Readers Will Be Enrapt by the Siren Songs in Victoria Mbabazi's Powerful Debut Poetry Collection

With two notable and very promising chapbooks already published, Victoria Mbabazi's debut poetry collection has been eagerly anticipated. And now, with the publication of The Siren in the Twelfth House (Palimpsest Press), poetry readers can immerse themselves in this stunning work.

The poems in the collection are siren songs that reclaim love from pain, driven by the organizing principle of the astrological houses, which must all be destroyed and rebuilt over the course of the collection. Mbabazi draws the reader through this process in a profound and powerful way, delivering lines that thrum with anger and love in equal measure.

We're thrilled to share this Line and Lyric interview with the author today on Open Book, where they talk about the inspiration for the collection, and how this impressive debut came together.

Open Book:

Tell us about this collection and how it came to be. 

Victoria Mbabazi:

I first started writing this book as a chapbook collection. I wanted to write twelve house poems and then in a former iteration of another full length I wanted to write I had these zodiac poems and I said maybe zodiac poems and then I wanted to do sister sign poems and sketches and… I really wanted my book to have a very theatrical vibe by the end of it. At the start of it I was trying to mesh two consistent special interests (writing and astrology). It's essentially a series of anger poems and love poems told through astrological houses.

OB: 

Can you tell us a bit about how you chose your title? If it’s a title of one of the poems, how does that piece fit into the collection? If it’s not a poem title, how does it encapsulate the collection as a whole? 

VM:

The first poem I wrote for this book is also the title of the book. This poem works to introduce the speaker or subject of the poems and sketches in the book. At first this poem was called twelfth house target practice and then I thought a title like that would make more sense for the ninth house because it’s ruled by Sagittarius which is a centaur with an arrow. I called the poem The siren in the twelfth house because the twelfth house is ruled by pisces which is a fish and because I’m a pisces which makes me a merperson I suppose. They’re a little different from me though I’m not that violent. 

OB:

Was there any research involved in your writing process for these poems? 

VM:

I had a lot of different ideas for how far I wanted to go into this book when it came to astrological aspects. I considered for a brief period writing about degrees as I was learning about them at the time. At first, I spent a lot of time trying to pick which themes in each house in the zodiac worked with each way I wanted “the siren” in the book to destroy a house. My favourite one I came up with is the gingerbread house for the second house as it’s ruled by Taurus which is the house of value and taurus value expensive and comforting things. It was fun to turn things darker as well so because the fifth house is the house of pleasure one of its themes is gambling and risk which is why Game Night at the Fifth house is no fun at all. 

OB:

What's more important in your opinion: the way a poem opens or the way it ends? 

VM:

I think it’s unproductive to think one of these is less important than the other. I don’t care about a really great opener without a great ending. It is hard though I guess I can see how one may think that one is more important than the other because an opener may want to be a little unassuming for a very flamboyant close. I feel like I’m always thinking about both at the same time because I’m trying to figure out how to tell you something. I want you to listen to me and I want you to get what I mean. They are of equal importance but if you care about the ending the opener did it’s job and if you liked the opening and didn't care for the close the poem failed.

OB:

Was there a question or questions that you were exploring, consciously from the beginning or unconsciously and which becoming clear to you later, in this collection?  

VM:

In the one semester I did in grad school my classmate Jack made a comment about how I very easily like to say what Love is in a poem. I wanted to explore the different lies we tell ourselves about the definitions of love and how maybe that’s what’s self-destructive and not our tendency to love in the first place. Maybe my ideas are bad. It wasn’t until I’d completely written all the poems for the book that I realized that the question became how does the siren get over past heartbreaks to accept that they are projecting past feelings onto a new relationship. The last poem written for it was the collaboration and although that seems really obvious while reading I think it wasn’t obvious to me because that wasn’t the book’s original intention. Or even that poem’s original intent.  

OB:

For you, is form freedom or constraint in poetry? 

VM:

I am definitely a free verse poet and I think form makes me feel so lazy and for one of the poems in this book I had to learn how to do a form that was invented by the poet I wrote it with and I had written six different versions of this poem and Ryanne ended up helping me figure out how to get my lines to work because I was just such a mess at the time it felt like a constraint to try and get my nine stanza to read several different ways. Then when I saw the whole thing together I realized form is freedom because it’s a puzzle, it’s about patience and despite everything I’m still really proud of how that poem turned out. Thanks again Ryanne. 

OB:

What are you working on next? 

VM:

I am working on a hybrid novel or novel in verse or experimental novel whatever you want to call it about a series of cycles in toxic friendships I have experienced throughout my life.

______________________________________________

Victoria Mbabazi is a Pisces with an Aries Moon. Their first chapbook, chapbook, is available with Anstruther Press and their double chapbook, Flip, is available with Knife | Fork | Book. The Siren in the Twelfth House is their first full-length poetry collection. They live in Brooklyn, New York. To read more about Victoria, visit their website: https://victoriambabazi.ca/