In U-M alum Perry Janes’ new poetry collection, Find Me When You’re Ready, the poems weigh desire by examining what you can express, what you hold back, and how you tell the story. These poems chase and dodge competing and sinister desires—and see what prevails. 

Janes, originally from Michigan, now lives in California. The poems in Find Me When You’re Ready involve both places, as the book’s description says, “Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles.” 

Janes returns to Ann Arbor for an event at Literati Bookstore where he will be joined in conversation by Peter Ho Davies, with a reading by Tommye Blount, on Friday, October 4, 2024, at 6:30 p.m.

On the topic of relocating from Detroit to the West Coast, Janes writes in the poem, “Ode to Xeriscaping; or, Regarding Austerity, I Find Devotion":

Darling. We have moved
             from a city with rusted rebar

blooming from coal ash
             to a city with plant
life lathed sharp by need

             and what does that say
about the way I sometimes drag
             the razor across my face

at just the wrong angle.

Some might describe both landscapes as harsh, but Janes finds out how one is not like the other. 

The book is split into five sections called acts, a nod to Janes’ screenwriting as we discuss in our interview below. One theme or thread in Find Me When You’re Ready is trauma—the distinct traumas of childhood sexual abuse and mass shootings. The poet discusses these experiences both directly and indirectly, such as in the poem “Creation Myth,” which employs a fairy tale as a metaphor: 

Turn back. One boy has the other in his grip, mouth
crimson with blood. (But which one is the I
this poem lays claim to?) I’m asking:
Is it ever the whelp? In the wild? The tiger’s
cub who preys on other cubs? Are there stories
for such encounters? Hansel easing Gretel
toward the oven, Gretel not understanding
her sudden urge to burn—

Amidst traumatic experiences and betrayal, Janes’ poems question how situations come to be and what is true, as in his line, “Meaning: Don’t trust it.” 

Still, the poem “Ars Poetica as Love Poem with Auto-Correct; or, Mission You” suggests forward progress and describes what life is like on the other side of the trauma, including moving on with someone else: 

Objective and journey. Obstacle.

             Reward. Our future blinks by,
surprising and mundane, and look

             how far we’ve come, you and I,
needing only the word our feet make
             as they walk side by side.

Carrying on requires moving one foot in front of the other, step after step, together. 

Janes and I chatted about his new collection, Find Me When You’re Ready, ahead of his local event. 

Q: When you were an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, you won the Hopwood Award multiple times for both poetry and fiction. How did receiving this recognition of your writing influence you?
A: On the one hand, it gave me validation that I was on the right path, and at such an early stage, that validation was invaluable. On the other hand, it made a material impact on defraying the cost of my college education, which can’t be overstated. 

Q: You are from Detroit and have since moved to Los Angeles, California. Both places appear in Find Me When You’re Ready. Has this change affected your writing? Why or why not? 
A: Absolutely. From early in my career, I’ve been occasionally tagged as a “writer of place.” Much of my work reflects growing up in and around Detroit’s metropolitan area. That might mean that a book or script is set there, or it might mean, more broadly, a preoccupation with working-class stories. But recently, life in L.A. has filtered into my writing. Unlike Detroit—a city that I often find gets mythologized by outsiders—Los Angeles is a city constantly mythologizing itself. Working in the entertainment industry has made me keenly aware of the many ways L.A. is enmeshed with performance and commerce. On the one hand, that makes L.A. an exciting place to be, full of reinvention and imagination and possibility. On the other hand, it can make the entire city feel like a simulation, shape-shifting for maximal attention and validation. Those themes, as well as the landscapes and communities that inspire them, increasingly occupy my work. 

Q: The fires of California are one way the state has a presence in the book. “Love Poem as Trojan Horse” asks “What won’t burn?” Also, “Palinode”—the one in Act 5 as there is also a palinode in Act One—reads, “Each day / I learn to hold some new shape / of flame. / Why expect anything / else, after?” How does fire work in these poems? 
A: To your point above, it’s become impossible to live in California these days without confronting the reality that wildfires are here to stay. I have a friend who likes to joke Los Angeles has three seasons: spring, summer, and fire. It no longer feels like such a joke. That’s one, very literal way that fire appears in these poems. 

Speaking figuratively, fire in this book tends to represent a destructive force—which can be damaging or cleansing, depending on its context. The speaker is regularly navigating that binary. When are the flames productive—needed even? When are they harmful? And if the fires are here to stay, in one form or another, how can we adjust the circumstances of our lives to that reality without allowing them to consume everything in their path? 

Q: Let’s switch gears a bit. Why are the five sections of Find Me When You’re Ready called “acts”? 
A: I’ve spent the last six years working as a full-time screenwriter. Part of this work means regularly “breaking” story for screenplay and teleplay formats, which involves parsing act breaks that turn the narrative forward. Although this book is composed primarily of lyric poems—meaning, here, they occupy the speaker’s internal thoughts without always belonging to a narrative moment—the poems tell a coming-of-age story that traces a single character’s journey across time—childhood to adulthood—and space—Michigan to Los Angeles. The details of that journey aligned with a five-act story structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. By naming the acts, the book combines its lyric sensibilities with a narrative arc. 

