above/ground press author spotlight #1 : Amish Trivedi

Amish Trivedi is the author of three books, most recently FuturePanic (Co•Im•Press, 2021) and four chapbooks from above/ground: The Destructions (2015), What We Remembered Before the Fire (2018), The Universe is an Earth-Shaped Urn (2021) and The Breakers (Expanded) (2021). In February 2023, above/ground press produced Report from the Trivedi Society Vol. 1 No. 1 (2023). Trivedi’s poems are in Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and are forthcoming in The Georgia Review. He has an MFA from Brown, a PhD from Illinois States, and is an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. Amish Trivedi reads on April 10, 2025 in Oneonta, New York as part of the Visiting Writers Series at Hartwick College.

You’ve published four chapbooks with above/ground press. How do you see your work progressing between titles? Were these titles deliberately composed as chapbook-sized units, or part of larger, book-length manuscripts? How do you see your chapbooks in terms of your larger work?

Sadly I feel like the three questions are one answer! And also: I had to go look and see what they were called, so that’s not great. But I think each one is its own kind of...experiment, but they are also self-contained. I know other chapbooks where they end up as parts of books or whatever, but of course my books are all their own things as well, so the chapbooks are more like...smaller projects in that sense. I know for my first one (which I think was The Destructions?) I had this shape in mind and kept trying to remake them. I think that’s been the same for the three that you published as originals— that I wanted to stick with an idea but ultimately felt like they were too self-contained to be part of anything else. So they sort of live as tiny things I wanted to try vs the slightly less tiny things that became books. I don't know where the distinction is between what I want to consider book projects. You start writing and sometimes things fall apart quickly, but after 20 pages, so you've got something small that works. I also tend to think that what works for 20 pages won't work for...80 pages. I think The Breakers, which you republished kindly, probably led into other poems that became Sound/Chest but I think they also felt complete on their own. And Sound/Chest was its own project with the card catalog, so there's no way around that. If you asked me what What We Remembered... was themed around, I actually have no idea. I think I just felt like I was moving forward from those poems.

For some reason, I annoyingly think of books vs chapbooks in terms of music. You can do the odd little thing in the chapbook and then do the big odd thing in the book (even if they remain as unpublishable as the other). Again, I think I can sustain some ideas for longer periods but ultimately I think a book has to do a lot of things that a chapbook doesn’t. I’ve also never really attempted to publish chapbooks elsewhere since you’ve always been so generous, so maybe they are as problematic as the books— you’re just too weird to notice <3

I suppose, if one is honest, every project starts out like a book and gives up (or one gives up on) and decides they exist just fine as they are. Is FuturePanic five chapbooks that had a better chance to be read if I had sent them to you to mail out? Probably! But they hung together and worked as a book (for me— unsure about the dozen people that bought a copy). If not hung together, they surely would have hung separately.

The Breakers (Expanded) is actually the second edition of that chapbook. What was the process of the first edition, and what brought you to wanting to expand and reissue it?

Ah yes— so the first version of it was published by an online journal called Absent which was run by Elisa Gabbert in the late oughts. It was basically a PDF one could read along. But when the journal went under and everyone went whichever way, I kept thinking about the work. I think there were a lot of poems written around that time and it just made sense to me, after doing three chapbooks of new material with you, that perhaps this was a chance to look back at this old work and include some of the stray poems around it. Plus it was very nice to get the physical things vs something that was immediately gone from the internets. Now it’s just sitting in boxes in people’s attics and what-not instead.

The first one sort of...happened, honestly. I think I sent one of the other editors at Absent some poems for consideration and he said something about wanting all of them, so I sort of put them together and had in mind this space I had never been to, which was The Breakers in Newport RI. The funny story, of course, is that within the next year or so, I’d move to Providence RI and go visit The Breakers. Anyways— so we decided to run it as a digital chapbook, which was nice for me as a young poet with no real network. Now as an older poet with no real network, it made more sense to have something physical. There’s a copy of another thing you published on my department’s chairs desk—a chapbook you haven’t mentioned yet!

You mean the Report from the Trivedi Society, Vol. 1 No. 1 (2023), I presume.

I do— what a lovely gift from so many people! As a person who spends his life assuming the work he’s doing is meaningless and unseen, it was a lovely thing to come home to.

Forrest Gander really brought the funny.

How did such a publication affect how you look at your own work, if at all?

As you well know, I spend roughly 138% of my time bemoaning my lack of love from the poetry world and that’s not including how I feel about the world in general— which is a pit I’m slowly climbing out of in my forties at least. But to see not merely peers but the people I aspire to be like in the chap was really heartwarming. Nikki [Wallschlaeger] and Prageeta [Sharma] point this way forward for poets of color in a way that I’m not sure I could be in the poetry world without. GC [Waldrep]..Forrest...where to even begin with them? And François [Luong] of course my brother in arms— and guitar gear. So it helps to remember (and I am always in need of being reminded) that a lot of folks love me at least as much as I love them!

And for my writing this means that as much as I’m pretty sure I’m throwing meaningless work into an endless void, there are wonderful people always within arm’s reach...at least digitally.

With your handful of published chapbooks and books-to-date, do you still see chapbooks, or even full-length collections, in terms of containment?

It’s funny you mention that as I’m starting to mull on a new book manuscript (while of course sending out another one as I type) and I see it very much as continuing whatever I did with FuturePanic— the same or similar obsessions that went into that book. I also really liked the way that book looked and felt with its five sections etc, so I feel like I learned a lot of lessons there or at least found things I want to try improving upon. Of course the book manuscript in the middle is nothing like anything else— and yet has the best journal publications of my entire career. Go figure.

So maybe they aren’t so contained, or perhaps I’m finding my “core” writing themes (an idea I’m stealing from one of my favorite movies, Frank). I'm also starting to feel like I might as well do what I want and that books should look the way I want and not worry about what the biz end of po does with it. While that matters to me a great deal, trying to fit myself into whatever niche that would take me from farm league to big city ball hardly seems worth it anymore.