INTERVIEW : Paolo Bicchieri by Lauren C. Johnson
Familial Animals /
Paolo Bicchieri /
Animal Heart Press
Interview by
Lauren C. Johnson
Paolo Bicchieri’s debut chapbook, Familial Animals from Animal Heart Press, juxtaposes the language of movement and roots. By transporting readers across landscapes, state lines, and borders, Bicchieri excavates his family’s history to better understand himself.
Perhaps most striking is the way in which Bicchieri surfaces—and returns to—the theme of displacement using imagery that’s both literal and metaphorical. In “a shadow dances,” the speaker truly is in motion, addressing the readers from a car winding through a mountain pass; In “i’m dreaming / the severing from the protean roots,” the speaker compares his roots to the birch’s, wishing they were kelp. Each poem is a swirl of dreamy yet deliberate language that evokes melancholy, longing, and hope.
Born in Ellensburg, Washington, Bicchieri has resided in San Francisco since 2018. In addition to crafting poetry and fabulist fiction, Bicchieri reports local news for the Sunset Beacon and Eater SF. He’s the former Volunteer Engagement Associate for 826 Valencia. These professional and life experiences, in addition to Bicchieri’s identity as a multi-ethnic, Latinx writer with family spanning Ireland, Italy, and Mexico, inform both language and narrative thread in Familial Animals.
There are so many different lenses a reader can apply to this poetry collection. I reached out to Bicchieri for an interview about the inspiration for Familial Animals and how he hopes this work will contribute to larger conversations about race and identity, sexuality, traditional expressions of masculinity, body image, and so much more. Here are the best parts from our conversation, paraphrased and edited lightly for brevity.
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Lauren C. Johnson: I’d love to dive in by discussing your writing process for this collection of poems. You have an extensive background in journalism as well as speculative fiction. Can you share why you chose poetry as the form to work with when you set out to write about the landscapes and people that populate Familial Animals?
Paolo Bicchieri: Throughout my life, I’ve gone from medium to medium to find the best way to express myself, which I know sounds kind of cheesy. The first poems and stories I wrote when I was younger were very much about me and my friends, or about people I was dating, or being sad or angry. But it’s been the people I’ve met in California, in the local poetry community, who have revealed just what poetry can do as a medium.
In 2019, I met my now-partner and some other folks who introduced me to writers I had never read before, like Ilya Kaminsky and Chinaka Hodge. I realized that the things I love about journalism and fiction—how you can write about topics like migration or anarchist politics—can be expressed through poetry. It’s beautiful, and it's dense, and it’s very effective. So, I realized this was a medium I could use to turn the lens on myself a little bit.
LCJ: So, when you were younger did you ever imagine you would end up with a poetry collection?
PB: Definitely not and I think part of me is experiencing impostor syndrome. Sometimes I can’t quite believe the book has been written and accepted for publication.
I only started putting this chapbook together during the pandemic; before that, I had a lot of poetry [but it wasn’t organized.] I didn't even know what a chapbook was.
LCJ: That’s a great segue for my next question. I read Familial Animals in chronological order, and I felt like I was on a journey with the speaker, literally, in terms of the various towns they describe, as well as figuratively. I noticed a linear movement—a kind of narrative thread running through these poems—as we follow the speaker from childhood “at some rodeo” into adulthood, in which they’re reflecting on childhood trauma, and how that informs their present relationships.
Could you speak to a narrative thread and what the order of these poems means to you?
PB: I've tried to be very cognizant about which stories are mine to tell and talk about. That’s a big thing I learned from Ruth Awad in her poetry workshop at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. In that spirit, working on Familial Animals was very much about me going through my life and trying to excavate the stuff I felt I could talk about.
I wrote some of these poems when I was like 19, and they sound and look different from the poems I wrote during the pandemic, which are more political. So, there is a narrative thread that touches on childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and becoming an adult who is reflecting on past experiences.
These poems are about having fucked up experiences and being honest about them, hopefully, and getting to a place where they're less impactful. So, there’s some amelioration with the self in that way. Toni Morrison’s most recent essay collection is called The Source of Self-Regard, and she talks about the process of recovering ourselves—I was riffing on those types of ideas in my writing process.
LCJ: Throughout this collection, you write about food in such evocative ways. For example, in “Red Over Red Means Captain’s Dead”:
Bodies drawn of salmon net
pork buns fries in oil gargled by chicken feet
red over red means captain’s dead
And in “Purge,” it’s clear that the speaker is experiencing bulimia. Can you walk readers through the decisions you made when writing about food?
PB: I think about food all the time, and I write about food all the time as a journalist. To the point about eating disorders, many of my journals are filled with what I ate on a particular day. A lot of people in my family have also experienced eating disorders, so this is something I’ve been talking about a lot with my family.
When I write about a family member, I might also be thinking about a particular kind of food. Take chicken feet, for example. Eating chicken feet specifically reminds me of one of my cousins—it was something we would eat when we were little kids, and still do. It’s a big part of our friendship and love for each other.
LCJ: I noticed that there’s both a strong sense of the place in all these poems—with settings spanning California, Mexico, even Ohio—as well as a sense of movement; the speaker is often in a car.
Similarly, I noticed the speaker references their Irish ancestry, as well as a Tio, and a Nonno. It’s no coincidence that the word “roots” is woven throughout poems, from “a fairy garden” to “i’m dreaming / the severing from the protean roots.”
