By Leia Penina Wilson, a UNLV grad student working on her Ph.D. in poetry (that doesn’t suck): I look to the wild in poetry, however short or long a poem: I want there to be wilderness—animals, decay, struggle, feasting, fattening, too. I want the whole wreckage to lick me in the mouth—to transfer energy, movement (every word should move the poem forward, making an ongoing difference). The sort of reckless practical nature of vultures eating dead animals, sometimes killing them on their own, to eat (to not be eaten)—that’s how I know a poem is well-written. I want it all over me, survival. All real things are wild—something body happens. I’m drawn to those poems willing to explore that loss of control. The uncertainty of catastrophe—messy, threatening, tender—binds me. Nothing is so meaningful as when you lose your bearings. What is important to you when the apocalypse descends—the poems I love start there, at that eating. Your world is gone. Here is the new world. Here is the new logic—“it is the sound of goats talking the answer is quiet robber take what you will with vengeance” or “& i will never die so i will not repent/& yet when i killed my father i frightened/you.”

Leia Penina Wilson considers herself a Midwestern poet, having spent most of her life in Missouri. She’s also proudly Samoan, so food will sometimes work itself into her poems. She recently received her MFA from the University of Alabama. It’s her first year in Vegas. She’s working on her Ph.D. in poetry at UNLV. Her poems often gravitate to bodies, desire, sprawl, wild animals. She likes poems that are playful.

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