Photo credit: Tam Lan Truong
Interview by Matthew Rettino
Mirabel (whose real name is Avleen K. Mokha) is a 24-year-old award-winning poet originally from Mumbai, India, currently studying speech-language pathology at McGill University. I came to know her well during the COVID-19 lockdown when the Caesura poetry collective met every Wednesday night on Zoom. Her chapbook, Dream Fragments (Cactus Press, 2020), received critical acclaim from The League of Canadian Poets and PRISM International. Mirabel’s first full-length poetry collection, The Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After) (Guernica Editions, 2023), is a meditation on grief, survival, and her experiences as a person of colour.
I interviewed Mirabel this spring over Zoom, calling in from my N.D.G. apartment. She tuned in from her apartment in Verdun.
Matthew Rettino: I’m struck by your opening poem’s statement: “I’m leaving to be a version of me that only I can see.” There’s a suggestion that this self is hidden, interior, and ostensibly more ‘authentic,’ yet still only one other version of yourself, something made up. Can you comment on this idea?
Mirabel: Yeah, I think there’s a bitterness to the first poem. If you’re the kind of person that tends to isolate yourself when things are hard, there can be a fine line between privacy and self-sabotage. There’s a bit of a threat in that [idea] because if you’re only the version of yourself that only you can see, you’ve stopped existing to other people. The idea that any of us can stop existing in the lives of others is frightening, and the speaker in this poem is wielding that fear to position herself as someone in control.
I like to imagine this poem as holding the reader at gunpoint. The final line [is] where the gun meets the temple.
MR: What was your biggest challenge in writing this collection?
M: The thing I almost always got stuck on was how do I define my style without it becoming my comfort? How do I have enough variety and how do I make it challenging enough for me while still having the style that I want? That’s what I think was the hardest thing. One thing that did help was […] forcing myself to know that this is my unexplored area of writing and going there even though it was scary.
I would rather have a shorter poem that’s packed with images and that packs a punch rather than have a long poem that I feel had a filler line. But I didn’t want the collection to be, like, 90 short poems. I had to sort of push myself out of my comfort zone and work on taking up space on the page. Some of the poems [are] intentionally much longer than I would ever naturally have written them.
MR: What role, if any, did Montreal play in your collection?
M: I was born and raised in India, and I moved to Montreal to study at McGill about 6 years ago. Since I’ve been here, it’s really become, in some ways, my home—even more than India.
The fourth poem in this collection (“Nightlife”) [is about] the energy of [Saint-Laurent Boulevard] not being enough to make up for the loneliness that you might experience if you’re a young university student walking down it.
Also, let’s say I had an … interesting altercation with somebody who owns a laundromat on Sainte-Catherine Street, and it was one of those heated moments of just bickering.
Somehow it led me to have an existential revelation. I don’t know how it happened, okay? I walked out of there and I was riled up, but I came home and wrote a poem (“By the Laundromat on Sainte-Catherine Street”) that really was trying to make sense of this conflict.
I think there’s something about living in a city that forces you to stay inside a lot of the year that really makes you think about what’s inside of you. You have to be okay being with yourself even when the weather is really bad—for example, when there’s freezing rain or an absurd ice storm in May. In that way, Montreal has really taught me a tough lesson about who I am.
MR: You’re studying speech pathology. Can you relate it to your interest in language and poetry?
M: Language is probably my biggest special interest in the world. To an extent, humans are quite unique in their ability to use language, and I think that’s so weird. Like, I was just born with language in me? And my cat doesn’t speak [through] language? It doesn’t make any sense. So it’s just me being baffled and awed by the concept of language itself that led me to care about poetry in the first place.
Language is so precious to me. I really care about the fact that I have language and that I can use it finely. I can’t imagine not having it or struggling with it or it not being the biggest part of [my] identity. Because I understand how important it is, out of empathy, I think I can work well with people that are struggling with it.
