Glamour, Darkness, and Playfulness
The inspirations, organizing principles, and publishing journey behind poet Karen Rigby's new collection, Fabulosa
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Karen Rigby about her second collection, Fabulosa. She shared thoughts on the blurred lines between film and poetry, how certain obsessions (including film and figure skating) led to the poems and the book, plus:
How a single poem became the blueprint for the rest of the book, with phrases from it used as section titles
How she balanced glamour, darkness, and playfulness in the poems
The importance of getting input from experienced poets and following one's curiosity in the process
Born in the Republic of Panama in 1979, Karen Rigby now lives and writes in Arizona. Her latest poetry book, Fabulosa, is out from JackLeg Press in June 2024. Her debut poetry book, Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012), was selected by Paul Hoover for a 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Karen’s work has been honored by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. She is a 2023 recipient of an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her poetry is published in journals such as The London Magazine, Poetry Northwest, The Oxonian Review, and Australian Book Review.
Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read an excerpt from the interview. To hear Karen read poems from Fabulosa, check out the video (I highly recommend it).
Glamour, Darkness, and Playfulness in Fabulosa
[Interview lightly edited for clarity.]
Radha Marcum: I’d love to start with a question about this book's obsession with film. The poems in Fabulosa borrow quite a bit from film. And in a sense, I can see how poetry is a bit like film: It's a series of images sequenced to affect the audience. What is it about film that captivates you?
Karen Rigby: To give you some background, a long time ago, I watched Sunset Boulevard, where Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond. I actually mentioned Gloria once in the book, and while it’s a subtle connection, I’ve always been drawn to the idea of performance. The film is a satire with an eerie, moody villainy, but at the same time, it’s over the top and fun. When I approached this book, I kept that mood in mind—a mix of glamour, a touch of darkness around the edges, but also playful and self-aware. I wanted it to reach the audience without being entirely serious, maintaining a balance between darkness and light.
As you mentioned, poetry uses a lot of imagery, which I also incorporate in my work. I see the connection between film and poetry as more fluid, with no hard boundary, and I've been exploring that overlap in some of my recent work.
Radha: I love hearing about where a work gets started, and it's often not clear to us as poets until we put together a collection, right? While we're in the thick of it, sometimes we're not aware that poems are generating from an origin point. Would you mind sharing a little bit about the process of developing the poems for this book? Where did they start?
Karen: My first book was mainly a revision of my MFA thesis. In a way, those poems were written in a very specific workshop context, even though the book wasn’t published until years after I had graduated. It carried that intensity—time-wise and in terms of urgency—and also a focus on learning how to craft a book, something I had never done before. I read a lot of other poetry collections as I tried to find my own footing.
The second book came much later. By that point, I was married with two kids and no longer in graduate school. A lot of time had passed, and I had to confront a certain silence and become comfortable with the idea of maybe not writing at all for years. So, the process of developing this book after that long silence was much more deliberate. I wasn’t working with a set of drafts from a thesis. I was starting from scratch. How do you begin from what feels like nothing?
I began an exchange with another poet, where we trade early drafts, almost weekly, without critique—just spontaneous work. There’s no feedback, but the sense that someone is waiting for you helps get the writing process going. In the course of this, I wrote a poem called “Why My Poems Arrived Wearing Black Gloves,” and that poem became the blueprint for the rest of the book. From there, I took several phrases from that poem and used them as section titles for the book—there are three in total. I kept returning to that poem to capture the same mood and carry similar themes across the work.
For example, the poem mentions gloves, so I deliberately searched for paintings with gloves in them to start filling out the rest of the book. I looked for small connections like that. The poem has a line about plot—"there’s never a plot unless one of us / goes missing,” and later in the book, there’s a poem called “On the Failure of Plot.” In that sense, I was continuously teasing out as much as I could from that first poem to make the rest of the book come together.
Radha: The book has three sections that are titled. The first is "Noir and Glitz," the second is "Wolf Behind the Saint,” and the final section is "The Director's Cut." How did discover those section titles and organize the book in this way?
Karen: When I went back to that opening poem, three phrases jumped out at me as possibilities because a lot of my work plays with darkness and light. I naturally gravitated towards that noir and glitz aesthetic for the first section of the book, which gave me direction in thinking about what else might fit under that theme. This led me to write certain poems about fashion, like “Dior’s Bar Suit” or an Oscar dress, and it also made me think about certain crime dramas I was watching at the time. It was a very deliberate process of writing poems to suit the book’s themes, rather than choosing existing poems to fit.
The second, “Wolf Behind the Saint,” gave me permission to explore more autobiographical material, including darker themes like teenage depression and adolescence. By the time I reached the third section, “The Director's Cut,” I was starting to feel the pressure. It was during the pandemic, and I had the sense that the book was taking shape and the finish line was near, but I wasn’t sure how to get there. So, in that section, I loosened up and allowed it to be more like the outtakes you’d see in a director’s cut. That’s where poems about parenthood or mother-daughter relationships—things that didn’t fit neatly with the rest—found a place, as they were still part of me.
Radha: How did you go about finding a publisher for your first book, and was it different for book two?
Karen: Because my first book came out of an MFA context, at the time, I wasn’t fully aware of all the possibilities that existed—and that was also a dozen years ago. Back then, there was a common mindset that if you had a first book, you’d submit it to a first book contest, which is the route I took. I sent it to university presses, it went around and around, and eventually, it won a contest.
The second time around, nearly a decade later, there seemed to be many more avenues for publishing. I started by submitting to some contests at universities, and it was a semi-finalist and finalist, but it kept going in circles. Eventually, I decided to go out on a limb and try an indie press, JackLeg Press. They ask you to submit a small query, and if they’re interested, they request the full manuscript. The poetry editor there had read some of my work previously for a literary journal, so I thought, “Okay, maybe this could be something that interests her.” Fortunately, it did, and I ended up withdrawing from other places I was still waiting to hear from.
All in all, it took about 14 months—between sending the work out and having it accepted—from start to finish. What’s been so wonderful about this experience is that it’s freeing to realize there isn’t just one route. You don’t have to go through contests or university presses. You can find a smaller, dedicated press and still get everything you want in terms of support, visibility, and design. It can work out just as well.
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View this and other interviews on the Poet to Poet YouTube channel.
Learn more about Karen’s work at www.karenrigby.com.
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