Possibility Out of Constraint: An Interview with Monica Rico – Michigan Quarterly Review
Blue background featuring cover of Monica Rico's poetry collection and photo of the author.

Possibility Out of Constraint: An Interview with Monica Rico

When friends and family gathered for the March 2024 launch of Monica Rico’s Pinion, we weren’t just celebrating the work, we were celebrating the person—the one standing before us in a bird-print dress, surrounded by flowers and a thousand paper cranes of her own making. At that point, Monica had been in cancer treatment for two years—nearly the entire length of time since Pinion, her debut collection exploring gender, domesticity, immigration, and the General Motors (GM) plant located in Saginaw, Michigan, had won the 2021 Levis Prize in Poetry. Monica and I
had spent our MFA years together and continued exchanging poems after graduation. I knew I’d love this book before I opened it, and I knew I loved this poet before she even had a book, but getting to see her hold the whole of its pages was profound: the book was here, and Monica would read it to us. Shortly after this joyous event, she and I got to talk about the work ethic that drives everything she does, why a writer’s family is never safe from observation, and the parallels between cooking and pantoums. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Monica Rico is Mexican American and the author of Pinion, winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry selected by Kaveh Akbar. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and is the Program Manager for the Bear River Writers’ Conference. She has published poems in The Atlantic, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Slowdown, Ecotone, The Nation, Gastronomica, and The Missouri Review. Follow her at www.monicaricopoet.com.

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Mariya Zilberman (MZ): Reading through your collection, I loved how many of the poems I remembered from our graduate school workshops. But there were also a number of poems that I hadn’t seen before, and others that I know we workshopped, but that didn’t make it into the book. How did you decide what you wanted to include? How you wanted to arc your collection?

Monica Rico (MR): It felt pretty intuitive to me. I’m not someone who gets super attached to poems. I’m the kind of person that will just toss a poem if it’s not working and not really think about it again. And then it is always a delightful surprise when you go back through your archives and you think, “oh, this one is actually not that bad.” That happened with one of the poems that I put in there at the very end, which was “Tomato and Lettuce.” But most of them, I just wanted everything in there to be as perfect and as good as I could make it and the poems that I
chose not to put in there were things that I just didn’t feel were fully developed or finished yet. I feel like I’m still writing poems that belong in Pinion, that hasn’t stopped at all. I’m still writing about the [Saginaw General Motors plant]. I’m still writing about my grandmother. I’m still writing about my dad. Those things don’t change.

MZ: Being able to release poems that aren’t working, and not forcing them in—that makes me think of what I would call your relentless work ethic. The million reasons that writers can give ourselves not to write—I don’t see you give those things power. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about that tenacity, and about the work ethic that led to this book.

MR: A lot of it comes from not being very successful as a writer when I graduated from [my first masters degree at City College of New York] as a 25-year-old, and realizing how difficult it was to get published. I got frustrated and I spent probably 10 years reading and didn’t really write very much. When I turned 30, I decided that I was either going to go into the profession of being in kitchens, or I was going to write. I said to myself, “This is the changing point of when I’m gonna decide what I want to do. It’s okay if I’m not a writer—maybe that will become helpful
some other way.” And I went to culinary school and started working really hard at that. Being in culinary school is about doing repetitive behavior. So you’re taught how to do something and it’s very much an assembly line and everybody has their own position, everybody does their own step. Once I got used to that and got into that train of thought, I realized that my body memorized those motions, and then I was allowed to think about whatever I wanted to. That’s how I started writing again, and that’s how I started writing every day. I would be on break from school, and Iwould just jot down poem ideas or things that I was doing. Then I got a job working at an olive
oil store and I had a lot of free time, so I started looking up how to write in form. I would practice writing villanelles, sestinas, pantoums. I would be like “all right, I’m gonna write about what this customer just said to me,” and I would practice and eventually stuff started coming and I kept at it. I’ve never been the kind of writer who needed a private space and absolute quiet. I’ve noticed the busier I am, the more I write. And I make time for it even if it’s 10 or 15 minutes in the morning. I still just do it and I always just do it.

MZ: Did your writing practice change when you started treatment?

MR: When I first started treatment, that was the one thing that was really being taken away from me—the amount of thought that I could actually have, because the chemo messes with your brain in a way that is hard to deal with, especially when you’ve worked so hard to curate this piece of you. I would look at it as an athlete: they have these beautiful bodies that are testaments to their will and I felt like I didn’t, I couldn’t, I had no control over my brain. But I found out I was still writing because six months [into chemo] I thought “I must have written just one poem in these six months,” and I went and looked at my computer and I had about 50 or 60 poems. I didn’t even remember writing them.

MZ: So you’re working even when you don’t remember that you’re working. I’m interested in how you’ve found creative fluidity in the structures of the kitchen and in the structures of formal poetry. Do those parallels feel true to you?

