In their debut poetry collection, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones (Wandering Aengus Press, 2025), Amanda Hawkins turns their attention toward the matter and material of bone. “The bones of / the dead are everywhere,” they write in the opening poem, inviting readers to see bones everywhere too: atop mountains, at the bottom of the sea, in the wreckage of colonial violence, strung from museum ceilings, and hidden inside boxes of ash.
The winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Prize, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones meditates on earthly processes of change and decay that transpose articulations of life. As Hawkins’s living speakers bear witness to human and nonhuman bodies in various states of decomposition, the line between life and death begins to feel porous and imaginary. To blur that line is both a poetic and political project, Hawkins’s work suggests, in a capitalist culture that depends upon the mirage of its own eternal life.
Hawkins is a poet based in Northern California, where they are at work on their PhD in English. Through a series of emails, we spoke about collective grieving, inherited imaginations of death, postmortem practices, time, whales, and writing toward the bottom of grief.
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The Rumpus: I’m curious how you first learned to relate to death and dying. What cultural, religious, or political factors shaped your own early imagination of death? Are there moments you map across your life that have markedly shifted that relationship?
Amanda Hawkins: Death and dying were, for most of my early childhood, confined to the containers of story, myth, and familial memory: my father’s recounted loss of his sister at a young age, his second-hand loss of a brother long before, religious stories of individuals like Jesus, Judas, and Peter, religious stories of whole peoples in the wars and genocides of the Bible, and the mass deaths of whole ecosystems and swaths of human and nonhuman history. The only deaths I knew firsthand were pets, and none of them were pets I loved.
In other words, death and dying were Big Happenings, but they were also distant from me, “not our fault,” and/or not worth much pause. Intentional space, for grief, was to admit guilt or weakness of spirit. My family knew how to party, and party they did. They enjoyed togetherness deeply, while togetherness was something to be had, and they prided themselves in not succumbing to the sadness and depression that early deaths catalyze: Jesus died at thirty-three, under the approving eye of his parent, but he rose from the dead! We have lost a child/sister/brother/friend, but we still have so much! The world has lost and lost and lost, but it’s all a part of a god’s plan!
Death was emotionally sanitized culturally, familially, and religiously, but I was a very sensitive child. [From a young age] I was depressed and struggled to find a place for all the feelings I had, desperate, in retrospect, for community to grieve, and what I now know was a layering of personal, familial, and societal losses.
Rumpus: Your poems “Fire Study” and “Lessons on Ashes” consider the intricate and regulated postmortem processes that human bodies undergo after death. In these pieces, you study flesh and bone as transmuted by fire, potassium hydroxide, and motorized blade. What was it like for you to write about these processes?
Hawkins: If there were “healing through writing” poems, these were the poems that did it. One part of growing up very Christian was that everything seemed to be a metaphor or a representation of something else. What was freeing about writing about the process and bone-hard facts of body, death, and deterioration was that I could make art from physical things that were not representative of some divine promise. I mean, even the bones that God shows the prophet Ezekiel symbolize the dead people of Israel. They shake and come back to life.
In contrast, I was interested in writing to the bottom—toward a death that does not “come back” to life but continues, so far into death it deteriorates. The bottom of death. The bottom of grief.
Of course, in doing that, I realized that there is not always an end. Keep going, and there is not necessarily a bottom, though there is a kind of transformation. Bone does eventually break down, or it can become unrecognizable. As I alluded to before: I feel like my grief and sadness—and the grief and sadness of those around me—was always stunted, stopped before it could find the end of it. How long would I cry if I just let it happen? How long would I need to mourn if I did not cut that mourning short? I have since been afraid at times I would lose myself to grief. I do think it is possible, but what was interesting to me in the writing of the processes of death and dying and bone was trusting myself enough to explore the depths—to trust that there might be a point at which I say “Aha, that’s it, I’m still walking through it but I’ve found a kind of bottom, and I’m still alive.”
Rumpus: You write about how, after cremation, bones are ground up to look like ash before being returned to a dead person’s family. What do you make of that detail?
Hawkins: This is a great example of a detail that I have not explained to myself but needed to exist. What do societies and cultures who do this to the remains of their dead make of it? I find it intellectually fascinating that my society finds it necessary to grind the remains of our dead. The easy answer is my society has distanced itself from any proximity to the dead. We buy meat from little trays in the grocery store. We have our loved ones’ bodies picked up by an ambulance hours—if not minutes—after they have passed. If we see them again whole, they have been pumped through with preservatives. If we see them again after cremation, it is like you said: cremains, something like ash. It is a version of closeting, quite honestly. It is hiding the facts. “These aren’t bones! Nothing awkward here! Nothing unfinished!”
