Five Questions with Author Zoë Ryder White

We’re delighted to present our Five Questions author interview with Zoë Ryder White, whose forthcoming poetry collection The Visible Field publishes February 23. We’d love it if you would preorder the book today!

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How does the idea of place, something we love at River River Books, shape your collection?

Sometimes I think every poem begins with place—I find myself in a place or I put myself in a place, and the poem grows from there. Some of the poems in The Visible Field are about actual places—the Midwestern landscape of my childhood, certain rooms, campgrounds, blocks etc. I lived in Brooklyn for more than two decades, and I’d obsess about microcosms within that massive and multifaceted place—I love street work, for example. Deep holes in the roads with people inside. The huge chain links by the harbor, the birds and smells there. Some of the poems are from that time and those places. And when we moved out of the city in 2019 to the Hudson Valley, I was so nature-starved I felt I could not get enough looking, I’d go up the hill by our house and look around like it was my job. Maybe I still do that. I take breaks from work to go stare at the plants. I want to know the names of plants both to get to know the plants and because plants often have more than one name, which seems right—I’m particularly charmed by the playful language of plants’ common names—love in a puff! Touch me not, which of course begs to be touched. I think, as seems to be the case with most everything I write, like it or not, I seem to be interested in the relationship between place—the land, the captivating, comforting, sometimes terrifying world of things—growing things and made things—and bodies, which are places all on their own. The question of where am I in this world, in this shape. Where are we, how do we meet each other and miss each other and meet each other again? My husband reads a lot of books about physics and consciousness and the nature of reality, and we have a lot of spirited kitchen table conversations about the world as experienced vs. the world as it IS—and the likely vast distance between these things. I remain committed to mud, whether mud is real or not.

What is a poem that you see as a particular driving force in your collection, and why?

I think “Listen to yourself” is the most obvious choice, though I didn’t recognize it as such until later in the process of collecting and ordering the manuscript. That poem tries to describe how one’s own neurology can hold one captive, even when everything one needs and wants is near at hand. There’s something of that tension across the collection, I think. And there’s power in looking hard at/trying to name that tension, over and over. “I was missing my antlers” is a similar, less direct attempt.

What was a significant revision that occurred along the way?

These poems represent several years’ worth of poems written just for myself, outside of other more focused projects and collaborations. I started with such a fat stack! Probably almost 200 poems—so many abysmally awful ones—self-conscious, or obsessively repetitive without expressing the obsession’s heart. I had no idea how to assemble a collection from so many years’ worth of disparate poems. I printed them and laid them out all over the floor. I arranged them chronologically by when they were written, and then by what time period in my life they represent, and then I mixed them all up and dropped them off the stairs. I loved them all and then I hated them all. But gradually, the ones that belong here became clearer, and as I put more and more poems in the NO pile, what was left started to come into focus. The last big revision involved cutting about 15 poems from the first version originally sent to River River. Some started making me cringe—a note of falseness or performative-ness became plain to see. Some seemed to be part of something else, not this. It was a relief to find the core of that fat stack. Also, part of that last revision involved moving “I was missing my antlers” to the front. It was buried at the back of the manuscript for several earlier iterations. Seeing the other poems through the lens of that one—how to be a person, how to inhabit one’s power, how to connect—made the manuscript feel whole.

At what stage did your final title emerge—early, late? How did it help with your collection’s conception?

I can’t remember! I think maybe about halfway through I started calling it Visible Field. I liked that phrase, found in “Listen to yourself,” because there are so many different ways to think about it. River River suggested adding “The,” noting that one of the editors “has a thing for definite articles.” I loved that little revision—it dials the whole thing in.

What’s something you wish every reader could know about you as the writer of The Visible Field?

This, my first full-length collection, was contracted at age fifty, during maybe my busiest ever phase of work and family life. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Han wrote to ask if the manuscript was still available. Writing has become a necessity, and it’s almost always joyful—the drafting, at least. I love to write in collaboration, especially with my longtime writing partner, Nicole Callihan. I find it easier to shape a manuscript that way, in the midst of the push and pull of conversation. I did not find the process of collecting poems into The Visible Field manuscript to be joyful, at times—it was quite humbling and lonesome. Maybe that’s why I avoided it for so long. But the process teaches about the process, and maybe it won’t be another half-century before the next one. Anyway, making things, immersing oneself in other people’s made things, making things together—lucky me, to have this throughline in my life.

Zoë Ryder White (she/her) has had poems appearing in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her most recent chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. Her chapbook, HYPERSPACE, was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring, with Nicole Callihan. Another collaboration with Nicole, Elsewhere, won the Sixth Finch chapbook competition in 2019. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.

River River has seven books coming in February 2026!
Watch for preorders for all of them at our store!