MR: Yeah, absolutely. I consider myself a person who is good at following directions. I don’t know when that happened in my life and I don’t know when I realized that was happening, but after I got out of culinary school, I realized that I could read a recipe, and not even try it, and I could know whether the recipe would work or not. So form to me is like following a recipe. If you can’t think of anything to cook, you can go into any of your cookbooks and find something and make this delicious meal. And sometimes, you have all of these ideas that you want to write
about, and it’s nice to give yourself some restrictions so then you’re forced to think about the poems in a completely different way. Now, whether or not the form works or whether you stick with it, it has put you in a different mode because you’ve had to follow all of these rules to get across what you initially wanted and often that takes you into places where you realize, “I didn’t even know that while I was looking at this bird I was thinking about my boyfriend from 15 years ago.”

MZ: Do you play a lot like that, trying poems in different forms? Is that part of your revision process?

MR: I don’t spend a ton of time revising. I spend a lot of time thinking about poems. I’ll spend weeks or months thinking about what I want to do with a poem or if I think it’s good or not. Then when I actually come down to type it, the poem usually comes out almost exactly like the final form, and there’s very little to do because I’ve put in so much behind the scenes work. Like I said though, I usually throw poems away or sometimes it’s one line I keep. There’s a poem in my book that I probably wrote when I was 30, at least part of it. It was this little, tiny, short poem,
that was maybe five lines long and it was about my grandma’s sister, because I found out that she slept with a gun under her pillow and at the time I thought, “this is the most exciting detail I’m ever gonna hear, I have to put this in something.” Then I wrote this five line poem and it wasn’t until 10 years later that I took that poem and expanded it into a longer poem. So that’s mostly what ends up happening to me: I’ll take a little piece of something and turn it into something else. That’s why I hang on to things so much.

MZ: As I was reading through your collection I was also thinking about images. I think something that’s so brilliant about your poems is your mind’s eye and that it can see from one image to another and to another in a way that is resonant but also delightfully strange. I would love to hear a little bit of what your mind’s eye feels like to you, or what your process is like of collecting images or interesting details—similar to what you just said about learning your
grandma’s sister slept with a gun under her pillow and having to write it down.

MR: Yeah, I kind of feel like I’ve been an anthropologist to my family. I was always writing down everyone’s behaviors, how they reacted to things and stuff like that. I guess most of it comes down to what I liked as a child. My favorite book when I was little was Alice in Wonderland and I remember very vividly thinking that all of those things were possible. Like it was possible to eat a cookie and become gigantic. It was possible to drink a potion and become tiny as the size of a mouse, and that kind of curiosity and that kind of belief in the supernatural or spiritual or the limitless possibility of your brain has just always deeply intrigued me. When I see things my first thought is what does that look like to me if I was describing this to someone else? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? What does it feel like? What does it make me feel like? How does my body respond to it?

MZ: I think there’s a joke in there somewhere—about it being a blessing and a curse when a writer is born into a family.

MR: Yeah, that’s the first subject you have any familiarity with. You want to understand why these people are the way that they are. And to understand that you have to understand everything about them, you have to understand how they were raised, what decisions they made, and how they made them, and how that affected them. To truly know somebody, you have to weigh all of those things.

MZ: And on top of those observations, I know archival research also went into this book, like going into the United Auto Workers archives, but also going to your family and asking for stories and for details. What does the research process do for you as a writer? And how do you navigate between what you know and what you don’t know?

MR: I always think of the Toni Morrison quote “Write the book that you want to read.” And I’ve always sought out books by Mexican American women, and I spent a good ten years reading as many Mexican American authors as I could, and there wasn’t a lot about Mexicans in the Midwest. There was a lot about California and Texas, but there was no voice that I felt like I 100% wholly related to. Even Sandra Cisneros—Chicago’s the Midwest, but it doesn’t feel like the Midwest because it’s just such a big city, and I didn’t relate to that as much either. So when I started graduate school [at University of Michigan] and started working on my thesis, I didn’t immediately set out thinking, “I’m gonna write only these poems about this one thing.” I kind of wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I’ve always wanted to write about my dad working at the plant because those were stories I constantly asked about and I loved when he came home from work—I wanted to know what did you do, what happened today, what was it like? I thought it was such a weird place to be. So then I asked, well, what’s out there in terms of people writing about work at GM? And the answer was there’s not very much. And then there isn’t specifically very much about Mexicans working at GM. So I thought “What does migration from Mexico to Michigan look like? How was that possible? How did Saginaw get so many Mexicans? How did they all decide to come here and not just stay in Texas or stay in California, which was close by and also used to be Mexico?” I wanted to know how that happened. So I read a lot of Mexican novels. I also started reading anthropology books that were the study of laborers from Mexico to Michigan. I found out that my grandfather probably worked in the silver mines in Mexico before he came to the United States, so he had that area of expertise already. At the same time, I was also reading heavily about great horned owls and other birds and I was thinking about how you survive, which was my question when I went into
writing this book: “How do you have all of these constraints and things working against you, but yet you still persevere and there’s still hope, and good things can happen? How does that happen?” I started to really see the parallels between animals struggling to survive and human beings struggling to survive. Humans are animals and I think humans like to forget that as much as possible, but you’re just like an animal, you do some other funny little things but ultimately, you’re an animal. I really liked that and I liked thinking about it that way. That got me into a
serious mode of writing about the plant and all of a sudden I realized I had no women in my book, and I had no me in the book either. What did I think about all of these things? What did I think about all of these men? So then I started to talk to my mom, and ask her questions like: What was it like at your first job when you first got married? Because when my parents got married, people got married young. My mom was 19 when she got married.

