INTERVIEW WITH MEREDITH NNOKA

Meredith Nnoka (they/she) is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. She is the author of Les Portes, winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, and the chapbooks I Could Never Be Your Woman (O, Miami, 2023) and A Hunger Called Music: A Verse History of Black Music (C&R Press, 2016). Nnoka holds a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, both in Africana studies. She teaches poetry in carceral facilities and has received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

M E N A C E: Congratulations on an absolutely phenomenal debut collection. It’s such a pleasure to read it and to talk to you about it today.

To me, the major theme of this collection is harm and how we can break free of its cycles. The very first poem opens with the assertion that harm is a “choice we made, sometimes daily,” and with the repetition of the cycle of harm in “cruelty and pettiness.” Later in this collection you write that “Harm without a container spreads like water,/touching every surface, rising waist deep.” As a prison abolitionist, you are especially familiar with the way that our society often tries to contain harm with incarceration, and how incarceration repeats the cycle of harm rather than contains it. Moving beyond this paradigm, how do we as individuals and as a society find a container for harm? 

MN: First, let me quote Mariame Kaba and point out that there is a difference between what is harmful and what is illegal. Laws are based on what’s illegal and what’s not, and as Kaba points out, not everything that’s illegal is harmful, and not everything that’s harmful is illegal. These are two different problems, and our criminal legal system is concerned first and foremost with questions of legality. Most harm is never prosecuted, which means that most harm we’re left to deal with on our own or in community. Even after writing this book, I’m still not convinced that containing harm is the best way to handle it when it occurs. The reason for this is that if we do not address, process, repair, and heal from harm when it happens, it becomes incredibly easy to get trapped in, as you put it, these cycles of violence in which someone harms someone else in the same or similar ways to what happened to them. For example, a significant percentage of people who harm children were themselves abused in their youth. Domestic abusers often grew up in homes with violence. Put simply, people learn these behaviors from somewhere, often as a response to conflict or emotional distress. These are the everyday realities we live with: that we and everyone we know has been subject to some form of harm at some point in their lives, and that there’s every chance that trauma will influence choices they make later in life. So, when we’re talking about a problem that every person has experienced to some degree or another, and when we’re talking about a problem that the legal system can’t fully encompass or address, all we’re left with is each other to help us get through it and truly heal. Prisons and jails cannot contain harm, and they do not do this essential healing work; only we can do that. 

M E N A C E: The horror of carceralism is invoked in the very first section of this collection in the “judge, jury, and arresting officer” of the parents’ “punishing anger.” It’s almost a cliché at this point, but the political is personal and the personal is political. How do you see carceralism playing out in personal relationships? 

MN: I think it’s really important to remember that at every level of society, police and prisons are posited as our only option when harm occurs. So, when someone hurts their intimate partner, the person who’s been hurt often believes that their options are either to involve the police or to involve no one. We can talk all day about the shortcomings of the limited interventions some of us have access to. Domestic violence shelters are not designed with queer and/or trans people in mind. The Violence Against Women Act overrelies on incarceration, which can expose families to a whole horrorshow of costly unintended consequences. As we know, any interaction with the police has the potential to become fatal, which means that for those who belong to groups that police and prisons seek to warehouse, calling the police can often lead to much greater harm than what initially occurred. In such cases, it becomes a choice between living with the harm that you’re already experiencing or potentially subjecting your family to a different form of violence. Beth Richie, in her book Arrested Justice, talks about how for Black women this incredibly painful choice of whether to involve police in instances of intimate partner violence can put people in a position of having to subject a Black man to the carceral state, which is an impossible choice. Moreover, every woman you talk to can tell you a story of someone who was arrested instead of her abuser even after she made the difficult decision to call the police. In instances that require intervention in intimate relationships, the most important thing that we as a society can do is create alternatives to calling the police that exist within communities and are readily available to those in need of assistance. Anti-violence organizers have been working for decades to build networks of support for women in these situations, but the need is so great that the lack of widely accessible resources often leads people in immediate crises back to relying on established channels for support, i.e., carceral intervention. And the cycle continues.

And again, where do queer and/or trans people fit into this? For generations, people in queer communities nationwide have been more accustomed to having the police called on them than calling the police for help, which makes the idea of invoking the carceral state as an anti-violence intervention feel completely infeasible and ridiculous as an option. Nearly all of the conversation around intimate partner violence focuses on dynamics between men and women, which significantly limits the options for people in same-sex relationships. For example, when a man’s male intimate partner harms him, how widely accessible are domestic violence shelters that are open to cisgender men? Additionally, there’s the persistent and pernicious myth that queer relationships don’t experience intimate partner violence, which means that even if we call the police, we’re often not believed or taken seriously. Our only alternative has been relying on each other, because we’ve historically been the only ones we can count on to intervene. And so, as long as we accept the lie that calling in law enforcement will solve our problems rather than create new ones, this carceral logic can and will find its way into personal relationships.

