While working on a project a few years ago, the poet Leah Silvieus searched for an anthology that highlighted the intersection of Asian American poetry, faith, and religious traditions. None existed.
So in the late summer of 2016, over a phone call that spanned two coasts — as Silvieus stood outside a coffee shop in the rain in Brooklyn — she and her friend, mentor, and fellow poet Lee Herrick in Fresno, California hatched an idea to co-edit such an anthology. The result: The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit, published in 2020 by Orison Books.
Bradley Samore asked about their experiences editing this anthology and how the journey has impacted each of them.
Bradley Samore: The book’s introduction mentions that M. Evelina Galang suggested this collaboration between the two of you. What did that conversation look like?
Leah Silvieus: Lee and I had met some years ago, and so I knew Lee. He was on my thesis committee when I did my MFA in poetry at the University of Miami in 2010-2012. In 2016, I was talking to Evelina, then the director of the creative writing program, about the beginning stages of this project. I asked if she knew of anybody that might be a good co-editor, and she suggested Lee. The minute she said that, I was like, “Of course! That’s the perfect person!” It wasn’t super dramatic, but it also seemed very destined at the same time.
Lee Herrick: I think it might have been destined. Leah and I met in 2008, in Seoul, South Korea. I also served on Leah’s thesis committee, and Evelina is an amazing fiction writer and literary community voice. The anthology was Leah’s vision. She called me. I was teaching at Sierra Nevada University, and we talked on the phone. I remember loving the idea, loving the idea of working with Leah, and asking for a few weeks to think about it. The fact that we discovered we are related is also what makes it feel destined.
Silvieus: Evelina’s good at putting people together. I think that’s one of her greatest gifts. Sometimes it seems like she holds a lot of the Asian American literary community in her head like spinning galaxies, and she’s able to make connections. I know this is not the only connection she has made.
Samore: Leah, I read that you grew up in Baptist and Pentecostal churches in rural Montana. Did that or any other experiences related to religion and faith play a role in your approach or desire to venture into this project?
Silvieus: The best way I can articulate my relationship to religion is that I’ve always felt haunted by God. I grew up in a very religious family. I went to a Presbyterian college, and then have been in and out of churches, and now I’m at Yale Divinity School.
Even though I don’t feel like I necessarily have a purchase on what religion or faith means to me, it’s always been a present part of my life. For me, this project was just a way to dig deeper into the questions I had — and just this burning urgency to see how other people related to spirituality and faith, particularly within the Asian American community, because I feel so much of a connection to them in other ways.
Samore: Lee, did you have any of your own early connections to religion and faith, going back to your childhood in the California’s Bay Area or in Modesto? And did any experiences related to religion and faith play a role in your approach to the project?
Herrick: Yes, but from a different experience. I wasn’t raised in a church or with religion. My parents took me to church a few times as a kid. My mom is an artist, and she believes in exploration and experimentation, so they took me to church as they might take me to try a sport or an instrument. I don’t know if it found me or if I found it, but religion was there when I needed it, probably in my late 20s when personal things in my life became very difficult. It was originally through literature. The poems of Li-Young Lee were one little portal into that world.
I really just created this makeshift personal relationship with God that has been very important to me. I hadn’t really talked about it a lot publicly. When Leah called me with the idea, it was very exciting. I see it being the anthology, but also my relationship with God as sort of like revelations — poetry is like that — where it’s continual and nonlinear, but fundamental to keeping roots to the world, if you will. It’s grounding for me and very calming. The anthology was a really wonderful way to explore that.
Samore: Leah, you said in a 2019 interview with the Adroit Journal that before and during the editing of the anthology you were “trying to figure out what faith meant” to you. Did you figure it out?
Silvieus: I think it’s an ongoing process. I like what Lee said about revelation, and I think that, for me, the way that I’ve learned to access faith or my relationship with God is primarily through poetry. It is this dynamic, ongoing process, and I think that that’s the way that faith has to live in me. I don’t necessarily think that what I think about God I will agree with in 20 years. But for me that’s exciting and feels so much more freeing to me. I’m learning more along the way.
Samore: Leah, you also mentioned in a 2019 interview with Sun Yung Shin for Hyphen Magazine that you learned much from the poets who contributed to The World I Leave You, that you got to see in their poems how they approached spirituality and faith. Could you elaborate on what it was that you learned?
Silvieus: I think, most broadly speaking, it was just the vast array of the ways that these poets dealt with religion, spirituality, sacred texts, and rituals. Some of the poets I knew very well. Our editor at Orison, Luke Hankins, also suggested poets I had never heard of before and was not familiar with their work. When we put out the call for submissions, we were overwhelmed with how many people were interested in the project.
Part of it for me was this discovery about how alive these conversations were, not only with people I knew but among people I didn’t know, and how many resonances across these conversations unfolded. As we were putting the poems together, I saw a kind of constellating-out and as these conversations came together over a wider, vaster landscape.
