How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024) is Saúl Hernández’s first full poetry collection and was selected as a finalist in the Wisconsin Poetry Series. The bookmoves in currents across five sections, or waves. The poems carry in them visceral emotions—Hernández tackles homophobia, racism, immigration, and grief—with a kindness utterly necessary to carry such weight.
A queer writer from San Antonio, Texas, Saúl Hernández was raised by undocumented parents. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. Hernández has gathered impressive accolades, including the 2022 Pleiades Prufer Poetry Prize, the 2021 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, judged by Victoria Chang. Hernández has also been a Macondo Writers Workshop and Tin House Workshop fellow.
I met Hernández at the MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso, so I loved having this conversation with him about his new book, which resonated with my own experience. Through a series of emails, we discussed the impact of community, the powerful, surrealistic images he’s known for crafting, vanishing and white space, and the difficult, wonderful process of this craft of poetry.
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The Rumpus: How did you first come to poetry? What made you consider poetry as a medium to explore and express yourself?
Saúl Hernández: My first love has always been singing and music, but I’m no Mariah Carey, so singing is out of the question. I even joined mariachi in middle school to learn how to play the guitar, but I quickly found myself not passionate about expressing myself through an instrument. I don’t draw or sculpt well either, so I knew I couldn’t excel as a painter or sculptor. My appreciation and love for the arts has always been strong, but I just couldn’t find my own path in them. At the time, my pastime of reading stories and poetry could be turned into the path I’m now on. It wasn’t until I did my undergrad work that I found writing. I dropped out my sophomore year from finishing my biology degree and took a year off to find my calling. When I returned to undergrad, I declared an English degree as my major. Later, in a Mexican American literature class, Laurie Ann Guerrero came to discuss her book, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, where she discussed her experiences, growing up in San Antonio—when I’m from—and how they came to life in her book. I told myself, “This is it. This is what I want to do!”
Rumpus: What was the process of writing this collection, from its initial idea to the moment you felt it was a finished manuscript?
Hernández: I initially thought my grad school thesis would become my first collection. Looking back at it now, it wasn’t near what I would have hoped it would be, in terms of pushing myself in craft, vulnerability, form, etcetera. After grad school, I pulled about ten to fifteen pages for revision and started from scratch. I just kept writing and writing. As my work progressed, I started seeing how I had similar themes and threads pulling this collection together. I don’t think any poet ever feels like their collection is finished. I would have kept writing and building if it weren’t for two of my colleagues telling me I had a finished product. I decided to do a chapbook first in 2021, and once I put it together, I sent it out. It won the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. The judge, Victoria Chang, selected it as the winner, and I was ecstatic. After the chapbook, I took my colleagues’ advice seriously. I spent the next eight months looking over all the poems I had for this collection, ordering the poems, making edits, and sending it out. And here we are now!
Rumpus: How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters is filled with such beautiful, visceral imagery! I love how strange your images can be and how powerfully that strangeness can be used to portray emotion. In one poem, the speaker nails water to the wall. In another, he catches lightning with his mouth. How do you conjure this kind of imagery in your poems?
Hernández: My visceral imagery comes from my dreams. I am a very vivid dreamer. In many instances, I find myself in these surreal-like dreams wondering if they are real or fake. Most of my dreams are not voiced or have sound, just images. The reference of nailing water to a wall came from a dream I had where I was trying to nail water, repeatedly, in an empty room but of course, I never got it right. If the image didn’t come directly from a dream, I ask myself: “How I can make this image strange?” I go directly to thinking: “If I was dreaming, how would this image translate into the page?”
Rumpus: How do you deal with the fleeting memory of dreams? Do you keep a dream journal?
Hernández: For me, either my dream will wake me up in the middle of the night or early in the morning. If I’m woken up by them in the middle of the night, I reach for my phone, open my notes app, and write a sentence. Usually, if I can recall my whole dream, I’ll write a sentence to a paragraph synopsis of the dream. If I don’t remember fully but I remember the images, color, sound, or odor, then I write down words. I repeat the same process for the morning. I’m embarrassed to admit my notes app has so many notes.
Rumpus: During your AWP panel about Latinx queer men and vulnerability, you spoke briefly about how loud white space can be. Looking at your collection, I see white space used brilliantly, achieving multiple purposes, from giving a voice to the unsaid to mirroring the waves that divide the book into sections—First Wave, Second Wave, etcetera. How do you decide to use white space?
Hernández: In graduate school at the University of Texas at El Paso, Sasha Pimentel, my professor of poetry at the time, taught me how white space is also a language—how white space has the agency to shock the audience, the same way words do. When I wrote these poems, one of the first questions I asked myself is, “What does the form want to say or be?” When I began putting together my collection, I found a multitude of water, lightning, and border references or imagery. I had to sit and listen to each poem carefully. From there, the poems began taking a form of their own with the white space, mimicking either the way water runs, or the border, in terms of wall or landscape. I wanted to create a type of dripping effect from the ending of one poem to the next, while also acknowledging how water currents are constantly changing.
Rumpus: Water is one of the most persistent images weaving this collection together—it is ever present in both the form and the language. There’s a more subtle thread, that of vanishing, also powerfully mirrored by poetic form. “My Queer Ancestors,” for instance, shows the names of those ancestors gradually fading. What are the different risks of vanishing you’ve explored?
