Poetry Interview by Autumn Konopka
A CONVERSATION WITH ANNE KAIER, AUTHOR OF HOW CAN I SAY IT WAS NOT ENOUGH?

Anne Kaier’s How Can I Say It Was Not Enough? is a breathtaking debut poetry collection, with poems that are masterfully crafted, emotionally stunning, and profoundly vulnerable, even shocking at times. The collection — which has been described as a memoir-in-verse — explores how the poet’s skin disorder, ichthyosis, has influenced her life and relationships, reflecting largely on one question: How does a woman with a disability see herself as a sexual being? 

But How Can I Say It Was Not Enough?, which won the 2025 Propel Poetry Award, is about so much more than sex or romance. Each of the book’s five sections focuses on a different sphere of connection — from doctors to family to lovers, even the natural world. In every space and relationship, Kaier reckons with what it means to exist in her body — a body at once delicate and determined, a body repeatedly misunderstood and underestimated, that both yearns to be seen and depends upon shadows. 

A Philadelphia-based poet and essayist, Anne Kaier holds advanced degrees from Oxford and Harvard and only began writing seriously at fifty. In the thirty years since, she’s published widely and taught creative writing throughout the Philadelphia area for many years. In our conversation, we discussed the differences between writing poetry and creative nonfiction, how she composed this debut collection, and what it means to stay loyal to your internal voice. 

Autumn Konopka: I’ve known you through the Philadelphia literary community for many years, and at Cleaver we pride ourselves on showcasing Philly writers within a broader national and international context. So, I like to ask local folks: Do you consider yourself a Philadelphia writer? And what do you think makes someone a Philly writer?

Anne Kaier: I do indeed have deep roots in Philadelphia. I was raised in the ‘burbs, and I’ve lived in Center City for 30 years. I love the rich literary scene here. In fact, I first started writing poetry in a class at UArts, run by Alexandra Grilikhes, a wonderful poet. I’ve read at Fergie’s Pub and launched my book at the Old Pine Community Center. So many diverse voices in Philly — performance poets, literary poets from all sorts of backgrounds. It’s a great place to be a writer.

Autumn: We met through the poetry circles, but you also have a really solid background in nonfiction, including essays published in The New York Times,The Kenyon Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review and an appearance on NPR’s Radio Times. Do you consider yourself more of one type of writer or another: more of a poet versus more of an essayist or memoirist, or something else?

Anne: I think a lot of poets and essayists and memoirists cross those lines.

Someone once asked me, “When you have some material, when do you write poetry, and when do you write prose?” And I said, “Well, I write poetry if I’m feeling irrational, and I write prose if I’m feeling more logical.”

I constantly struggle with the prosiness of some poems. I’m basically a storyteller. I’m an Irish storyteller from the way back, and that’s pretty much what I do much of the time. So sometimes that storytelling impulse gets into my poetry, and I am very aware of not making poems which are too narrative. I really try to make sure that the poems that I am writing have not only a narrative element, but also are held together with some kind of controlling metaphor and with a real sense of the rhythm of the lines. And I scan them; I print them out, and I scan every line. I’m very aware of assonance and alliteration and how those poetic tools work in a poem. 

On the other side of the coin, when I’m writing an essay, I’m also very aware of the rise and fall of sentences, of how poetic techniques like metaphor can work in an essay or a memoir. In memoir, there are recurring themes; there are recurring images. I have a memoir that is set in Oxford, England. When I was a very young woman, I was lucky enough to go there for two years. And it was the first time in my life that I had actually dated because my skin was— I was a funny looking person, and I was brought up to think that nobody would be interested in me romantically. And I believed that. But then I got to England, I was 3,000 miles away from home, and I did start to date. And various things happened—mostly the sorts of terribly awkward sexual encounters that you have when you’re 22 years old, and you’d really just as soon forget about. But throughout that book, there’s a recurring image of my hands, which are sort of rough, sliding along those very ancient stone walls. And that’s a poetic device; it’s an indication of me wanting in my body to be part of this very ancient place and also to feel a certain kind of touch. 

So the answer to your question really is that one informs the other and vice versa.

Autumn: How Can I Say It Was Not Enough? is your first full-length collection of poetry. Can you talk a little bit about the process of making the book? Did you set out to write it as a memoir-in-poems, as you describe it on your website? Or did you have a mess of poems and then shape them into this? 

Anne: Well, I wish there were any kind of real logic to it. There wasn’t. I wrote many of these poems over time, and I published many of them. I actually did bring some of them together in a chapbook years ago, and then I wrote others. 