Samore: That’s beautiful. Lee, did you have any of your own spiritual learning insights in putting the book together?
Herrick: The anthology gave me some context for my own wide-ranging sense of faith and spirit. Part of that was in Leah’s original organizational structure. I think we had five or six sections, and they were really wonderful. There was prayer, ritual, the natural landscape, spirituality as political resistance, and a section on doubt. It was affirming to read all of these poets from different backgrounds and aesthetics and belief systems writing the way they were.
We wanted a range of cultures and belief systems. There were some that we solicited directly, and some appear in the anthology, and others just weren’t able to send something. But I’m proud of the book’s breadth. Asian American poetics has traditionally been seen through a pretty narrow lens. Some recent anthologies continue to widen that. We hope ours continues to widen it — a contribution to the discussion.
Samore: I learned a great deal in reading through the anthology. Poetry and spirituality are two of the most difficult words to define, and yet, after reading The World I Leave You, I feel more grounded in both poetry and spirituality. The anthology’s contributing poets offer a vast range of approaches. It seems that spirituality can take so many different shapes — the way a cloud can, too.
The cover is designed by one of the anthology’s contributing poets, Kenji C. Liu. It features a layered, cloud-like mass in mid-movement. It conveys to me both stillness and change — it seems amorphous. Did either of you have input as to the direction of the cover? What do you feel the cover adds to the book?
Herrick: We definitely had a hand in the cover, which I was grateful for. We looked at a couple different artists, and Leah and I talked about possibilities. We had seen Kenji’s work — I believe he did some other book covers; he's a very talented poet and artist — and our publisher was open to it. Kenji sent us about five mockups based on just some general thematic ideas that we thought would make for a good cover. I don’t think we wanted anything really concrete.
Silvieus: We had some ideas about color. Blue and green were the hues that came to both of our minds as evocative of the content. We wanted an attractive color cover but one that also foregrounded the work. For me this was always the cover from day one, which speaks to its longevity.
Samore: Were there any editors who had already walked the anthology-editing path, who gave you advice in the work to put together The World I Leave You?
Herrick: Yes. One is Brian Turner, whom I talked with about collaborative editorial projects. I met Brian when he returned to Fresno after the Iraq War, and it was Corrinne Clegg Hales, the former coordinator of the MFA program at Fresno State, who put me in touch with him. Brian has become a dear friend. The other person was the poet Christopher Buckley, who has edited many books. He was very helpful in terms of some of the technicalities like permissions.
Silvieus: Something else that was really helpful for me was looking at anthologies that I admired and trying to kind of reverse-engineer them — what made them work for me, what I found compelling, what I might have improved if it were my book. I know that Lee came to the table with experience reading a lot of other anthologies, too, so I think it was more of an ongoing organic project of gathering different inputs from people and from our own reading along the process.
Samore: Why did you select Orison Books, based in Asheville, North Carolina, as the publisher?
Silvieus: Part of it was logistical. Anthologies are huge projects for the editors and for publishers. There are publishers that we would’ve loved to have worked with, but they were not taking anthology projects. I had known Orison through the literary community, and they focus on work having to do with some dimension of spirituality. And I also knew they there were a small publisher, so I knew there was a chance that they would work with us and be receptive and hear what we wanted to bring to the table in terms of shaping the anthology, which was something I was looking for because it was a project that was so close to my heart. I really wanted it to be a very collaborative process.
Herrick: Leah knew Luke Hankins and knew the press more than I did, and she suggested them since Orison Books is “a literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad range of perspectives.” So, it was a perfect pairing in that sense. Once Leah recommended them, I did some homework and asked a couple people about the press. I wanted to see what the books looked like and how they would handle distribution. It was a great match and Luke is an outstanding editor, so it worked out very well.
Samore: I’m starting to see why this editing project took three years!
Herrick: There are really big markers along the journey. For example, creating the call for submissions, receiving the submissions, reading through them, communicating with the writers, the sections and arrangements, the introduction, the permissions, the galleys. It was a long haul but worth every single moment. I couldn’t be happier with it.
Samore: The World I Leave You features poets at various stages of their careers — some who are just starting out, others who are well-established such as Amy Uyematsu. Was this a conscious editing decision?
Herrick: That was a very conscious decision. Amy is one of the first Asian American poets I met. She had poems in Garrett Hongo’s 1993 anthology The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, which was formative for me. It’s a very important anthology. And so, Amy, Li-Young Lee, Vijay Seshadri, and Timothy Liu are all important voices in the anthology.