Q: Speaking of acts, we are talking about poetry, but you mentioned that you also write prose and scripts. Do you approach these various forms in different ways when writing? How does writing in multiple forms guide or prompt your creativity? 
A: By working in more than one form, I allow each idea to tell me what shape it wants to take. These days, I’m able to tell whether the idea, when it first arrives, wants to become a long-form narrative, such as a script, or something more contained like a short story or poem. Once I know which direction I’m headed in, my approach varies. My work for the screen almost always involves a detailed outline—but poems, and short stories, too, rely on discovery and surprise. In that case, the process involves a lot of finding my way from one word to the next, embracing unexpected turns of thought, and doubling back to revise. None of this accounts for the many ways in which my work in one form operates in hidden and unexpected ways on my work in another. For instance, when beginning Find Me When You’re Ready, I didn’t set out to write a five-act coming-of-age tale. That structure came later, in revision, and went a long way toward helping the poems cohere together.

Q: Back to Find Me When You’re Ready, the collection covers childhood sexual abuse and mass shootings. What inspired you to explore these topics via poetry? What did you learn as you wrote about these weighty matters? 
A: I see these as divergent topics, but what they share in common is a need for specificity to resist generalization. 

In many ways, Find Me When You’re Ready is a work of auto-fiction at least partly about the journey into, through, and out of childhood sexual abuse. Needless to say, this was difficult to write, not least because this particular story unpacks an act of “peer abuse” wherein the abuser is another child.  To capture that complexity, it was important that the poems track a single speaker’s arc toward healing over time. The early poems convey experience through the child’s sight and perspective. Later, the poems look back with the clarity of adulthood and a need for revision. That revision is often enacted right there, on the page. The speaker increasingly questions, probes, and rewrites the story, allowing its many contradictions to coexist. In doing so, he is able to break away from the stories he’s been told—and told himself—about the experience, which is a kind of freedom, in the end. It was important to me that the poems not just be about but also embody the speaker’s emotional journey. 

Separately, gun violence is a subject I feel passionately about. Despite the reality that it shadows all our lives here in America, it’s often reduced to political abstractions. The poem “Shooter” contemplates a highway shooter shadowing I-96 over the 2012 Halloween season, which some Michiganders may recall, wondering about the distance between real and simulated violence. The poem “Manifesto with Honey and Bullets” on the other hand is my attempt to defamiliarize the subject with the strange or absurd. The question in either case is: how can the poem avoid or diffuse our kneejerk presumptions in order to speak more intimately and humanely to the reader? 

Q: The poems also grapple with the concepts of truth and lies in storytelling. The poem “Another Diorama, Revised” concludes, “See? Already the story promises to lie, / shifting from subject to subject. So? / Power, at last, just a trick of light—”. Fiction sometimes has an unreliable narrator. What about poetry? Is the poet in these poems unreliable? 
A: I see the speaker in these poems as knowingly fallible but not unreliable. Put another way: he’s keenly aware of the unreliability of his own memory, and of the artifice inherent in the stories we tell ourselves to get by. As a result, he’s constantly working to rewrite, confront, question, and expand his own understanding of those stories. In this sense, I find him more reliable than if, say, he boldly proclaimed the facts of the story with unqualified certainty. 

Q: Find Me When You’re Ready contains 90 pages of poems. Late in the book on page 80 is an ars poetica titled “Ars Poetica as Love Poem with Auto-Correct; or, Mission You.” As mentioned earlier, there are also two palinodes. Let’s talk about these poetic forms. Why is the ars poetica placed toward the end of the book? Also, tell us about your choice of palinodes and the inclusion of two. 
A: It was important to me that the ars poetica arrive late in the book as a reflection of the speaker’s growth. He had to first take this journey in order to arrive at a conception of his own poetics. This particular ars poetica is also tied to adult, romantic love, which arrives later in the story and operates as a healing force. In this way, the ars poetica interweaves with the speaker’s arc as a reflection of lessons learned. 

As mentioned earlier, this book is also interested in holding contradictions together. Scattered across the book are a series of “Odes” that embrace praise and gratitude. The palinode—one of my favorite poetic forms—creates space for its opposite. I’m very often drawn to poetry that wears its misanthropy, irreverence, pettiness, and ingratitude on its sleeve without attempting to beautify those feelings. The palinode declares itself for those emotions right up front. I don’t see it as negating the odes that came before so much as it expands the field of view to acknowledge our less attractive thoughts and emotions. 

Q: What is on your to-be-read pile? 
A: Too many books to count—beginning with Liars by Sarah Manguso. 

Q: Where are you going next with your writing? 
A: In several directions at once, including a handful of scripted projects, a collection of short stories all about labor in America—past and future—and a second book of poems that turns the lens back on Hollywood itself.  

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.

Perry Janes will be in conversation with Peter Ho Davies, with a reading by Tommye Blount, at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor, on Friday, October 4, at 6:30 pm.