M E N A C E: You’ve made several striking choices in this collection. Two that I notice are the inclusion of many ekphrases—and in particular, several ekphrases responding to contemporary photographs and installations, which I don’t see a lot of—and giving two poems the same title, “Honeymoon Phase.” Can you tell us a little more about these choices? 

MN: Each section of the book has a series of five poems that use the same form. In the first section, there are five ekphrastic poems that shed light on the climate that produces harm against women through an examination of famous works of feminist art. In the second section, I make liberal use of the zuihitsu form, a form rooted in fragmentation and collage in order to replicate the experience of traumatic memory. Part of the use of fragmentation was inspired by this line in Hamlet when Gertrude describes Ophelia as being “incapable of her own distress” as a way of explaining her sharp decline after her father and brother died because of her boyfriend. Ophelia’s madness is expressed through tiny fragments of song, and that idea made me want to explore ways of representing traumatic memory on the page. Finally, the third section explores the sonnet form, which allowed me to represent brief windows into the thoughts I was having during the recovery process. A lot of people have noted the cyclical nature of the book as a way of representing entrapment, and I think the repeated use of certain forms was a big part of that. This is likewise true with the two Honeymoon Phase poems, which refer to a portion of the cycle of abuse when the couple is in love and everything feels solid before the next incident occurs. All of this is to say, I thought a lot about entrapment and what happens to the human mind once a person has been harmed, and I wanted the poems in the collection to reflect that.

M E N A C E: Speaking of entrapment—I was struck while reading this collection by the motif of rooms, windows, and doors, and by how their meaning changed throughout. Harkening back to my earlier question, I see the room in this collection as a sort of a trap, a container in which harm is (re)experienced (“‘This doesn’t leave this room’”, “I’ve occupied that room/in many houses since”). Meanwhile, the window or the door offers escape, as in one of my favorite lines I’ve read in anything ever, “with the right words I can turn the walls to windows and doors again”—but at the same time, violence is a “window he never wanted to open,” and a woman falls “from a window/with her husband in the room.” The window is an escape, but escape is sometimes violence and sometimes death. The door or window might lead, as in “People Always Ask Why She Stayed with Her Abuser,” to another room that’s just like the one you left. Did you write towards this motif consciously, or did it emerge organically? And was there anything you learned about this tension between escape and true deliverance in writing this collection that surprised you?  

 MN: I think the motif of windows/doors/walls came to me gradually but as a clear way of invoking carceral thinking as part of the discourse around domestic violence. In the world of the book, being locked in a domestic space with your abuser functions similarly to being locked in a prison cell: These are spaces in which you are subjected daily to threats, intimidation, violence, and violation, spaces that you are not expected to find your way out of. Doors/walls/windows become the mechanisms by which people are kept inside these cycles of harm. What I think the third section tries to get at is that a person may physically escape the proverbial room, but it takes much more for your mind to let go of that sense of containment and entrapment. And I think that surprised me the most about writing that section. I wanted so badly for it to have a neat ending in which I was fully healed and detoxed from fear, but real life is always more complicated, and instead I had to lean into the possibility that it was more powerful to end with hope for a better future rather than a clean resolution in my present.

M E N A C E: We are so excited to be able to publish two of your new poems, “Everyone I meet I meet again” and “[I can talk about the hospital].” In the latter, you return to rooms—but here, the locked room of a hospital. I am struck by your use of sonnet, a highly structured form, for both of these pieces. Do you feel like there is something about this form that evokes the experience of hospitalization? Can you speak a little more about how carceralism plays out in the hospital and in the way we as a society treat people who are dealing with mental illness? 

MN: This year I’ve been working on a series of sonnets about bipolar disorder, which I was diagnosed with at 18. As a refresher, different countries have different versions of a traditional sonnet, but Americans tend to adhere to the rules of 14 lines and a turn somewhere in the poem. I’ve found that this form has been really crucial to the work of representing the thought patterns of bipolar disorder on the page, both because the sonnet form allows for these short bursts of feeling, but also because they can often be mini-essays working toward a key idea, enabled by the turn. The limitations of the length have been forcing me to draw associations and make connections I would not have otherwise made, particularly when I find I have more to say about something that doesn’t fit neatly into one sonnet. So, I’ve been finding them helpful.

