Bound Voices 005: A Conversation with Elise Powers
Where joy and sorrow breathe the same air.
There are poets who chase revelation, and there are poets who listen for it.
Elise Powers belongs firmly to the latter.
Through her newsletter Two Raw Sugars and her debut collection The Size of Your Joy, Powers has built an extraordinary conversation around tenderness and the way joy and sorrow can live within the same breath. Her poems find holiness in the ordinary: wilted flowers, grocery lists, the quiet ache of being alive. They remind us that beauty doesn’t ask to be perfect; it only asks to be seen.
In this edition of Bound Voices, we talk about imperfection, inheritance, and the courage it takes to be “the full thing.”
1. The Everyday Sacred
G. K. Allum:
Your poems find holiness in the ordinary—wilted flowers, grocery lists, the kindness of strangers. What draws you to these small, unguarded moments, and what do they reveal about how you see being alive?
Elise Powers:
I think I’m drawn to those moments because they’re where life is actually happening, often pretty quietly and without spectacle. The world is constantly offering us these little gifts, but we tend to rush past them, waiting for a “bigger” or more impressive moment to arrive. Those little moments are the places where life feels most honest to me—the place where holiness actually exists, not as a consolation or stand-in for something more extraordinary, but because the small things are what all of it is actually about. People love to celebrate the cake without paying homage to the flour, the sugar, the baking soda—but the ingredients are what make the cake possible, the same way the ordinary “nothing” moments are what make a life a life. They exist whether you notice them or not, and for me, the act of noticing is a form of prayer. And I have to say, your observation is so spot on—the final poem in my book ends with the lines, “all the small, invisible ways / the ordinary becomes holy.”
2. The Beauty of Ruin
G. K:
In “On Leaving the Flowers Too Long in the Vase,” you write, “Maybe I like the idea of being alive enough to ruin.” What does that line mean to you now—this idea of allowing things, and ourselves, to be imperfect and still beautiful?
Elise Powers:
When I first wrote that line, I was actually thinking about my grandmother and the end of her life. After battling cancer for many years, she chose to leave this world through assisted suicide, and witnessing someone I loved so deeply choose her own ending in that way changed something in me. It shifted how I understand what a “good” life is supposed to look like.
We place so much emphasis on the “beautiful” parts of being alive, while the so-called “ugly” parts are often treated as boring, shameful, or something to be hidden. But watching my grandmother move through both the tenderness and the devastation of her final years reminded me that a life is made of all of it—the bright and the brutal, the soft and the unresolved. I try to hold space for it all in my own life.
For me, to be “alive enough to ruin” means being willing to participate fully. To love, to risk, to fail, to grieve, to keep trying all the way to the wondrous, ugly end. It’s come to mean that imperfection isn’t the opposite of beauty, but the proof that something has been truly lived. To me, that matters more than beauty ever could.
3. The Shape of a Poem
G. K.:
Your poems feel deceptively simple—clear, conversational, yet perfectly weighted. How do you think about structure and rhythm when you write? Do your poems arrive whole, or do you build them line by line through revision?
Elise Powers:
Thank you so much! Usually my poems begin with a single line, thought, or observation that, when I shine a little light on it, blooms into something worth exploring. That feeling or realization then often becomes the thesis of my poem. I like to let that initial spark of curiosity lead me, and the rest of the poem flows from there as I discover the shape and rhythm along the way. Most of my poems arrive slowly, line by line, often over the course of a few days or even weeks. I do tend to edit as I go (which I know is often advised against), but I think it helps to keep me grounded in the work and stay close to the thing I’m trying to articulate.
4. The Size of Joy
G. K.:
Your debut, The Size of Your Joy, explores the ways women carry joy and sorrow in the same breath—how identity, beauty, and desire are inherited and redefined. When you were writing it, what did you discover about the hunger for joy, and what it means to claim it as an act of defiance and hope?
Elise Powers:
Something that kept coming up while I was writing this book is that hunger is not a flaw or a virtue, but simply a signal. As someone who has struggled with body image and disordered eating, that was something I had to remind myself of again and again. Whether you’re talking about physical hunger or emotional hunger, it’s the body and the heart saying, hey, something here matters—feed me. For a long time, I learned to mistrust that signal and see wanting as something that needed to be managed or disciplined. Writing The Size of Your Joy definitely helped me understand how deeply that instinct runs, especially for women.
