“How do you / keep stones from sinking like that, I wonder? / How do you hold the wild shoots / of spring inside you, instead?” Now is the right season of year to contemplate these questions from the poem “Preparing” by Ellen Stone in her new poetry collection, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them.

The Ann Arbor poet will debut her book and be joined by two other local poets, Monica Rico and Ashwini Bhasi, on Wednesday, April 9, at 6:30 pm at AADL's Downtown branch. The event will include a reading and Q&A. On Saturday, April 26, Stone will be one of the poets in the Celebration of Jewish Poetry from 2 pm to 6 pm at Temple Beth Emeth. One of Stone’s poems is on display at Comet Coffee in the Poet Tree Town project throughout Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti during April.

The appearances of the moon in various forms generate a comforting presence in Stone’s collection as the simile “tidal as the pull toward moon” in “How I want the road to you” illustrates. In the second poem of the book, called “Bright side of the moon,” the poet shares how some things are nevertheless amiss since there is “Scarlet fruit scattered in the garden straw as if / the strawberry moon splintered. I gathered shards.” The poet discovers and picks up such shards for the rest of the book. The poems tell stories of lives unfolding through the natural order of marriages and motherhood as well as the pain of sexual assault and loss.

The constant of the moon and other natural processes draw us “into the lemon light of May” where the poem “Depression as guest” “sits down. And, evermore, we add her in, her troubled / stare and rumpled clothes. She sleeps all day, then joins us.” Mental health issues trouble the poet’s family and then the poet herself. The poet examines “How to stay alive” and concludes that the answer is that “he does not kill me.” Yet, the damage extends deep, and the poem “The end of girlhood” results in “mourning / the soft give of June, not going home.” In “After college,” the poet “[o]n my little porch in Kansas” observes a thunderstorm while “wanting to believe in aftermaths” and sees “the sky cleared up as if nothing / had really happened.” Still, this collection illustrates that a lack of visible evidence does not negate the experience.

The poems enter topics of love and motherhood, where the poet is a mother herself and also reflects on and supports her own mother. Places, including Ann Arbor, become integral to the lives and events lived in the lines as “I turn to loam / moving sedimentary / centuries out of my skin” at the start of the poem “Midwest soil.” The “River prayer” is dedicated in part “for the Huron River” that infiltrates because “I have river so much in my core, / its plunge and sweep like a sob ready to burst.” In these places, the poet finds that “to mother is a strange equation”—one that causes a fundamental shift in oneself:

                                                       a state

of being                 finding your

self in                    then rearranging

           your           whole               body skin

this you                plus one

          no memory            what is

     before              this               only now.

This new state connects the poet to the circle of life and to the hard truths “[t]he way a tiny turquoise egg lands whole on hard concrete” in “Restoration.” Though birth creates a new relationship, it also launches a separate life in the poem, “Snow, the letting go,” where the poet encounters “The igloo of my daughter’s mind. What room / I can find her in, the place she calls / hers/not mine.” The poet must come to terms with this delineation between her and her children. The poet must also go on to watch her own mother’s decline, visible within the observation that “here your face is dune-swept / smooth and still, opening / like the sky coming clear / on March days.” The poet cleaves to her mother and daughters in both senses of the word.

Later in the book, the poet plans to accomplish some “Late Raking” during which the threads that tie their lives together—the moon, the river, home—are evident:

Night begins to fall, late November
and the leaves not yet raked. Debris collects.

…

Through a window, the kitchen brightens,
squares hazy-yellow like the glow of the moon.

Yard now full of shadows. Muted roar of cars.
Almost like a river rushing if I tilt my head enough.

The moon and river weather the tasks and trials with the poet.

Stone and I talked before her book launch of Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them. We discussed her pursuit of poetry, involvement with the Ann Arbor community via poetry, how she organized her new book, how motherhood shows up in her new collection, the way the moon shines throughout these poems, the role of place and food, and what is next for her writing.

Q: This is the first time we have talked. When did you get into poetry and why?
A: I fell in love with contemporary poetry after taking an introductory class at Antioch College in the mid-1970s. I specifically remember Diane Wakoski’s The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems because I had never heard poems written by a woman with that much anger. It was enlightening—and freeing. Then, I took a follow-up class featuring the work of Sylvia Plath and James Wright and I was hooked. The combination of Plath’s fierce inventiveness and Wright’s embodiment of the lonely and the lost crept into me like a fever. I walked around campus quoting poems, and eventually, the daily journal I had always kept just seemed to morph into verse by the time I graduated.

