmothering” and failure is a generational concern that demands women be well-versed in the hazards of being barefoot and pregnant: a vessel of selfless and unconditional love. I wanted to carry forth Plath’s and Rich’s disillusionment and skepticism toward old notions of chivalric romance and wifely duties to my kingdom. While there’s a shift today to be more transparent about the realities of motherhood, there’s still a level of perfection and self-sacrifice represented on social media, the mommy blogs, etc. that irks me. It’s peculiar when people express the regret a woman is bound to feel if she doesn’t fulfill her “biological destiny.” To me, that’s kind of silly. I made peace with the fact that I’ll never be an astronaut either. I aim to interrogate the many facets of feminine identities. The mother figure is amorphic, omnipresent, and entangled in her in conflicting impulses.
I wanted to carry forth Plath’s and Rich’s disillusionment and skepticism toward old notions of chivalric romance and wifely duties to my kingdom. While there’s a shift today to be more transparent about the realities of motherhood, there’s still a level of perfection and self-sacrifice represented on social media, the mommy blogs, etc. that irks me.
AW: The last poem in “Spindle Realm,” “Take My Milk,” provides us with the book’s title, which comes from a quote from Macbeth, one of Lady Macbeth’s lines to be exact. I love this title so much, particularly for how it so efficiently conveys the collection’s preoccupations with nurture, violence, and literary allusions. Can you share more about how you landed on this title?
NLT: I love intense and misunderstood female characters. Lady Macbeth’s complexity has given her quite a reputation and led to damaging stereotypes of ambitious women (i.e. Hillary Clinton). Lady Macbeth’s fierce battle cry (“Unsex me…Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall”) is where she renounces the maternal goodness associated with womanhood in order to exist within a male-dominated game of political power. The emasculation of this warrior-husband proves to be a persuasive rhetorical tool. The scene also echoes biblical stories: the sinister Eve leading Adam off the righteous path. Macbeth appears blameless for his destructive actions while his wife serves as a scapegoat. I’m interested in the subversion of obligatory sexualities, gender roles, and androgyny to claim the throne.
From a modern vantage point, “milk for gall” contains the idea of “exchange” that is essential to Gayle Rubin’s writing on “sex/gender systems” in capitalism and kinship economies where marriage and childrearing is a means of solidifying solidarity between family units and their need to assert male dominance. Woman’s value is as “bridewealth,” “dowry,” a “gift” to be transacted. Her mobility (passage from father to husband) is ironic since this transference is ultimately what leaves her stuck, confined, and with limited options. I wrote this poem while wedding planning (lol!), so I was hyperaware of how this age-old exchange is rebranded. Ultimately, I wanted to explore the experience of being a cis-woman in a hetero relationship who read gender theory while navigating the wedding industry and Pinterest boards. How does one balance romantic love, bodily autonomy, and professional ambition?
I care deeply about every individual poem’s title as they stand in as a first line or archway into another room of the house. I often start writing by coming up with a poem’s title, but no one prepares you for how difficult it is to select a title that encompasses the themes, aesthetics, and voices within a collection. As a reader and movie watcher, I love that moment when the title emerges in a line and everything snaps into perspective. It’s satisfactory. However, I wanted to deny that moment to the reader, so I conducted a botched surgery of Shakespeare’s words.
AW: I’m curious about the speaker(s) in these poems. Sometimes the “I” feels semi-autobiographical, other times it feels like a limber instrument, flensed of biography and deeply committed to the lyrical impulse. At other times the “I” gets subsumed into a “we” such as in the closing poem, “Lolita Licking Wounds,” where the speakers note: “If our moods feel like storm surge pounding a seawall, // we will bisect from girlness, girlmess.” Can you share more about how you conceptualized the speaker(s) for these poems? Or, alternatively, how do you balance drawing from invention and experience in your work?
