Eric Tran interviewed for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club

We found The Rumpus Poetry Book Club’s discussion with Eric Tran about activating the spiritual through poetry to be both thought-provoking and insightful. Eric Tran’s debut poetry collection The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer engages with comic books in a sacred way, and AHP is delighted to learn more about Eric’s process and when he started “approaching poetry as prayer.” The interview itself is casual and open, offering the opportunity for true insights to slip in. For one, Eric considers how the spiritual and poetry might serve to alleviate or deal with grief:

I think certainly it’s related to grief, like how loss pushes us both deeper into ourselves and also way beyond ourselves, corporeally and temporally.

I haven’t figured out if anything helps contain or deal with grief. I get the statement a lot that my book was a way to process and I’m not sure that’s the case. I’m not sure if anything helps with grief but time.

And even then I’m finding that grief doesn’t end, it just puts on different clothing—this is now grief in a fun spring floral, this is grief relaxed in sweatpants.

Check out the full conversation here.