Q: You taught special education in Ann Arbor Public Schools for more than 30 years. Now you advise Community High's Poetry Club. What does being the advisor involve? How do you and the students engage with poetry?
A: I meet with students at Community High during their lunch hour once a week. Typically I bring some sort of prompt, often involving a poem or two that might involve a theme. We have been reading poems commemorating Women’s History Month during March, and we wrote Golden Shovels—after Terrance Hayes commemorating Gwendolyn Brooks—at our last meeting. We always leave time to free-write and we share our drafts with each other. Luckily, I get to write along with the students.

Because it is National Poetry Month in April, I also organized an all-school guest poet visit with Jason Crawford—now in NYC, originally from the Lansing area—in our school library last week. Ann Arbor is such a great poetry town so it is usually easy to make connections and find poets to come into our school. In fact, Poetry Club just hosted a pre-launch of my new book with our high school poets and some of our guest poets last Wednesday night. I tried to read the poems in my new book that I wrote at Community High.

Q: What connections do you see between your work with students and your own poetry?
A: That is a great question. I think the students and I have a lot of the same concerns, fears, and passions. I tend to look to nature for a lot of inspiration and some of the high schoolers I work with use nature as a backdrop for their work, as well. They love to write about relationships, as do I. We also tend to see poetry as a means of empathy toward others. I think we admire poetry as activism, too.  And we also love art! Our last field trip was to a local art gallery, WSG, where we wrote poems for a show of local artists. I think I learn as much from the high school students as they do from me. When I listened to our students talk about their poems at a reception the art gallery hosted for us, I was blown away.

Q: You are also a co-host for the monthly online poetry series Skazat! What is this initiative, and what is your role?
A: Skazat! is a monthly poetry community that gathers online for an open mic, and a featured poet’s reading every fourth Tuesday. except August and December. Before the pandemic, the group met in the downtown Ann Arbor Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea for several decades under different names. We have continued to meet online as we have audience members joining us from all over the country, and sometimes, the world. Along with my co-hosts, Scott Beal and Karrie Waarala, my role is to encourage and introduce our open mic participants, as well as our guest poets.

Q: Your new poetry collection, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them, was published this month. How would you describe this book? How does it relate to your earlier books?
A: My new book is about mothers and daughters, leaving home and carrying home inside you, how loss filters down through generations, and how the natural world carries you through it all. The book deals with some of the same themes from my earlier books: the balm of the natural world, mental illness, sexual assault, and caregiving. Originally the title was Daughters Leaving Home in an Age of Aggression as it was hatched during the first Trump administration.

Q: I am always curious how poets order and divide their books, and yours has two parts that are preceded by a single poem called “A wrist, a wren, a small knife.” Tell us about the sections of your book.
A: First I have to say, ordering a book is not my favorite task—it always mystifies me, and I typically need help from my poetry friends and readers to do it. The sections of this book divide the eras of motherhood and daughters leaving home in my family. The first section focuses on my mother and me, as daughter; while the second section moves into my own motherhood and my daughters leaving home. I begin the book with the poem, “A wrist, a wren, a small knife,” which sets up my mother as a central figure, and the poems at the end of the book document her finally leaving us, and the Earth.

Q: Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them travels through time, from your childhood to age 65, and the life events in between those points. Is writing poems about memories and earlier moments in time different from writing poems set in the current era? Why or why not?
A: When I write poems, time often shifts and melts away, so what is current and what is memory can blend into each other. That being said, poems set in the present are more challenging for me to write. I’m not sure exactly why that is, but I suspect it has to do with the need for me to integrate how I am feeling with the circumstances I am writing about. I often need time to digest and contemplate in my poems.

Q: As you mentioned, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them covers a range of topics including motherhood, mental illness, sexual assault, marriage, parenthood, and loss, all alongside the natural world. How can poetry address and work through these life events and trauma?
A: I believe poetry has a unique ability to serve as a magnifying glass on living. I use my poems to literally zero in on specific moments or situations that confound me, or worry me, or scare me. It turns out, I don’t really get to consciously decide what those moments are, they come to me. Probably more accurately, poetry decides for me what I need to write about. When I was first writing in my 20s, my poems were often about love newly found or lost because that is what I was most urgently dealing with. The natural world factored in from the start because nature was always my home, what grounded me. When I began to delve more deeply into the written word, I understood that loss was a central issue I needed to write about. I think I will always write about losing my mother to mental illness because it defined my childhood. But so did the mountains, the river, the fields I worked raking hay.  Poetry has helped me integrate the components that make up my life—what matters most to me.