Of course, there are many, many people who live quite close to the death and dying processes: farmers and ranchers who hold the animals we eat, healthcare professionals, undertakers, death doulas, scientists, educators, priests, and others who literally do the heavy lifting of being and teaching with the bodies of our dead. Back to the point: The “ash” is, in my humble opinion, a manifestation of avoidance.
Rumpus: You describe living and dying bodies viscerally in this collection, revealing blackened tongues, “headless whales,” “chips of chinbone,” and a child’s “brain ravaged like land cleared of itself. . . .” The titular line appears to frame the way you write about death throughout the collection. What do you think is lost, in writing and in life, when we forget that our bodies are bodies, and that our bones are bones?
Hawkins: I am a person who lives in their head a whole lot, one who sees, in the world and in my days, symbol, metaphor, and meaning, all the damn time. I appreciate that about myself. I have a radar for that tendency in others, because I like it. It feels like hope. What is lost, however—in writing and in life, when we forget our bodies are bodies, and our bones are bones—is the present. We leap forward or backward or vertically, in time and space, and we miss the experiential physicality of the present. We miss the possibility of meaning, without leaping elsewhere. There is value and meaning in a face in front of a face. There is value and meaning in no words. Perhaps that’s the closest to what I mean. A bodily, bone-dense world, of no explanation, is the art of wordlessness. I used to paint and draw—that used to be my art form—and I miss the wordlessness of that articulation. Sure, eventually there would be extrapolation, communication, and connection that would be necessarily word-filled, but in the making there was only this physical, visual, experienced-by-the-senses thing. I could paint all damn day and create meaning without saying a word. It was this physical thing in front of me, and at least for a time there could be meaning in it just existing.
Rumpus: Whales recur as main characters in your writing. What is your relationship with them like?
Hawkins: I believe the first whale that emerged in the collection was in “Whale Fall,” which, of course, is only the body of a whale, dead and sunk at deep sea. I had never seen a whale before, and I developed a deep longing to encounter one. It is interesting now to see the shape that relationship has taken over the years. In the book, I have a different kind of relationship to each whale mentioned. Sometimes it’s longing. Sometimes it’s awe. Sometimes it’s healthy distrust. Sometimes, grief. The essence of my relationship with them, though, is the essence of what my relationship is with different animals at different times in my life: some species will get all sparky and catch my eye. Or, my whole personhood will notice, say, the great horned owl or cheetah or flamingo, and suddenly that’s the only animal I notice in the world. The collective has something to teach me. The whale—individual beings, and also the collective species—had some things to teach me when I was writing these poems. I did eventually see whales, and not just one, and not just dead and not just alive. I love that you say “characters,” plural, because that is the truth. There is not just one essence. Each whale shows up differently. There is no consistent metaphorical equation one can read into these, or I haven’t planned one or found one. I used to be self-conscious about that, but I came to love it, be curious about it, follow its unsystematized meaning as its own lesson.
Rumpus: Your poems often consider several timescales at once, contextualizing human lives among more-than-human lives. You emphasize the ways that earthen bodies are not static, but rather shapeshift into one another. A child who dies is, to his mother, a “landscape.” Whale bodies are a future seafloor. Rocks are waves “caught / in still shot.” How do you parse the relationships between bodies, places, grief, and time?
Hawkins: I was just talking with my brother-in-law last night about how there is a high likelihood that we all have at least a molecule in common with Julius Caesar. Like, I think it is telling that you asked a question about big things—timescales and landscapes and time—and my brain leapt to the micro nanosphere of molecular physics. That is the relationship. Our bodies are landscapes for many microorganisms. Our places are griefs in physical form—they are the literal scars of time and change. To me, this is the most tragic and hopeful thing about living—that we already are made up of those who have come before us, and that we will become others as well, both human and not human, “animate” and “inanimate.” My mother likes to say the only thing guaranteed in this life is change. I don’t disagree.
Rumpus: In several poems, you write about settler colonialism and the ongoing desecration of Indigenous lands and peoples in North America and Palestine. How did colonial legacies shape or inform your poetics?
Hawkins: It is no accident that in this book, there are quite a few sparse poems that span quite a few pages and that the imagery is often land-level and place-specific. This developed organically, meaning, I did not pre-plan, rather, when I realized what was happening—what forms and foci I and the poems were drawn to—I listened for that tendency, shaped it, pursued it. Quite like the whales.
