Wallace Stevens famously composed poems in his head as he walked to and from his job as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, the rhythm of his steps determining that of his words. Ronald Palmer wrote much of his poetry collection, Brother Nervosa, during downtime in his company car, grappling with themes that grew out of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. “Nervosa,” as Palmer writes in an introductory note, “is the feminine form of the Latin word nervosus, which means pertaining to the nerves. Sinewy. Vigorous. Nervous. The psychological addiction to a behavior, belief or habit that [affects] the body via the nervous system or the mind.” Much in this collection pulses with such tension, as Palmer writes in “Voice of the Virus”: “We birth like ecstatic tadpoles / our neurons // vibrating in the calamity / of our former selves.” The volume is one of the best indie books of the year; Palmer answered the questions below by email.

What are some of the ideas or thoughts that got you started on these poems?

How HIV has haunted my entire adult life. I came out in the late 1980s, lived in the East Village of New York City, and joined ACT UP during the Reagan years. Then—after decades of perspective on the ravages and terror of the virus (as well as being desperate for a medical breakthrough)—I joined Gilead Sciences as a sales representative to launch HIV PrEP in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this way, Brother Nervosa is a construction of hauntings, especially self-haunting: the Jungian Shadow Self.

Places—Northern California in particular—figure prominently in a lot of your poems. Do certain places strike a chord or resonate more than others?

Absolutely. Especially hiking in parks near the Pacific Ocean. I live with my husband near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, so the landscape of the park in many ways becomes a character in Brother Nervosa—for example, the bison paddock, the gardens around the windmills, the snakehead lamps, and the raccoons and coyotes.

What inspired you during the writing? What were you reading, listening to, watching?

The book was written over a 10-year period. Some of my obsessions in terms of authors have been William Shakespeare, Anne Carson, Hart Crane, Philip K. Dick, Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams), Carl Jung, Jacques Derrida, Paul Celan, Ernest Hemingway, and John Rechy (City of Night). I listened to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (read by Cyril Ritchard) nearly every morning during lockdown. I found a secondhand box set of four vinyl records at Green Apple Books. Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho) and Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket). Ex Machina and The Killing of a Sacred Deer were also inspiring. 

Where and when did you write the poems? Describe the scene, the time of day, the necessary accoutrements or talismans.

I call on medical specialists, traveling to and from hospitals during the day. So Brother Nervosa was conceived in parking lots and waiting rooms. I also wrote in hotel rooms, in longhand, in a notebook. I record my dreams scribbling in a notebook under my lamp. Sometimes I write at the beach and let the waves dictate. I completed a Ph.D. in English and taught for a number of years, but surviving in San Francisco necessitated a career change.

What was most challenging about this collection? And most rewarding?

The most challenging part of the book was wrangling all the disparate themes—viral infection, double consciousness, generational trauma, how perversion can become a blind spot—and to let those ideas unfold and mutate inside the manuscript. The most rewarding aspect is witnessing a decade of thinking amalgamated into 120 pages. I am so grateful to see the book in print and how beautiful it is to hold in my hands.

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.