I taught at Kundiman in 2016 and taught fellows such as Jennifer S. Cheng, Duy Doan, Kenji C. Liu, Monica Sok, and several others who appear in the anthology. These are important voices. Leah and I are both adopted Koreans, and I wanted to be sure to have that represented as well, so there’s Sun Yung Shin, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, among others. And there’s a Hmong poet, Khaty Xiong, who published her first book in 2015. We wanted a range of that publishing experience.
Silvieus: Lee is further along in his career than I am as a poet. As somebody who had just started publishing when we started this project, I really wanted the chance for these voices to be able to speak to each other across generations and across different contexts. I really think that there’s so much to be learned by having these voices side by side.
Herrick: One of the most exciting parts of it was reading poems from poets I hadn’t heard of that we love as much as any other poem in the anthology, whether they had a book or not. We weren’t so much concerned with where they were in their careers as much as a love for the poems.
Silvieus: And how they spoke to the different themes we were working with.
Samore: Two of the poems I fell in love with were by Hyejung Kook who I had never read prior.
Silvieus: I can’t wait for her book when it comes out! She’s brilliant.
Samore: Even before you asked for submissions, were there poets or poems you wanted to include that immediately came to mind?
Herrick: For me, there were two poems by Li-Young Lee. One of them is the first poem in the anthology, “The City in Which I Love You,” the title poem from his second book. Another one was “Arise, Go Down,” from which the anthology’s title is taken. Aside from those specific poems, it was mostly poets. It was interesting to read someone like Brynn Saito. I mean, talk about somebody who’s writing about ancestry and the spirit in powerful ways. It was exciting to see a common thread in all the work.
Samore: I really enjoyed reading in this anthology so many poems by writers I had not previously come across. I underlined a bunch of writers’ names in the “contributor biographies” section at the back so that I remember to check out more of their work. Other than two poems first published in 1990, you exclusively chose poems that had first been published within the last twenty years, many of them having copyright dates from within the last four years. Why did you mostly select contemporary poems?
Silvieus: I sometimes wonder if we would have gone further into the past had we started this project now. But at the moment, when I was thinking about this project, I wanted to have a snapshot of the conversations that had been happening recently and what poets had been talking about in the last 20 or 30 years. This anthology could’ve been five-hundred, a thousand pages long. So, I asked: “How do you focus the anthology onto just a small segment of the conversation?”
Herrick: One of the most well-known anthologies in Asian American literature is Aiiieeeee! And then there was a follow-up called The Big Aiiieeeee! which was Chinese and Japanese fiction writers. But for the most part, Asian American literature is often talked about as really blossoming in the 70s. Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior doesn’t come out until, I believe, 1976. Our anthology, I suppose, could’ve been called “contemporary Asian American poets on faith and spirit.”
I agree with Leah. I saw it as picking up the conversation from, say, 30 to 40 years ago. There’s been such a wonderful growth in the Asian American poets that have published in that short time. As groundbreaking as The Open Boat was, I don’t think there was a Hmong writer in there; maybe there were some Cambodian writers; I don’t think there were any adopted poets. There’s such a new breadth and wealth of writers to draw from. We still feel our anthology is fairly comprehensive, though certainly not exhaustive.
Samore: It was exciting and inspiring to see the range across these poems! Was it a conscious decision to include poems with many different styles, tones, and forms?
Silvieus: Absolutely. I wanted to have stylistic diversity, but there was no need to go and search it out. Asian American poetry is very diverse. Therefore, our submissions call received a lot of diverse responses, which was invigorating to see.
Herrick: Yes. The word “anthology” comes from the Greek and means “an arrangement of flowers.” There needs to be a range in the arrangement. I’m thinking of one poet’s work in particular, Purvi Shah, whose aesthetic challenged us and made the anthology stronger. We loved the poems so much, but just from a logistics standpoint they presented some challenges. Duy Doan writes often very short, compact poems. Li-Young Lee can write sweeping poems. I’m glad that you that you noticed that range.
Samore: Lee, I read in a 2018 interview you did with The Normal School that Li-Young Lee has greatly influenced your writing. As you’ve mentioned, his “The City in Which I Love You,” one of the anthology’s two poems not from the last twenty years, is the opening poem in The World I Leave You. What was it about this poem for both of you that caused you to place it at the beginning?
Herrick: I arranged all the poems and Leah suggested ideas. I think of an anthology kind of like an album. The first song on most any record is placed as the first song for a reason. It sets a certain tone. I usually want a first poem in an anthology to be compelling for different reasons. And for me, “The City in Which I Love You” is that kind of poem. It’s also a pretty well-known poem, being the title poem of his book. He’s also a poet who many of the readers would identify by name. For all of those reasons, I thought it would be one of the best poems to open with.