The women I come from survived because they wanted fiercely. They kept reaching and never settled. Claiming joy, especially for women, often feels rebellious because it asks us to take up space in a world that teaches us, from a very young age, to be as small as possible, physically, emotionally, and otherwise. What I came to understand while writing this book is that choosing joy, even (especially) in the presence of grief and depression and uncertainty, is a way of saying, “I’m still here. I still want.” And that, to me, is where hope lives.
5. Connection and Community
G. K:
Your Two Raw Sugars Substack often turns reader messages into conversation. How has that intimacy—this back-and-forth between poet and audience—changed the way you write or what you choose to share?
Elise Powers:
The way a poem moves between writer and reader is one of my favorite exchanges in the world. When you read a poem of mine, you are reading me. I’m handing you a little piece of myself, and when you read it and feel seen, I feel seen too. It turns a private feeling or experience into something shared. What I once thought was just my own experience suddenly has company, and there is something so validating and freeing about that. That type of recognition on both sides of the page reminds me again and again that connection is at the center of why I write. And say what you will about social media, but being able to share my work so easily with readers through Substack and Instagram is truly a gift.
6. Poems by Post
G. K:
Sending poems through the mail feels almost radical today. What inspired the Poem Postcard Club, and what does it mean to make poetry something that can be touched and held?
Elise Powers:
Taking a small step back from what I just said about social media, it can also feel strangely abstract and lonely to live so much of a creative life online. Nothing makes me feel weirder than when someone tells me they enjoy my “content.” I’ve always loved physical books and paper—I fell in love with reading and writing not on a computer, but on the page. Now that so much of writing and reading lives on screens, I sometimes feel this ache for something I can actually hold, and I figured I couldn’t be the only one who felt that way. Sending a poem through the mail makes it feel less like content and more like, well, a poem.
7. Being the Full Thing
G. K:
You’ve written that maybe we could “be the full thing, too.” What does that mean for you as a poet—and how do you know when a poem, or a moment, has become the “full thing”?
Elise Powers:
For me, “being the full thing” means allowing myself to exist as the truest version of myself, not the most attractive or impressive or palatable. It means letting the contradictory parts belong. It means letting the messy, unfinished, ugly parts take up just as much space as the polished or impressive ones. And all of this is true for my work as well. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, so writing poetry for me a lot of the time is more an act of letting go than one of control. I always tell myself a poem doesn’t have to be “good,” it just has to be true, and that’s what “the full thing” feels like for me in my writing and otherwise.
8. What She’s Reading
G. K:
What are you currently reading and inspired by—and is there a poem you’d like to share with our readers?
Elise Powers:
I’m currently on a Mary Magdalene kick and I just finished reading The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. I can tell I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time. I’m always drawn to books that explore the inner lives of women in great detail—their longing, their contradictions. That kind of intimate interior attention is inspiring to me as a writer, and I often find myself seeking out books like this in all genres. I also highly recommend When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney. As for poetry, I’ve been slowly reading Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems and Ada Limón’s Startlement. I’m almost always re-reading one of Ada Limón’s books—The Carrying is one of my favorite books of all time.
I’d love to share the poem we discussed in this interview. It’s called “On Leaving the Flowers Too Long in the Vase.”
On Leaving the Flowers Too Long in the Vase
by Elise Powers
I can’t decide which part of me
lets the flowers rot—
the one that can’t bear endings
or the one that can’t be bothered
with them. I tell myself
I’ll throw them out tomorrow,
and instead I watch each petal
darken by degrees,
water gone cloudy and rank
as time itself. Maybe I like
the idea of letting things end
without forcing grace upon them,
to let the flower be the full thing—
beautiful and withered, fragrant
and fetid. Maybe I like
the idea of being alive
enough to ruin.
Editor’s Note
To read more of Elise Powers’s work, visit elisepowers.com or subscribe to her Substack, Two Raw Sugars.
Her debut collection The Size of Your Joy is available now wherever books are sold.
Bound Voices is an ongoing interview series from Ink & Ribbon Press, a nonprofit publisher devoted to craft, discovery, and the permanence of the printed word.