MZ: I love what you just said about the themes in your book and the worlds that exist in your book, because it’s clear that you weren’t writing about birds for the sake of their birdness. You were talking about birds for the ways in which they allowed deeper meaning into your family system and your family history. Did you have a taxonomy in mind of how birds and family members overlapped?

MR: Oh, absolutely. I have the birds of prey versus the songbirds, which have a totally different lifestyle. The cardinal is related to my mother. The robin is my grandmother. The great horned owls are all the men.

MZ: And you’re the American crow!

MR: Yep. (laughing) I mean, that might change, but I admire crows so deeply because they’re such a familial unit and they protect each other, and they live together.

MZ: I know you’re already working on your next book. Can you talk a little bit about how that is shaping up?

MR: It’s the first time I feel like I’ve ever really written love poems. When I was younger, I always wanted to write love poems, but I was never really in love with anybody—I was just obsessed with someone, but I wasn’t in love with anybody because I didn’t know them very well. So with this book, I started writing love poems and that felt very vulnerable. Because I feel like writing a love poem is like getting someone’s name tattooed on you, it’s just like you’re destined to break up at this point. And you don’t wanna write the love poem that’s like “No one will ever
love you as much as I do.” Well, there’s billions of people in this world! There’s someone who is going to love you as much as I do, if not more. So that felt like a very weird place to me because I’d never been there before. But I wanted to write them because I wanted Todd to know how much I love him. I was like “If this is the last thing that I can do, if this is the last thing that I can put on this earth, then I want everyone to know how much I love Todd and I want everyone to know how happy he’s made me.” And because my memory was going, and I wasn’t remembering
things as well as I wanted to, I wanted to write about everything that Todd and I had ever done together because if I could only have one memory, I want it to be of him.

MZ: How are things now with memory and writing, and how are you feeling in your writer’s brain?

MR: I feel like myself, but my writing’s changed. It looks different, but I feel like that’s okay. I feel like writers that I love the most always change. Diane Seuss is one who comes to mind. Each of her books are like their own little gift. If you look at her earlier work and compare it to her sonnets, there’s Seussian vibes throughout, but if you just look at them on the page, you wouldn’t immediately think these are both her works. And so I feel like it’s nice to have the freedom to try something different.

MZ: Building off of your thoughts about how a writer’s style shifts, I am curious who you might describe as the influences or the echoes in Pinion—the people who really fed your own writing and your creation of this book?

MR: I listened to a lot of music to make Pinion. [Writing-wise] it’s mostly stuff that influenced me when I was younger. I definitely feel like there’s lots of Lorca influence in there. Lots of Larry Levis, Jimmy Santiago Baca. Things that are those training wheels that you have on, those recipes that you go back to. Also Lolita Hernandez’s Autopsy of an Engine—without that book, there would be no Pinion.

MZ: What music was feeding you while you were writing?

MR: I was listening to a lot of Pedro Infante. I was listening to a lot of the Ballet Folklórico [de México], mariachi singers, mariachi groups, and just playing that shit on repeat, getting lost in the music and listening to all of this really old, old music, like Chavela Vargas is the greatest mariachi singer of all time and her voice is unbelievably haunting. She’s a singer I cannot listen to without crying. Her rendition of “Paloma Negra,” if it doesn’t bring you to tears, I feel like you have no soul. She’s just a bad ass.

MZ: Something else I wanted to talk about is honesty. And I want to talk about your honesty as a writer. I’ve heard you say that honesty for you is the only option. Like: “What else am I going to do but tell the truth?” But, I think it can be a hard thing, especially writing about family. How did you work through your ability to write the truth you saw?

MR: I would come back to a quote from Nicki Giovanni that I remember reading or hearing her say at a reading: “You can only speak for yourself.” You can’t speak for an entire group of people. You can only say your experience. So when I started to look at writing about my family and realized that I’m only writing about them from what I know and from my vantage point, that gave me freedom to say what I thought was happening and what I thought was going on to the best of my knowledge. I felt by writing those poems I was experiencing all those moments, like
when my dad used to tell me about racism that he went through. I always felt like I was living those experiences with him while he was telling me, like I was there, I felt connected to it and I just wanted to figure out a way to honor all of those things, so that other people could understand what it was like growing up in the 80s and how little stuff had changed. And I wrote a poem that I thought was so difficult to deal with. My uncle was murdered—this happened before I was born—and my dad had to go and identify the body. I can’t even imagine what that experience
must have been like for him, so I wrote a poem about it. And I remember being terrified of what was gonna happen once the poem was published. Like what was anyone gonna say? It turned out almost no one read it, but my dad read it, and he loved it. And I was like, all right, we’re good. That’s all I needed. That’s all I wanted. So every time I wrote a poem for Pinion, I sent it to my dad and I was like what do you think of this? And he liked all of them, so I just felt like I was given permission to keep doing it, so I kept doing it.

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