As we celebrate National Poetry Month, we’re excited to highlight poet Aja Couchois Duncan, whose third book of poetry, The Intimacy Trials, was published with the Phoenix Poets series in March! Here she discusses Ojibwe tradition, the relationships her poems hold with each other, and the kinship she feels with other writers.

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Tell us a little about yourself and your relationship to poetry.

When Sky Woman fell onto turtles back, she was pregnant, barely showing. Mikinaak felt it, the baby bump, but the other animals—muskrat and heron, beaver and loon—thought Sky Woman was alone when she fell through the hole in the sky and they hustled to make a nest for her on the back of turtle. Sky Woman had gone through a bit of an ordeal and wasn’t sure herself if what she felt in her belly was anything more than new world jitters. To calm herself, to introduce herself, she told a story. The first of many. And the stories painted the sutures of turtles back until every stich was gold.

Was this a locutionary act? Were the words simply dispersed through the air like seeds?

One day a girl woke up with too many inside her mouth. She tried to swallow them. She tried to spit them out. No matter how many she expelled, the next morning there were even more, a mix of smooth and scratchy shells stuffing her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

She knew to seeds were older than her. She knew the stories were wiser. The only way to empty her mouth was to write them. Some songs, some poems, some directional graffiti for those who would come later.

As a writer, I am in some ways, merely a scribe, one of many who have emerged from an old cross-cultural tradition, that of literate minorities who facilitated religious and administrative statehoods as well as a legacy of literature. And too, as an Ojibwe, a woman of an oral tradition and language, I am a double agent, subverting the fixed nature of the written word.

Poetry provides a particularly nuanced space in which to enact such subterfuge.  

What’s something you’re particularly excited about with your new book?

For most of my adult writing life, I have written in long form. Meaning my poetry collections—the last two of which I consider lyric novels—are not discrete poems living amidst other discrete poems that share some thematic elements held by a tumbler of pages, but rather interconnected narratives that weave across different terrains in an intentional trajectory. In this way my new book, The Intimacy Trails is in sequility to my previous book, Vestigial. It is very satisfying that these siblings are both moving about in the world.

Tell us a little about your process—is there something or someone you draw inspiration from, a particular routine or practice you work with, or any rules you set for yourself?

I think of writers as transcribers of the ethers. Perhaps that is only true for some of us. But for me writing takes place in that liminal space between sleeping and waking, early in the morning when stars still strewn across the sky. This is a time when my ancestors whisper to me in the predawn gleam.   

Do you consider your writing process to be primarily solitary or collaborative?

It is a collaboration. Writing across time.

Do you see your work in a conversation with a community/communities of other writers?

And too, in this timeplace, I am writing alongside, toward, and between many other artists. I recently began rereading Maxine Hong Kingston’s mythopoetic novel The Woman Warrior. I first read this extraordinary book in college. Reading it again, I was captivated by her engagement with language, culture, history, feminism, form. I don’t know if Maxine would recognize me as kin, but I definitely claim her as my own.

The Intimacy Trials opens with an epigram from Chrystos. Her work has been extremely important to me, particularly in the early years of my writing life. To quote Gloria Anzaldua, another creative auntie, Chrystos’ “words slide into our throats, feed the hungry soul, fill the lost and homeless heart.” Born and raised in San Francisco, Chrystos provided both a literary and familial home for this mixed race, Native woman coming out as both queer and a poet in the early 90’s.

There are so many other contemporary writers and artists whose life and work I am in conversation with. I am equally in relationship with madrone, deer, hawk. To all I say “Aaniin indinawemaaganidog.”  

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Aja Couchois Duncan is a leadership coach and movement capacity builder of Ojibwe, French, and Scottish descent living on the ancestral and stolen lands of the Coast Miwok people. She is the author of Vestigial and Restless Continent, which won the California Book Award for Poetry. Her other projects include the collaborative opera Sweet Land, which was named the best opera of 2020 by the Music Critics Association of North America.

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The Intimacy Trials is available now from our website or your favorite bookseller.

Through the end of April 2026, enjoy 40% off this and other recent poetry titles from Chicago and our distributed client presses on our website using code POETRYMONTH at checkout. Learn more here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/virtualCatalog/vc167.html