On a similar note, I wanted to end it on a newer voice — Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s poem “One Day You'll Look in the Mirror and See Lions.” I think the last poem in this anthology is equally important. For different reasons, it’s equally compelling and powerful. Even within each section, I saw it as a microcosm of the larger anthology. So in the second section about locating the divine in the natural world, Brynn Saito’s poem, “How to Prepare the Mind for Lightning,” does the same kind of work. From section to section and then cumulatively, it was really a thrill to work on the arrangement. I hadn’t expected to enjoy it as much as I did.
Silvieus: The title of each section is also an excerpt of a poem from within the anthology, which served as a framing device through the different sections. Although we had themes that we were interested in, we didn’t want to predetermine, “This is what spirituality looks like,” for these poets. We were very mindful of looking at the poems and seeing the way that they kind of wanted to organize themselves as well.
Herrick: The work of arranging the poems into sections was made easier because of the thematic sections that Leah had created. It’s kind of like painting the house — it’s a lot easier if you take off the screws, you put down some tape, you put down the floor. The foundation for the anthology was laid out well by Leah.
Brynn Saito’s poem “Shadow and Release” — “Wanting to get clear on her God-thinking she went out into / that meadow again.” I read that and thought, “Oh, that’s got to be part of that section’s heading.”
Samore: Lee, in listening to recent interviews you’ve given, it’s evident that the shortness of life is very much at the forefront of your mind now that you’re a father. Would you say that your awareness of time and mortality affected your approach to this explicitly spiritual project?
Herrick: I’ve always felt a sense of the shortness of life. I think it’s been crystallized since I became a father, but I’ve always felt poetry — as a sense of revelations, or questions, or recurrence — is a way to hold on to things and to let go of things and to imagine things. I’ve always felt that. Poetry is the main vehicle where I think about that, so I don’t know that that affected my approach as much as it affected my interest in the project itself.
There’s the question: “What projects do I want to take on and spend this much time on in my short life?” There is a part of me that wants to take on everything that’s even mildly interesting, but I value my time. I value others’ time. It’s difficult for me to put into words how much this anthology means. On the one hand, it’s a book with a lot of wonderful poems on a very important theme. But I’m interested in poetry and books that go beyond something logistical. I’m interested in work that for me is meaningful.
Samore: Given that this is the first anthology either of you have edited, was the process any different than initially expected?
Herrick: This book came out right before the pandemic and Leah did go to AWP, where there was a launch. I didn’t go. I haven’t really had a chance to talk to Leah a lot. We talked on the phone a few times after it was published, but we haven’t really had a chance to publicly celebrate this book as we would like. We’re going to do it definitely when the smoke clears.
Silvieus: As Lee was saying, we were finishing this anthology when the world changed. For me personally, it’s been a sustaining force — just hearing people pick up the book and send me a note about how certain poems resonated with them. I don’t think that I would have expected that when we started on this journey.
Herrick: For me, there were periods during the editing of the book that were extremely time-consuming and difficult. I am so grateful to have done this book with Leah because it was a long haul.
Silvieus: I want to echo what Lee said about having a good co-editor. Knowing that we were mutually supportive of each other really galvanized my fortitude to keep going — you know, when your eyes are just aching from looking at all the tiny-printed text. Our common vision made it all worth it and consistently reminded me of what I was in it for.
Samore: Did any part of the anthology-editing process influence either of your own artistic directions?
Herrick: I think I’ve always written poems that were responding to faith and spirituality in some sense even if they aren't overtly about adoption or faith or spirit. I feel like this book allows me to write about other things since I thought about this for so long.
Silvieus: When I’m asked about influences for my own poetry, I usually don’t see the influences coming. It’s only after I published my book and it has been out in the world for years that I’m like, “Okay, so here’s how these themes are coming together. Here’s how these influences are shedding light on my current work.”
But that’s part of what I love about poetry — these discoveries after the thing is written, after it’s lived in the world. More of the effects this anthology will have are going to surface later, and I’m excited for that. I’m excited for the afterlifes that will continue to emerge after the book has been in the world for a while.
Samore: Thank you for this conversation. I reflect back to you the thanks you both give in the anthology’s introduction: “Thank you for your faith. Thank you for your spirit.”
Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, the Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright, and she serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen Magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere.
Lee Herrick is the author of three books of poems, Scar and Flower, Gardening Secrets of the Dead, and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor, with Leah Silvieus, of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). He served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. His poems appear widely in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks including The Bloomsbury Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Normal School, The Poetry Foundation, ZZYZYVA, Seeds from a Silent Tree: Writing by Korean Adoptees, Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California's Great Central Valley, 2nd edition, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, and HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama (Copper Canyon, March 2019), among others.
Bradley Samore studies poetry in the Master of Fine Arts program at California State University, Fresno. He works as a writing consultant for graduate students. Bradley’s writing has been published in the West Texas Literary Review, Cloudbank, and elsewhere. He won First Prize in Fresno State’s 2021 Art Song Festival Poetry Competition.
Lee Herrick author photo credit: Curtis Messer