NLT: Maybe this comes from my discomfort about how the speaker is assumed to be the poet. In my first workshop with Cate Marvin, we were given pseudonyms—mine was Tricia Tate—which I found liberating. No one in class knew my identity and I could write anything. The voices I gravitated toward were a little twisted and appeared unrecognizable from the quiet girl in the corner. Fiction writers are granted a level of plausible deniability, so why not poets? I intend to use a slippery self that keeps the reader at arm’s length, one that is Janus-faced in possessing an outward, voyeuristic gaze at the world while offering a small glimpse into the personal. Studying the confessional mode, I loved the religious and legal underpinnings—the sharing of secret transgressions causing guilt and shame toward conscience-clearing catharsis. However, I learned that poets like Plath and Sexton were also very theatrical, avoiding a self-indulgent gush-fest (gross!). The various masks within the collection such as Barbie, Lolita, Evil Stepmother, Bertha Mason, etc., use the tradition of the dramatic monologue to escape, conceal, or expose facets of the true self hidden beneath the surface. Akin to when Dickinson claims, “When I state myself, as the Representative of Verse—it does not mean me—but a supposed person,” the “lyric I” shapeshifts to achieve a disjunctive female subjectivity composed of my experiences, stories I’ve heard/witnessed, and pop culture.
AW: Yes to all of this. I feel like your response here goes back to the idea of “curation” and identity—the lyrical “I” is the canvas on which this collage is pasted and stitched. In the collection’s final section, “Bulb Realm,” complicated, often unsettling images of burial and rebirth proliferate. I was particularly drawn to “Parks!” and how it investigates the transformation of Freshkills Park from landfill to recreation area. The poem wonders if “a landfill could be sacred ground,” and ends with “despite the veneer of sod, I remember that true thing: the hideous stench that is our legacy.”
This poem made me think of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins and her examination of what survival, and possibly flourishing, might look like in late-stage capitalism, where, more often than not, toxic spaces become sacred in some way—either through some form of transformation, such as at Freshkills, or because they become untouchable, such as a superfund site. This also makes me think of the animals thriving in Chernobyl. There’s a question, here, somewhere, I promise, and I think it’s that I’m curious about how you approach ecological topics in your writing, which is (as already noted) rich in both literary and pop culture allusions. How does allusion fit into ecopoetics?
NLT: Thank you for this question. I’m not sure if I have anything super insightful to note on the current situation of the environment other than being distraught. California is being devastated by wildfires as I write this. Hurricane season, wildfire season. There’s always the uptick of concern, resources, and outrage from well-meaning people on social media (myself included) but politicians weather the storm with thoughts and prayers, our demanding work schedules resume, and we are distracted by the next catastrophe as the impacted community is uninsured, unhoused, collectively grieving, and the neighbor votes for the guy wanting to “Drill, baby, drill!” I tend to be cynical about this stuff but look to ecocriticism and ecopoetry for signs of hope. Tsing’s book was very influential with her concepts of entanglement, polyphony, and assemblage all being important to my poetics. She writes, “Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes. And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope—or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin.”
I started thinking about the “damaged landscape” from a local perspective and having to maintain a level of cognitive dissonance as I was jogging in a park that had radium found on the other side of the trail. Staten Islanders have growing concerns about the health effects of living in close proximity to a landfill where capitalist production and waste come as a final destination. It seems like ecological destruction is and will be at the front door of the working and poor classes who are disposable to wealthy elites.
In “Parks!” I wanted to explore Freshkills Park as a stratum, something that contains history, linguistic changes, loss, memory, and harm. A few of the poems in Milk for Gall consider the intersection of feminism and environmentalism, but “Parks!” might be most hopeful for the transformational symbol and intentions to begin anew.
The “hideous stench” is still there, of course, no matter how many liners the Parks Department places down. As a transplant Floridian, I’ve learned that kudzu does its own sort of covering-up. Some say its vines “smother” or “choke out” plant life, which is an interesting word choice, no? I think animals and plants will adapt but I’m not sure how Americans will fare. We panic if the local Starbucks is closed.
Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press). Her chapbook, Hesitation Waltz, is forthcoming from the Midwest Writing Center. She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University.