Regarding the site of the hospital specifically, I’m glad you brought up that psychiatric wards in hospitals are locked, because this is the number one way that they overlap with prisons, particularly when we consider that you can have anyone involuntarily hospitalized if they are not behaving in a way that you deem normative. There’s this phenomenon that happens when you go into a prison as someone who is not incarcerated where you get your allotted time with the folks you’ve come to see, and then you get to leave and they do not. This is what it’s like being visited in the hospital, where you can walk your visitor to the door, and then they keep going but you stay behind, and then the door clicks shut between you. Some other points of overlap: Your phone time and contact with the outside world is limited and supervised; your access to everyday household items is monitored and restricted; you do not have control over how or where you spend your day; you can be involuntarily sedated or medicated if you do not behave according to their standards; and, most importantly, you cannot leave until they decide it’s time for you to leave. 

I was hospitalized for a week in my early twenties because I was suicidal, and when I was there, there was this strange Catch-22 where we had the option of enjoying brief periods outdoors, but only if we didn’t try to leave before the hospital approved it. So, essentially, you could either petition for your freedom and never see the sun, or you could see the sun occasionally and stay at the hospital until you were deemed safe to leave. Either of these scenarios could potentially take months, not to mention the fact that psych hospitals are often used as so-called “detention alternatives” for people who demonstrate mental illness and have been convicted of a crime, in which case you could be there the rest of your life. How does someone become healthy again in a locked ward for weeks, months, years on end? The psych ward, like the prison, is not intended to make anyone better, only to warehouse and stabilize us. This is not the same thing as healing.

M E N A C E: Thank you for sharing that. 

In a few places in your collection Les Portes (“Words wither/feelings,” “What is said is murdered”) you seem to suggest that speaking or writing even the truth can be a kind of harm. I am also struck by the use of erasure in the latter (“The Words Beneath”), which seems to suggest additional words that cannot yet, or perhaps ever, be said. In “Abolition” you also return to the limitations of words: “What words can I use/before the one who wronged me/to express the life she cleaved/in two? What could she possibly say/in return?” As a poet, how do you navigate the limitations of language? And/or the difficult terrain between perpetuating harm and simply telling the truth of what happened? 

MN: There was a six-month period leading up to the end of my marriage in which I, ever so slowly, built up the courage to say words that were actually very simple. Couples break up every day of the year, and yet given the right context and opportunity, very simple words can completely shatter a life. I was afraid to say the words I needed to say because I did not know how much physical danger I would be in once I said them, but I also knew that speaking the truth of the situation would change my life in ways I couldn’t anticipate. The reality was that for most of my twenties, I did not have the language to be able to articulate what was happening to me under my own roof, and it kept me locked in a pattern of harm and intimidation because I could not verbalize my fear or profound discontent. It’s a cliché to say that words have power; what’s not a cliché is the idea that the absence of words can keep you behind a locked door for the rest of your life. On a more macro level, there are ways we can think about the criminal legal system in similar terms. Laws, trials, verdicts, and sentencing decisions are all examples of the power of words on a page or uttered aloud. Without the correct persuasive language to fight back, you can quite literally lose your life. What felt empowering about writing Les Portes was the exercise of putting words to events and feelings I had never been able to speak of. Living in an enforced silence for six years meant existing within an imposed poverty of language designed to keep me quiet so our day to day baseline could be maintained. Les Portes, as a result, is very loud.

M E N A C E: One of the major themes of issue 3 is adaptation and how that’s not always a good thing. How we are asked to adapt to terrible structures and circumstances, and how the human animal is very adaptive, but sometimes to its own detriment. This collection seems of a piece with that, because it traces the ways people adapt to harm by enacting it on others or accepting/internalizing it. But I strongly believe that this collection is also, as captured in the title, a window or a door to another way of being—resistance, nonviolence, true justice. Kind of an intense question, but do you have any thoughts on how to resist adaptation to the horrors but still survive? How can we keep les portes to a better world open in ourselves without exploding from the positive pressure? 

MN: We’re living in an era of daily atrocities, horrors, fears, and injustices. We’re assailed every day by news of massive violations of rights and mass roundups and murders of those who do not cleanly fit into narratives of nationhood. This is the reality we’re in, and it’s the reality we’re fully expecting that we’ll live with for potentially a long time. The truth is that if we do not adapt to the horrors, we’ll succumb to our despair. Adaptation is an important component of human survival. But adaptation is not the same thing as inaction or inertia, and this is a distinction I think is vital. Just because we’ve become used to a new phase of our lives in this current iteration of the world, it doesn’t mean we have to accept the status quo, or that it isn’t absolutely crucial for us to fight back and agitate against it. We can get used to something new while still pushing for something better. And there are always ways to push back.