These poems feel so rooted in place and ancestry, yet displacement is so present. Is the speaker searching for their roots? How do you see your poems speaking to a sense of place and displacement?
PB: When I think about this question, the poets that come to mind are Joy Harjo and Seamus Heaney. Harjo is a Native Muscogee American and speaks beautifully about place and nature, and with Heaney there's a similar vibe from his writing about Irish revolution. I recognize that a reader might pick up my book and think, ‘What the fuck is this person talking about? What is going on? Is this person Irish? He’s talking about six or seven different places or identities.’ As a white guy, and as a mixed guy, and as a Latinx guy—and however you want to break it down—one of the things I'm hoping somebody gets from my work is that I, and all of us, hold many, and complicated, identities.
I was just in Mexico, visiting my family in Cuernavaca, and this part of Mexico is really different from the typical narrative about Mexico. Mexico is an enormous country. In this book, there's this kind of white-guy-road-trip thing that happens where there’s reflection on all this stuff, and that really has been my experience. I’ve learned and reflected on how most of my family history is rooted in displacement.
So, I've been intentional in trying to figure out why I write and like certain stuff, and Joy Harjo and Seamus Heaney come to mind because I think they both write with clear intentions. They're representing their own existence, which, sadly or not sadly, is political, depending on who's seeing them and what spaces they are in. With all the privileges that are afforded to me, I rarely have to think and move like that. I am hoping to leverage my privilege in that way through this writing.
It’s also intentional that there are a lot of references to roots and plants in the book. I grew up in Ellensburg, Washington which is an agricultural town a couple of hours east of Seattle. My family even has a farm there. So much of this book was me trying to better understand my family and better understand my place in it.
LCJ: Man, there are some beautiful lines about love in these poems. I love your piece “he should be in jail!” in particular.
once i’m enveloped in the ray of your sun,
the turquoise of your fingers gripping my skin,
the plush of my back oozing between your tips
There’s a sense of physical fluidity in these very sexy, very lovely lines. Do you think your poems are speaking to the larger conversation about the subjects of sexuality or sexual fluidity?
PB: This goes right back to your last question. You can also look at this book through the lens of sexuality—in addition to a class or race lens or gender lens.
This weekend is the annual rodeo in my hometown. It’s when everyone comes out with the cowboy hats and gets fucked up, and it’s not a safe place for queer people. Growing up, I would say there were no or very few safe places for queer people in my hometown, myself included. I've often been in hetero-presenting relationships, but the people I've been romantic and sexual with haven’t always fit along heteronormative lines. So as an adult, writing has been a refuge and safe space to explore my experiences.
LCJ: How do you see the speaker reckoning with masculinity?
PB: That is definitely something I've sat with a lot. Growing up in Ellensburg, there were all the problems with masculinity you would imagine. You name them, they were pretty much there. The Sean Connery poem was born from a moment when I was trying to sit with this stuff, and not to sweep it away or evade it. My therapist tells me it's healthy for me to write these things out in poems, so there you go.
My dad shows up in about ten of my poems. I think anybody who has a dad has at some point examined these kinds of questions and asked, ‘Which aspects of our relationship are or were cool and special and which parts were informed by his own relationship with his dad?’
In my family, my Nonno was this huge grounding presence, here and internationally. We all loved our Nonno so much. He was this really charming guy with a big beard. It’s been interesting to look at these [traditional ideals of masculinity] because I notice them in myself, in my dad, and in my family, because it's not just dad stuff. It's the men that I'm friends with and the people I've had in my life that are also men.
Eating disorders are born out of those kinds of things—well, they're born out of a lot of things— but I think that for me, they were very much born out of this concept of what an adult man should look like. To go back to your question about fluidity, I’ve had to recognize that I can look like whatever I look like every day, and that's okay, rather than being really upset with myself if I had gained weight, or if I didn't work out that day, or if I didn't look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. It's just ridiculous, you know? I’m trying to do a better job of noticing those [behavior patterns] so I can move toward other forms of masculinity and toward vulnerability.
LCJ: How do you think your experience as a journalist in San Francisco, writing stories that are very neighborhood focused, informed the way you crafted these poems?
PB: Through either journalism or other writing, taking this hyper-local approach is a real positive thing for me. I wish it didn't sound so selfish, but this really is my way of trying to make peace with the world, with myself, with my family, and with my history.
A good day for me is spending time in the coffee shops between 4th and 9th Avenues, the places I've been going to since I moved into my neighborhood, like Yo Tambien Cantina, places where they know my name. I've written articles about those places because that’s what’s most honest for me. This isn’t about objective journalism, it's more about this being the stuff that makes up my life, and when I focus on it, it lets me live better too.
Of course, in the spirit of being political and trying to leverage privilege, I believe this is a remedy for lots of problems. If we shopped at our local bookstores, we could take down Amazon. If we concerned ourselves with local politics, we could maybe make a change on a larger scale. So, it is very much all the same thread that I'm pulling on, and it helps me be a better person.
Paolo Bicchieri is a writer living on the coast. His journalism has been featured in SF Weekly, Eater SF, Street Spirit, and more. His poetry can be found with Ghost City Press, Quiet Lightning, Bay Area Generations, and more. He is the co-founder of the Something Ordinary reading series. He hopes to find more clever ways to allocate resources to commodity producers and, as ever, attempt to derail global capital accumulation.
His new collection of poetry–Familial Animal–won the Animal Heart Press 2021 Poetry Chapbook Prize and is available for purchase now.
Lauren C. Johnson is a writer living in San Francisco.