So I sat down at my dining room table, and I printed them all out. I shuffled them all around, and I began to see that there was a pattern and that it might be chronological. I used that basic chronology as an organizing principle for the book. And once I’d figured it out at my dining room table, I went back to my computer and pulled them together. I left out some poems that were about people who might be hurt if I published them. I left out some other poems that didn’t seem to fit into the chronological structure. But everybody has to find their own structure. It’s the one of the hardest things to do, to find whatever is the internal logic.

The memoir-in-poems—I have to admit, I didn’t say that. My friend J.C. Todd said that. I thought, Oh, she’s so smart about this! Often your friends see something in your work that nobody else does. 

Autumn: I really appreciate the way you describe your process. The one thing that you said that really struck me was related to leaving some poems out because they might hurt people. It feels like there’s a lot of risk taking in this collection. On your website, you’ve written: “…I write about the body. How does a woman with a disability see herself as a sexual being?” In this book, it’s not just the sexuality; you have some really provocative — maybe even taboo — poems. I’m thinking about “Mother Love.” I’m thinking about “Twin.” [These are poems in which the speaker imagines sex acts with mother and brother, respectively.] 

Can you talk about writing about sex, or any kind of risks that you might be taking in a book like this, and how you approach that level of disclosure with those more taboo or vulnerable topics?

Anne: I was fifty years old before I started to write poetry seriously. I grew up in an Irish-Catholic family where they were very loving, but you didn’t talk about anything important. You sure as hell didn’t talk about sex — not at all — even though my parents had a very happy and very physical marriage, and so does my brother. So, by that time, I figured that I was getting in a rut, and I needed to get out of the ‘burbs. I started to take some poetry workshops at UArts [the University of Arts in Philadelphia] with a very wonderful poet whose name was Alexandra Grillikes — she has now gone to her eternal reward — but she was a risk taker. And I heard my internal voice. 

After the silence of my youth and young womanhood, I just wanted to tell the truth, and poetry was one way that I could do it. I wanted to be honest and generous about my experience. I didn’t want to beat around the bush, and usually I don’t. All my life, I’ve been getting into trouble for saying things I shouldn’t be saying, but I didn’t want to disguise my feelings. I think that I’m not the only one who’s ever had something of a sexual feeling towards a parent or a sibling. For heaven’s sake, people do! That doesn’t mean I’m going to act on it or or even consider acting on it. But poetry is something where, as I say, you can be irrational. You don’t have to be proper — and I can seem like a pretty proper person. And I’m a pretty upstanding citizen, really, but in my work, I just have found it tremendously important to say what I really think. That voice that I hear in my head when I’m writing is a voice that I want to be loyal to. I don’t want to silence it.

I should also say I’ve been writing these poems for the last thirty years and publishing them too, but in obscure journals. I mean, I was never in a position where I was going to offend a boss or lose my job, or anything like that, with the work that I was writing because, believe me, my bosses would never in a million years have found the literary journals that I was publishing in. So it wasn’t as if I was taking the kind of risk that would imperil my livelihood. 

Autumn: You were talking about the voice in your head, how that sounds, and what it wanted to say. I did feel, for the most part, that the form and the voice throughout the book are relatively consistent. But there are a few places that really jumped out because they had a different voice. One of the poems that I’m thinking about was “Redlight Blue,” which has a really different rhythm to it. And then there’s “Speculation” — it’s in rhyming quatrains, and it stood out to me. I was like, Wait, she’s rhyming all of the sudden. 

You talked a little bit about how you think about form, in poems in general, but I’m curious how you think about form, particularly as it relates to these sorts of anomalies within the book. Were you thinking intentionally about changing up forms, adding variety, or anything like that?

Anne: I left those in — and there’s another one, “Donkeys On Parade,” that is really kind of surreal — and I left them in for two reasons. Number one: to provide some variety because a lot of the other poems in the book are narrative basically, or they tell a story, whereas these don’t. So, I left them in for variety. Also it’s kind of puckish, you know? I just wanted a different voice. Americans are very earnest, and I wanted to be just a little bit more playful.

Autumn: I have two questions about the mother-daughter element of the book because, in addition to really exploring sexuality, there’s so much in here about that complicated mother-daughter relationship. So my first question is: Did your mom read your writing when she was alive?

Anne: That is a very interesting and very smart question, and the answer, blessedly, is no. She wouldn’t have understood it — I don’t think. Well, she wouldn’t have admitted that she did. So no, she didn’t, and I didn’t show it to her. 

