Last fall, I had the pleasure of organizing a poetry reading with local poets on celebrating transformation, the unknown, and the changing of the seasons. It was then when I first experienced the work of Temperance Aghamohammadi. Earning her PhD at Northwestern University, Temperance is celebrating the release of her debut collection of poems, BATTALION SHAPED GIRL from Discount Guillotine. The collection is a profound meditation on being, and is as exciting and mysterious as its author.
Congratulations! How are you feeling about your debut collection release?
It’s quite exciting, even though it hasn’t fully sunk in yet! I feel like I’ve stepped through a portal to an elsewhere. I’ve been living with these poems for a few years, and they’ll soon exist as a complete codex. I’m interested in seeing how people engage with the collection, what they connect with, and how they encounter BATTALION SHAPED GIRL. It feels as though I’ve wrought a talisman that will pass through many different hands in many different ways.
I’d love to know more about your process. Could you tell me where BATTALION SHAPED GIRL started?
While the oldest part of the book dates back to 2019, I began writing the collection in earnest in the fall of 2022, starting with the five “Fetish” poems. Those poems grapple with various modes of fetishization and how those structures of power influence a life. The first starts with the lines “Into narrowing. Worry I went.” What are we when we step out in public? What happens when we are looked at? What is the syntax of everyday life? How do we record and reckon with public and private violences and magick?
As such, the book is interested in the utterance as a unit of speech; what stops speech, what begins it, and how the utterance affects both the material and spiritual worlds. From the microscopic scale of the period to the macroscopic scale of the book, each utterance summons its own life and physicality, like an incantation.
Of course, incantation can either cast a spell or break one, and anyone can cast the spell of language, which refracts back onto the speaker as they speak aloud or remain silent. We live in the gyre of language’s power, for better or for worse, and its syntax paves the pathways into (un)being. Each utterance forms a different shape to inhabit, whether self-conjured or conjured onto us, and I’m interested in how those shapes can be enacted on the page and in life.
How were you thinking about organizing the collection?
It came as received from the poems themselves. The five “Fetish” poems exist in the order in which they were originally written, and form the book’s spine. The fifth ends in media res, on the edge, beckoning toward the next. From there, each of the three sections comprises its own thematic unit; the first section focuses on alchemy, the second on mediation, and the third on devotion. It was crucial to me that the book was exact and intentional with its choreographies; there’s several serial poems, and each poem has its counterpoint in the book.
While there’s the linearity of those “Fetish” poems as a living record, much of the collection is non-linear, speaking back to itself. Echoing. Circling. Crossing. Temporality is a fickle thing. While one experiences an event, numerous dimensions occur: the emotional, psychic, physical, and so forth. One also relives the past, and even the future.
While all of these events occur simultaneously, they are not always mutually congruent. I’m interested in that slippage – what happens when you’re living through many times at once, and how do you live with that? BATTALION SHAPED GIRL involves itself with the lives before us, the lives after us, and the lives contemporary with us.
What was influencing you during your process?
Much of the driving force behind the book came from my undergraduate training in anthropology, initiating as a self-inquiry. By "self," I don’t mean myself, but rather the Self and selfhood. What we do every day, what we say every day, embodies the host of our histories and traditions. I wanted to investigate and refract the quotidian to inspect what lurks beneath.
Naturally, part of what also influenced me was my history, my traditions. Firstly, Persian poetry, which is with and in me. Forough Farrokhzad haunts the book and my writing life. Hafez, Sohrab Sepehri, and Simin Behbahani, too. Then, the lives of the saints–Winifred, Catherine, and Joan. My mother. Her mother. The cinema and drama. The act of performance, of making all language both image and song. If I don’t feel I can perform the poem, then it isn’t done yet.
Finally, another influence was my research on experimental poetics and sound studies. I am considering the ways in which sound—the thing that encompasses more than just audio—is perceived and conveyed through vibrations and reverberations within a text. Sonic exploration and that incantatory nature of the work were a threshold into my academic interests. In this way, my creative and critical work are enmeshed and entwined with one another, informing each other in many ways.
Could you tell me more about the title of the collection and the title poem?
The collection has always been BATTALION SHAPED GIRL. It existed with a few other titles, but I always went back. It is an incantation, a chant, a prayer, a shape, an utterance that is as vast and polyphonic as it suggests, and, at the same time, also one figure, one person. A single multiplicity. A numerous individual.
Are you working on anything else right now?
Another book, and the one after that. Thinking through my research. Planning and dreaming up performances on winter, fire, and movement. Reckoning with death and grief, the epic and elegy.
Do you have any events to promote? A book tour or launch party?
Yes, and I’m thrilled to be able to perform work from and surrounding the project; it’s such a blessing. My Chicago launch is on September 24. I have a couple more events in Chicago, one of which will be at the PO Box Collective in October, and another with the Poetry Foundation in November. My friend, Duncan Richards, has an exhibit opening at the Bushwick Gallery and has invited me to read as part of the programming on September 20th. My New York Launch is on September 21st. I have a tour planned for both coasts and the Midwest; all the details can be found on my website.
BATTALION SHAPED GIRL is available through bookstores and the Discount Guillotine website.
