I first met Lisa Low at a Tupelo Quarterly Review weekend online seminar for poetry manuscript prep. We’ve stayed in touch through a Zoom poetry discussion group. Low is a poet, book and theatre reviewer, scholar, and former English Professor who lives in Connecticut across from the Naugatuck Forest. She’s been writing poetry her whole life and her first poetry chapbook, Late in the Day, was recently published by Seven Kitchen Press, a Cincinnati-based publisher specializing in handmade, limited-edition poetry chapbooks.
Late in the Day is an intense personal account, flooded with imagery and sensory experience, exploring intimacies in the natural world and in human relationships. I had a chance to talk with Lisa about how her first chapbook came about, what drives her writing, the role feminism and Virginia Woolf play in her life, and more.
Editor’s Note: The following interview was conducted by email in late 2025.
Saudamini Siegrist: I loved reading Late in the Day. Your poems have a distinct voice that resonates. Were the poems written with a particular theme or thesis in mind, or did the chapbook happen more spontaneously?
Lisa Low: The poems themselves were written separately and spontaneously, without regard to one another, but when it came to the book, I picked the poems that seemed to share themes and images; poems that could be arranged easily, that sing to each other, in the same key.
SS: The book’s title, “Late in the Day” also appears in the poem, “The Last Time I Saw My Father,” about your father’s life and death. Could you speak about the significance of your relationship with your father?
LL: The book’s title came to me instantly. For one thing, yes, “Late in the Day” is the title of one of the book’s key poems, a poem about my father’s death and I have a lot of poems about my father. In fact, my next book, Rapscallion, is devoted to my father. But I think, to be honest, the title
also refers to me because it’s “late in the day” of my own life, too.
SS: Your book opens with the poem “The Favorite” about your mother and how you saw yourself, as a child, through her eyes. Can you reflect on how that has affected your writing?
LL: When I was a little girl, my mother told me I was my father’s favorite, whispering that information in my ear (she may well have said the same to my siblings). I think it made me feel special, but I think it also did some harm, separating me from my five other siblings. My father wasn’t one to hand out compliments so it always struck me as rather mysterious and strange, my being his supposed favorite. But the effect on me ultimately I think was to make me a poet. I think I thought she was telling me I had to speak up. I had to say what happened in the land of my family, in the land I grew up in.
SS: In addition to family relationships and intimacy, your poetry speaks to and celebrates nature. How does nature inspire your poetry and in what way do you see yourself in relation to nature, if not as a nature poet?
LL: I have a sister who is a gardener and a son fascinated with hiking. They are both happiest when they are outdoors working in and looking at nature. I have never fully understood that. I used to love sports: running, throwing balls, climbing trees, but I have never been one to spend hours
and hours in nature. I am most comfortable in a chair with a pen looking at nature through a window. And yet nature is something my mind is also totally immersed in. I can bury my face in a hyacinth or a lilac [and] be completely absorbed for some time. So I think it’s a bit of a paradox. I
certainly recognize the extreme beauty of nature. But I think I am most comfortable when I am writing about it: not necessarily being in it, but threading it through the needle of my imagination.
SS: You have included a poem written to Virginia Woolf, referencing Mrs. Dalloway. Could you speak about that and how Virginia Woolf may have influenced your work as a writer, as a poet?
LL: My first husband gave me a copy of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves for my twenty-first birthday and I fell so in love with it [that] I went to the bookstore in Dinkytown (where we were living at the time) and bought every Virginia Woolf book on the shelf. In a short time, I had read all the
novels and all the essays and letters of Woolf. Basically, I read everything of hers I could get my hands on. I had never been so swept away by a writer. It was like being carried downhill on a violent stream. As I grew older, she became someone I wrote and spoke about. I have a portrait
of Woolf with a featureless face painted by her sister, Vanessa. That portrait is the inspiration for “Giving Birth to Dalloway,” a poem where I imagine Woolf in the moment Dalloway is conceived. I would say Woolf has been extremely influential on my writing, more than anyone else including Plath. I think, as for so many women, Woolf speaks for me. She describes the world as I experience the world. I think her writing broke through, gave birth to feminine consciousness in a world that had primarily only heard the masculine.
SS: What other writers do you see as a major influence on your work?
LL: It would seem presumptuous to say I’m influenced by writers like Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Shelley. But they knock me out when I read them. For slightly more contemporary writers that have meant something to me, I would say Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Virginia Woolf, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Kenyon, Sharon Olds, and of course Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Plath and I grew up in the same town and had the same English teacher. But honestly, for pure poetry, I’ll never get over being thrown to my knees by epic poems like The Iliad and Paradise Lost. They are the gods of my idolatry.
SS: Your poetry has an intensity; at times a fierce sexuality and/or violence. I’m thinking of the poem “Love of My Life” and also “Toy Rabbit.” Do you see writing as an outlet and release for such intense emotion, a letting go? Or does poetry serve as a dwelling place, to cultivate and retain the emotion, to hold on?
LL: Frost famously calls poetry a “momentary stay against chaos.” Wordsworth calls it “emotion recollected in tranquility.” However huge and violent emotion can be in the living of it, in the writing of it you are calm, filing your fingernails behind the scenes as James Joyce said. Nothing more important than the emotion that comes with experience. Nothing harder than to rope it in and nail it down. Poetry is a form to contain, organize, fix, memorialize, and explain rapture or despair in song.
SS: You have included a powerful poem, titled, “Three Sisters.” I found it very moving. In my family, we are also three sisters and we have a lifelong bond. The poem ends with an invocation to “the motherload.” Could you speak about the feminine, about feminism and how your work as a poet is informed by your life as a sister, a mother, a woman?