MR: You’ve told me before that you’re not religious, but you do find religious faith fascinating. You come from a Sikh background, and you make use of religious ideas such as miracles, faith, and even original sin in the poem “Stain.” Can you comment on how you engaged with these ideas?
M: There’s something very interesting about referencing a [religious] canon of images, just like you would [reference books] in the literary tradition. There are a lot of themes that emerge: there’s hope, there’s difficulty, there’s needing to explain mistakes and evil, there’s wanting to do good in a way that you can justify and spread. But I don’t think having a collection of good ideas has ever been enough for me to be religious. I feel that if I sat for long enough, I would logically reason myself out of every religion because they’re all human.
I was aiming for something that was a little timeless with my collection in that there’s obviously a lot of personal motivation for me to talk about grief, but I really wanted the book to be relatable to people who had a different sort of crisis: a crisis of faith, a crisis of identity, a crisis of not being accepted. I think religion often offers that rescue for a lot of people.
MR: You said in another interview that you position yourself as a Romantic poet since you are so concerned with interiority. Who are your poetic mentors or inspirations, living or dead?
M: I still agree that I’m a Romantic poet. You know how people picked their Hogwarts houses, back when that was an okay thing to do? I feel that it’s a natural thing when you’re a literature student writing poetry to be like, “What kind of poet am I?” And I’ve always, in that sense, identified the most with Romanticism. I don’t believe you can write about things without your perspective seeping in.
That aside, I would say some of my general poetic mentors are—let’s start with the dead ones—Seamus Heaney (Incredible, okay? Love him) [and] Mary Oliver. She’s written probably my favourite poem of all time, which is “Wild Geese.” I’m actually looking at that poem of hers. It’s just printed on a 4×8 black and white printout that I got five years ago, and I’ve just carried it with me for five years and put it on the wall near my desk every time I’ve moved apartments.
I will say I always try to balance [dead poets] with musicians and songwriters because I think it’s equally important not to sound antique or outdated. I listen to a lot of music, and I pay a lot of attention to how singer-songwriters use their words. Some of my biggest inspirations from music […] are Taylor Swift— everyone knows I’m loud and annoying about that—The National, Noah Kahan, and Ashe.
MR: Can you tell me more about what you’ve been listening to recently?
I’m a folk indie pop girl, basically. I listen to Taylor Swift all day, every day. Her versatility, being able to work across genres, gives her writing such power because you can analyze her for years. My top two albums of all time are Folklore and Evermore. Those were some of my biggest inspirations because they came [out] around the time I was writing this book. I listen to Lorde […], I’ve really been loving Gracie Abrams, who’s another indie pop artist. I also like Noah Kahan. His newest album Stick Season is currently on repeat.
What’s a question that no interviewer has asked before but that you really want to answer?
“How do you support a poet?” If you like somebody’s poetry, how do you actually make a difference to them? If you find somebody in your neighbourhood whose art you enjoy—and the neighbourhood can be a city, province, whatever—try and buy a copy of their book. Try and come to a launch event. Share what they’re up to. Follow them on social media. I hate to end on something that can seem as shallow as that. I know I’m writing in a niche, right? I’m not trying to be a global bestseller with this book. I’m really hoping for a lot of connections. What would be the most meaningful [outcome] to me to come out of publishing this book would be to get a lot of people who wouldn’t have read poetry otherwise to read it.
Avleen K. Mokha, also known as Mirabel, was the 2019 winner of McGill’s Peterson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing. Mirabel’s poems have appeared in carte blanche, Yolk Literary, Dream Pop, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and more. She is the author of the chapbook Dream Fragments (Cactus Press, 2020). Her first full-length collection The Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After) (Guernica Editions, 2023) is in Guernica’s Essential Poets series.
Matthew Rettino is a Montreal/Tiohtiá:ke writer whose interviews have appeared in Cult Montreal and NewMyths.com. A member of the Codex Writers’ Group, he can be found reading his latest weird tales at the Accent Open Mic or wandering Dawson College’s Peace Garden photographing brown-lipped snails and chipping sparrows for iNaturalist.