Hernández: Vanishing, for me, stems from my upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness. In church, I was taught to make myself invisible and only speak when I was spoken to. I also spent more than half of my life in the closet. When you mix religion with denying self-acceptance, you have a recipe for invisibility. It is because of those experiences in my life in which I dared to be honest and vulnerable in my collection. Being invisible allowed me to be an observer. Although vanishing can be seen as a form of surrendering, I hope my readers can also see vanishing as a way of resistance and observation.
Rumpus: So many of your poems deal with family and lineage in especially complex ways. In “Missing Tio,” you’ve used a photo of your father because, as the notes state, his features resemble his brother’s. What was your experience writing about family in such honest ways? How did you negotiate the private and the universal yearnings of a poem while writing about family?
Hernández: To be honest, I never intended to write about my family or lineage. My first poems I ever wrote were, for the lack of a better term, silly poems about nonsense. As I evolved as a poet, throughout graduate school and after, I realized I have always wanted to write about linage because I had so many questions such as: Why and how grief is inherited. Why being undocumented limited opportunities. Why identity is important to culture and society, et cetera. What I lacked was the courage to see these poems through. After reading Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen, I saw how honestly, delicately, and courageously they navigated lineage, truth, and identity. Hieu Minh Nguyen’s poetry collection gave me the push I needed to explore and dive into my own lineage and secrets. When I began writing these poems, I began as most poets do: word vomiting on the page, and then going back to cut. Through this process, I was able to answer some of the questions I mentioned above; other questions just led to more questions. Negotiating what needed to be said and what should not be said, while also listening to the poem/page was difficult for me at first, because I did feel I was betraying myself and my family in a way, for putting out these stories of us. But my job as a writer is to first witness, and then record. It would be an injustice to these poems if they were not written from a place of vulnerability and truth.
Rumpus: In contrast, while you still tackle very personal issues, you sometimes write about them using assumed speakers. “The Rio Grande Speaks” is a persona poem, in the voice of the river. What considerations did you have while writing persona poems?
Hernández: In the summer of 2021, I was part of Tin House Summer Workshop, with Patricia Smith as my workshop leader. During this one-week workshop, I had a one-on-one with her, where she asked about my collection I was working on. When I explained to her the themes and what I was writing about, she asked me what I was writing around. Having my collection center around grief and the Rio Grande, it was vital for me to write a persona poem about the Rio Grande so my audience could understand the Rio Grande as a three-dimensional character. The news is always filled with headlines of the Rio Grande, but we as an audience never stop to question the river itself. Does it have feelings? Does it know grief? Does it know what its waters are capable of doing? I went on to read Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, which gave me the confidence to explore those questions, and what the Rio Grande might say if it could speak.
Rumpus: A large part of this collection focuses on landscape and, especially, borders. Could you elaborate about the ways you explore borders, both literal and metaphorical, in this collection?
Hernández: The border has always been a crucial part of my life. I’ve always felt like I’m living in between two spaces. Truthfully, I still feel this way. Growing up with undocumented parents, a lot of things didn’t make sense, like why we couldn’t drive more south or north, why my parents chose to be quiet and invisible to society, why we always held our breath around cops as if they could smell a lie. At the time I was writing this collection, I didn’t know these questions would seek answers through the poems I was writing. Through my poems, I was able to be vulnerable and ask the questions I wouldn’t dare ask my parents. Now that my parents are legal residents, and knowing what they have experienced, I don’t think it would be fair for me to probe them, making them relive trauma. Instead, I turn to poetry to find ways of exploring the borders I continue to live in of identity, of the past, of the present, and of the future.
Rumpus: This book probes so many facets of pain and aggression in frank and vulnerable ways. What was your experience writing about these difficult topics? Do you have any kind of self-care ritual to prepare yourself for tackling them?
Hernández: Writing about these topics is never easy. I’m a slow writer and a patient one too. Those two qualities have made writing about difficult topics bearable. However, I do have my own rituals. I like to approach my work from a place of care, and I do this by first making sure my space is clean. I play anything by Ólafur Arnalds during my writing to help me get in the zone. Afterward, I do like going for long walks to decompress.
Rumpus: You’ve spoken about the great sense of community in the world of poetry. Could you talk about the influences that helped shape the poems in this book? Who are the poets you return to looking for inspiration and knowledge?
Hernández: There are many poets who have helped me find my voice, style, and have astonished me. I return to many poets for various reasons involving form, imagery, white space, experimental poetry, etcetea. Patricia Smith is a poet I return to time and time again for various reasons. Her poem “An All-Purpose Product,” from her collection Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, allowed me to find different entries into my poems such as “Meditation on Grief,” which begins with a discussion with a therapist. Diana Khoi Nguyen is poet who I go to when I want to challenge white space and form. I go to Eduardo C. Corral when I want to find vulnerability. There are plenty of poets who I go to and for all of them I am grateful.
Rumpus: What’s next for you?
Hernández: Since it only happens once, I am allowing myself to bask in all the praise for my debut collection. I was working on a new collection before the release of my debut collection, which I will return to later this summer.
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Author photograph by Bradley Miller