Our present world’s iteration is built on top of Indigenous lands and peoples. My own life and religious and racial experience as a queer, white, post-Christian American is built on top of my own ancestors who chose to silence their Indigenous heritage to survive in a colonized world bent on their erasure. That shit takes time and space to see. That shit takes time and space to walk through, process, and articulate.
In these pages, I barely am able to approach what might need to be said—about any of it. That is how the colonial legacies of the lands shape and inform my poetics. This book is a beginning, and I’m really just joining in with a host of voices. That’s poetry for you. It isn’t even an essay in the formal definition of the word—an attempt. It is a speaker’s sputtered first lines in what I hope will be a long song, of not just my words but of the collective’s, a song that actually heals.
Rumpus: The collection emphasizes the ways that death, grief, and change are inseparable from life. In the context of a hegemonic capitalist culture that is arguably both death-denying and also death-wielding, do you feel like there are political stakes to writing about death in this way?
Hawkins: There are absolutely political stakes. Capitalist culture would claim death as change and change as death and erasure. Capitalism says, “Get on with it. Nothing is sacred, least of all what did not survive the cut.” And what is cut is our proximity to the body, land, our ancestors, our present and alive loves, and our foundational and continued interconnectedness. Capitalism is about network, not connection. Change as an attempt to one-up. There is no homeostasis. There is no peace and no sustainability. For me to claim that death, grief, and change are inseparable from life then, is, inherently anti-capitalist, is political and post-humanist in the most human/e and tree-hugging way I can muster.
Rumpus: “In the Year of Salt and Death,” the speaker mourns the deaths of “two of [their] beloveds” alongside fractal violence and death occurring elsewhere in the world. How do you relate to personal versus collective grief? Are there practices of collective grieving that you have, or wish you had, in your life?
Hawkins: I was grieving a hard breakup recently and shared with a friend how I was trying to handle my grief in the comfort of my own home (or car, or trail) without bothering her or my other beloveds, and she very gently and decisively told me to stop such nonsense: “You can be alone if you want, but you don’t have to grieve alone,” she said.
I also recently went to a group grief ritual, a free Saturday gathering a local therapist puts on as an offering to the community. We shared our individual griefs. We listened. We did some ritual things. We danced and screamed and bawled our fucking eyes out. It was amazing.
Collective grief is real. Collective grieving is also real. I’m also thinking of the vigils in the wake of the mass shootings and the vigils surrounding the deaths of individuals that became and become collective grief because of their social implications and injustice—Eric Garner, Stephon Clark, and Breonna Taylor spring fast to mind, but also the many, many others murdered by police—and those vigils are a bittersweet reminder that even in the society in which I live, mainland 21st century America, collective grieving still happens. I want that communal grieving. These feel much too rare though, and I don’t think a shooting or murder needs to happen to tap into that experience. I want more places and spaces to not grieve alone. Because we all inevitably grieve alone in the between times. What people need, whether they are getting it or not, are opportunities to be in grief with other people. I wrote this book as a call to collective grief.
Rumpus: Across the collection, the speaker is drawn toward and away from the clarity of meaning offered through stories, myth, and religious tradition. Sometimes, the speaker seeks counsel from a priest. Other times, they are overtaken by the “still foreignness of unbelief” and the existential sense that any mountain may as well have been the one that God spoke from. By the end of the collection though, something has shifted. Do you chart a narrative arc about belief through the collection?
Hawkins: I began this book in a mental space and physicality of not talking about belief—its doctrines, details, or diversions—and how I felt about it all. I was not at peace with where I was: I did not believe “rightly,” but I still believed something enough to care [that] I was wrong. In short, if there is any narrative arc in this collection about belief—that I can claim, as claiming is still very uncomfortable for me—it is that by the last lines, there is a kind of acceptance of proximity to the holy. The speaker’s very physical relation to “the mountain[s]” has changed over the course of the poems. [This] allows them to speak the way they can, without the damning and shaming that had previously built up. In fact, in the last lines the speaker calls out the name of “god” and thus “uses the Lord’s name in vain,” in a moment where it’s not quite clear what they believe or what they are doing: is their “oh my god” a moment of praise or of profanity? It’s not clear. It doesn’t have to be. I don’t think the speaker even knows. The praise is only “as if,” and for that moment, that’s close enough.
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Author photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