She came to one of my very early readings. My brother was with her, and he told me afterwards that she turned to him and said, “How do we know that this is poetry? It doesn’t rhyme.” And my dear, sweet brother said, “Well, it’s poetry because they say it is.” 

So no, she did not read them, and she was dead and in her grave before this book came out.  The poems about her were published — some of them — before. But again, they were in obscure literary journals. It wasn’t like a leading article in Golf Digest. That she would have seen. 

Autumn: That leads to the second question: Would it have been possible for you to publish this collection if she was still alive?

Anne: I think I would have done it — along the lines of not wanting to be silenced. 

In some ways, that’s a moot question, but the other interesting way to answer that is my brother, Ed, who is my twin. He and I have always been close, but we hadn’t talked a lot about my skin or my sex life, such as it is. He’s a sort of shy, Irish-Catholic guy, and when this book came out, I thought, Oh my God. What is he going to think? And he came to my house, and he said, “Well, Anne, I’ve read your book—twice. It’s really wonderful, and I’m so proud of you.” 

I mean, he has been after me to write a book about [our mother]. She was a very powerful influence in his life, as well as in mine, and she was critical of him as she was critical of me. She was also extremely loving to both of us, so it was never a situation like Mommy Dearest. You couldn’t hate her because she was very loving, but she was also critical and overbearing. So in some ways, I’m his voice. And I was, of course, tremendously relieved to know that he liked what I had written. 

There are some poems to women lovers in this book, too. And so I said to Ed — and he’s a straight man from way, way back, you know — “What do you think about those?” And he said, “Ah, it is what it is.” So, he’s not a stand-in for my mom — who is blessedly wherever she is — but he comes from that background, and he’s very accepting.

Autumn: I wonder if you have a favorite poem or a favorite line within this book. Is there a place in the book where you feel like you really nailed it?

Anne: I think listening to that internal voice is the key. 

But, the line that I use from “Haven” [for the title of the collection]. I’m not good at titles; it took me a long time to come up with this as a title. The line is: “How can I say it was not enough?” It comes at the end of a poem about a friend of mine; I’ve probably had a crush on her since we were three years old, when we met down the shore. It’s a poem of yearning. It’s a poem that shows unrequited love in some ways (although she’s straight as an arrow). 

I thought that was a good thing to sum up this book: How can I say it was not enough? Part of it is a question of craft, of success as a poet: How can I say? What words can I use? What craft can I employ? It was not enough. I think the poems are full of yearning for a life that I haven’t led. So I thought that was a good line. It’s simple, straightforward, but it also has a reverberation of various different meanings, which I hope are clear in the book itself. 


Autumn: Absolutely, and I have to say: I felt that line was one of those gut-punch moments that you get at the end of a poem that you just feel with your entire body.


Anne: The other thing I liked about it is that it’s an unanswered question, and that’s one of the things you can do as a poet, right? As a prose writer, there’s much more of a pressure to resolve things at the end in one way or another. The heroine gets married to Mr. Darcy and goes off to live happily ever after. Of course, there are ways to do it in prose too, but with a poem you can more immediately end without a resolution or without an obvious resolution. 

How Can I Say It Was Not Enough? by Anne Kaier was published by Nine Mile Press in June 2025.

Anne Kaier’s memoir, They Said I Couldn’t Have a Love Life, was a Finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2024 Sue William Silverman Prize. Her essays have appeared widely in venues such as The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, 1966journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the anthology About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of The New York Times for which she appeared on NPR’s Radio Times. Her poetry collection, How Can I Say It Was Not Enough?, won the Propel Poetry Award and was published by Nine Mile Press and the University of Syracuse in 2025. Poems have appeared in several anthologies including the 2012 ALA Notable Book Beauty is a Verb: An Anthology of Poetry, Poetics, and Disability. She is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and has an MA from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Anne was on the founding faculty of the Rosemont College MFA program, where she taught poetry and memoir for many years. She also taught creative writing and English literature at Bryn Mawr College, Arcadia University, and Penn State – Abington. She lives in Philadelphia.

Autumn Konopka is a Senior Editor for Cleaver, responsible for Book Reviews, Author Interviews, Writing Tips, and Newsletters. A former poet laureate of Montgomery County, PA (2016), Autumn’s poetry chapbook, a chain of paperdolls, was published in 2014, and her award-winning, debut novel Pheidippides Didn’t Die was released in 2023. Autumn is a Philadelphia native and loves celebrating the city’s unique impact on the literary landscape. Visit Autumn’s website here.

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