LL: I didn’t even hear the word feminism until I was 18 when I went to college. At first, doubting like Thomas, I pushed it away, thinking of it as irrelevant. Maybe because I didn’t want to see myself or my sisters as discriminated against. But once I saw it, once the scales fell from my
eyes and I saw the so-called “patriarchy,” I couldn’t take that boulder away. Like it or not, my original consciousness has been “corrupted;” turned away from, and feminism is the lens I’ve seen the world through for the last 55 years. Everything—my literary studies, my teaching, my
poetry, my personal relationships—has been shaped by my consciousness of the patriarchy, of male domination.
SS: How can readers find more of your work and where is the best place to order your new book? Do you have plans for another?
LL: The book is sold out for the moment at Seven Kitchens Press but another press has offered to republish it and I may take the publisher up on it. In the meantime, anyone who would like to get a copy of Late in the Day can reach out to me directly at lisalowwrites@gmail.com. As for the future, I have just completed what I hope will be my next book, Rapscallion, seventy poems about my father and my relationship to him. As one of my poet friends said, there are many poetry books about mothers and daughters; not as many about fathers and daughters. It is possible I will touch some common chords in what I say there.
SS: Is there something additional that you would like to add, perhaps about your writing process, your daily practice as a writer and a poet?
LL: As for my writing practice, I try to follow Dani Shapiro’s advice to not take day dates. I am lucky to be retired so I can finally devote my life to poetry. I write in the morning, every morning, but that often overlaps into Late in the Day, and as my first chapbook’s title suggests, I myself am “late in the day.” I don’t have much time to waste. I have to work hard if I hope to leave something of consequence behind.
Lisa Low was the first runner-up for the Shakespeare Prize at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her poetry has been nominated for Best New Poets 2025 and shortlisted for Ploughshares. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Adroit Journal, The Boston Review, The Massachusetts Review, Phoebe, Pleiades, and Southern Indiana Review.
About the Contributor
Saudamini Siegrist’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Free State Review, december magazine, Oberon Poetry Magazine, Zone 3 and forthcoming in Rattle. She has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and was a finalist for the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry. She has a PhD in English literature from New York University and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Saudamini lives in New York City and works as a consultant on human rights for the United Nations.
Contents
“Managing [my husband’s] pain became fraught in the last week of his life when he could no longer swallow the medications that had kept him comfortable…The poem explores the vulnerability and intimacy found in such a crisis.” Read five poems by Amy Riddell, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Reading the Body.”
Chapbook Poem: Aphasia by Robert Allen
“Ultimately this is a poem of love and recognition, of finding the right words for the right listener, to the one who listens and understands.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2026, “Aphasia,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Egg of Anything by Paula Bohince
“The poem is filled with moments of ‘O’ sounds and ‘Ah’ sounds, mimicking the O of the egg and the Ah of the open jaw. I like that the poem is compact in its little form, also a bit egg-like.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2026, “The Egg of Anything” from A Violence by Paula Bohince, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Abraham Aondoana
“Instead of providing any solution to the issue, the poem is ready to be open to the ambiguity that can enable doubt, tenderness, and resilience to co-exist. By so doing, it points to survival not as victory, but as endurance…” Read three poems by Abraham Aondoana, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Surviving a Country That is Also a Question.”
Five Poems by Colleen S. Harris
“I am always struck by the juxtaposition of the biology and science of illness versus the life of the person living with it, and how those two spheres constantly interrupt and flow into each other.” Read five poems by Colleen S. Harris, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Inflammation As Girl.”
Chapbook Poem: Offering by Richard Jordan
“In my mind, the narrator recognizes that Harper’s fate could very well have been his own, and I hope that readers can relate, in the sense that we all have done reckless things, especially in our youth…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Offering,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Passage by Paul Hostovsky
“When she’d call me on the weekends, I was high half the time, impatient with her, and unforthcoming. It’s one of my greatest regrets. The tears well up just thinking about it. I didn’t grieve her properly. I’m grieving her now.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Passage” from Perfect Disappearances by Paul Hostovsky, along with a few words from the poet.
“The poem captures us both there in the dreaded check up appointment: me clenching crinkling paper, scared of what the lab reports say; him…lab reports in hand like some mysterious document…” Read three poems by Mary Whitlow, our fourth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Examined.”
February ’26: Section Editors & Staff Wanted
Editor Aiden Hunt begins year three with a call for applications for section editors and other editorial and production staff in this editor’s note.
“I am most comfortable in a chair with a pen looking at nature through a window. And yet nature is something my mind is also totally immersed in…So I think it’s a bit of a paradox.” Poet Lisa Low discusses her latest chapbook in this interview with Contributor Saudamini Siegrist.
“My work has always found a focus in the bodies of women, and watching the mix of strength and fragility in women as they face illness and pain has been a topic that I keep coming back to.” Read four poems by Betty Stanton, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Vein Song.”
Chapbook Poem: Found in the African Art Collection… by Rohanna Ssanyu
“It is laborious to hold on to a culture removed, one for which I am a perpetual novice. I do, however, try, and I bring my children with me. … Can this space, this culture, only be ours if cut up and reimagined?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery After the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Targeted by Frances Klein
“The poem focuses specifically on the way that online algorithms ‘read’ a person’s internet history related to pregnancy or trying to conceive, then deliver the most painful possible ads…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Targeted” from Another Life by Frances Klein, along with a few words from the poet.