Q: The moon is part of this natural world, too. The strawberry moon, the wolf moon, and both the mother as moon and moon as mother brighten and fade in these poems: “We idolize / her, mother, moon—while we are gas or kerosene, / combustible, made solely for consumption. Moon / swelling, overfull, disappearing to the other side.” Why the moon? What qualities of the moon makes it central to this collection? When did you know that the moon would be the recurring metaphor as you were writing this book?   
A: When my mother died, my older sister and I noticed there was a full moon. We had a visceral sense that our mom was watching over us there in the sky, as if she had been transfigured into the sky from her time on Earth. But as I tried to determine what this collection of poems was trying to teach me, I saw that I literally was writing about my mother as the moon. The moon is a constant, but it also has its phases. At one point in its cycle, it disappears from view. My mother left our family, first through her depression where she literally was swallowed by her sadness and did not leave her bed. But later, she physically left our house.

When my friend, poet Sarah Messer, suggested the title of the collection, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them, I realized she was absolutely right. Not only do I see the moon as a phenomenon humans use to guide us through the year, through the seasons, I began to understand how my relationship with my mother was exactly like the moon. I have used my mother as my guide through life, her persistence, her steadiness, her resolve. Even through her darkest moments, she would always come back around, shining and full.

Q: “We were taught stomach as place" reads the poem “Perimeters.” These poems find grounding in not only the moon and places, including the Midwest and Appalachia, but also food. The “tomatoes just climbing out of their cages” grow in “First married,” and the poem “Recipes for mothering” serves yellow cake, meringue, and jam. How does food work as place in your collection?
A: I was lucky to be raised by women who were amazing cooks and bakers. My people also grew and raised all their food.  My maternal grandmother, Granny, lived just down the road from our old farmhouse. She grew up on the family dairy farm in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, near Scranton where her sisters lived out their years as well. When the “aunts on the farm” invited you for dinner—the noon meal—it was as if you were a threshing crew straight in from the fields. They made enough food for a church supper, three little German women turning out fried chicken, roasts, multiple kinds of vegetables, pickles, homemade biscuits and cakes, pies. Food was a kind of religion.

My grandmother taught my mother to cook and bake—and my mother brought her own Italian heritage to the task. She made homemade pizzas, manicotti, and lasagna, everything with homemade tomato sauce. Mom also became a wonderful baker and made bread every week, cakes, and pies. Her cream puffs were my favorite. My father was the gardener and kept three large gardens raising everything from potatoes, squash, and carrots with enough to keep us through the winter to the raspberries and strawberries we used to make jam. Our summers were spent raising, harvesting, and then preserving food for the next three seasons. So, “food as place” was literally a way to describe our house, our family’s work.

Q: As we wrap up, what is on your nightstand to read?
A: I have been reading Edward Jones’ novel The Known World since it was on my shelf and was voted the best book of the 21st century by the New York Times last summer. Jones is a startlingly gifted writer and the book is brilliant. It is also hard for me to get through because it so accurately depicts human cruelty, so I sometimes have to take a break from reading it.

But I also have a stack of poetry I am reading through for National Poetry Month because I write a prompt a day for my students. So, I have lots of poetry volumes piling up: Foreign Bodies by Kimiko Hahn, Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Works, and The Back Country by Gary Snyder. I am also browsing through Detroit poet John (Cal) Freemans’ work since he will be coming to Skazat! in June. And my friend, poet Rachel Nelson, lent me her copy of From, From by Monica Youn who came to the University of Michigan last month and blew us away with her Zell Writers reading.

I have to mention Good Dress by Brittany Rogers, too, as well as Flower Boi by Mars Marshall, both also Detroit poets. Those books have been hanging out on my desk from last month when I saw Brittany read at an InsideOut event at Wayne State, and I introduced Mars at Skazat.

Q: What is next for you now that this collection is published?  
A: Well, before I knew this book was going to be published, I began a series of spare-ish essays or prose poems called Wrackline when I was at the Good Hart Friends Writers Residency last summer with my friend, Ashwini Bhasi. I have not been able to fully get back to those with the new book coming out, so I am hoping I can finish that work this upcoming summer.  Then I have another book of poems I am starting to tinker with that might be called Uneven Science, thanks to poet Tommye Blount who suggested that title at the Bear River Writers Conference last summer. It turns out I need other poets to tell me the best titles for my books! 

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.   

Elle Stone will debut her book and be joined by two other local poets, Monica Rico and Ashwini Bhasi, on Wednesday, April 9, at 6:30 pm at AADL's Downtown branch. The event will include a reading and Q&A. On Saturday, April 26, Stone will be one of the poets in the Celebration of Jewish Poetry from 2 pm to 6 pm at Temple Beth Emeth. One of Stone’s poems is on display at Comet Coffee in the Poet Tree Town project throughout Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti during April.