In her latest poetry collection, PULSE, Maria Nazos ushers her readers across the lines of passion and suffering, of love and cruelty, and of the obsessions that drive us. In poems that are as equally tender as they are brutal, Nazos transports her readers across space and time, from the American Midwest to Greece, from Costa Rica to the bathroom inside the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando moments before the start of a mass shooting.
PULSE is a testament to what it takes for humanity to witness tragedy, experience loss, foster resilience, and navigate love in a world that seems set on extinguishing an individual’s chance to live life on their own terms. Below, Nazos and I discuss how poetic form, a keen ear, and obsession are useful tools in a world bent on madness.
Content Warning: The interview covers topics such as mass shootings, addiction, and domestic abuse.
RS Deeren
Many of these poems pull between human passions and sufferings, with much of the latter a result of the former. “Change in Altitude” is an example of this, particularly when the speaker’s friend—wrecked by chemotherapy—“can only sit in his garage and run/his numb fingers over the cool chrome he cannot feel,” a reference to his motorcycle. How do you see passion and suffering at work in the book and more broadly as a poet?
Maria Nazos
I think passion and suffering have to co-exist. If we’re passionate about something or someone, we desire it. If we desire something, we suffer; Buddhists call desire “the flower of hell” for a good reason.
In “Change in Altitude,” my desire was to help my friend recover as I stood by, helpless yet reverent of the way he weathered pain with such grace; it taught me how to live. Even during his worst moments, he was my role model for living life fully until the end. To live and to write is to desire and suffer, but that doesn’t mean we should entrap ourselves in the starving, depressed artist persona and completely give in to the sadness.
Even behind suffering, there’s a glint of hope, even if the outcome isn’t desirable. The same goes for poems. With Joe Gouveia (my friend to whom the book and “Change in Altitude” are dedicated), I willed him to stave off cancer and live. His dying wasn’t the outcome I wanted, but I had to have loved him deeply because I still mourn him. So, it made sense that, while the poem’s (and Joe’s) ending certainly isn’t happy, it is hopeful in its suffering. I was there with him, even when it hurt us to breathe.
RS Deeren
The book comes nearly a decade after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub. How are these poems a testament to the resilient—even kinder—side of humanity? How are they a condemnation of human cruelty?
Maria Nazos
One can’t exist without the other, and to say otherwise is to erase a history of heinous acts against marginalized people. The 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting is one among many, which is precisely why the poem in PULSE, “Aubade in a Burning Bar,” uses snippets of a real love letter from two on-and-off lovers, one of whom was unfortunately among those killed.
As resilient humans, we pick kindness, but for kindness to survive, we can’t cancel out cruelty. Canceling out cruelty is denial. To deny suffering is the greatest act of cruelty and privilege, perpetuated by those who think gun violence can’t happen to them. Nobody is exempt, even and especially those who think they’re untouchable. Take Charlie Kirk. He remarked that lives lost to gun violence are a casualty we must accept. Kirk and his supporters were certain that, as cis, straight white people, human cruelty didn’t exist until it happened to them, and even now, they place blame back on trans and minority populations. In Kirk’s mind, gun violence was something that “happened” to and by people of color in inner cities and trans people, never to him, until it did. His penultimate words were a transphobic dog whistle, and his final ones were racist. Look what his denial of human cruelty, including his own, did.
On the flip side, PULSE also examines human kindness. The love between the two men in “Aubade in a Burning Bar” will always exist, as will the queer population’s resiliency. As LGBTQ+ and BIPOC can tell you, the world isn’t always tender, but somehow, we love each other without stripping away the nasty excess. It’s either that or be terrified and miserable, especially if you live in a red state. So, the connection between those two men in the poem can never be extinguished. But one of them was still killed, and we can’t ignore that truth either; to do so would be even more unkind.
RS Deeren
Work is prominent in these poems—the tedium of jobs, the emotional labor to love and to grieve, and the toll work takes on a body. “Waitress in a Small-Town Seaside Tavern” is a good example. How do these poems speak to the through line of the book: “the rhythm of heartbeats?”
Maria Nazos
Jobs are rhythm. They can be a terrible soundtrack, a great one, or a mundane one. And you have to live to work, and work to live, even if you don’t want to. What I think is cool about the different speakers in the poems is that they keep showing up. Work, especially service industry work, teaches resilience like nothing else, and although some of the people in the poems may never be happy, they sure are strong.
With jobs come pain, and sometimes not just from the work, but from the job that is life, hence what’s happening in “Waitress in a Small-Town Seaside Tavern” and all the other work-related poems. Work is, on one hand, a natural expectation, but on the other, like the heart itself, we forget that we’re there, or forget that it’s there, it becomes this humdrum routine. But there are also parts of every job that give us a lot to love, as crazy or as terrible as they can be.
“Waitress in a Small-Town Seaside Tavern” speaks to the rhythm of heartbeats in a less romantic way. The speaker is obviously repeatedly getting her heart broken, not only because she’s being abused, but because people are looking away. Yet she’s coming to work every day, still showing up, and probably to the same patrons who continue to ignore her suffering. And somehow, she’s still surviving.
In “Nightclub Owner’s Aubade,” he’s grateful to be alive and manages to stay sober despite staying up every night to oversee the bar. For somebody like that, the rhythm of heartbeats is a privilege. He did so much cocaine that he survived multiple heart attacks! At the same time, he still has a love affair with drugs, but has this renewed love affair with life.
And of course, I’ve worked almost all of those jobs in the book. Sometimes work can just be ecstatic. I absolutely loved parts of selling sunglasses. Some of it, however, is heartbreaking when you see an abused coworker and people ignoring her. Sometimes it’s beautiful because you see people who have lived and seen it all and succumb to addiction, but then have these incredible epiphanies.
Much like our pulse, work shapes us, keeps us alive, makes us want to die, feels repetitive, and ultimately gives us the choice as to how we see and interact with the world.
RS Deeren
You come back to the pantoum throughout this book. The repetitive nature of the form, I think, works great to mimic the repetition of a pulse. What drew you to this form?
Maria Nazos
I’d always tried to write pantoums and failed. At best, I could write one where I kind of understood the working structure. And it ended there.
What drew me back to the form was reading a good essay that reframed its function: “The Pantoum’s Postcolonial Pedigree,” by Vincent Gotera. It blew my whole world apart in a good way; I realized that I learn poetic forms best when I understand the end goal. Gotera said that when he instructs students on pantoums, he encourages them to pick an obsessive topic. I thought, I can do that. I’m, like, the most obsessive person I know.
Finally, I returned to a painful memory: In the dead of winter, an addict friend had stolen our canoe. When the canoe capsized, the friend survived, but the man with him drowned. For almost a decade, I wrote free verse pantoums about it, but they didn’t gel.
Pantoums are great for subjects like addiction, codependent relationships, and coming and going. But what I really love is that you also get to push the momentum. As you repeat a line, you can change it for more intensity, even though you’re circling back, you’re introducing new ideas by slackening the repetitive stanza and creating new ones to advance the ideas, the situation, and the surprises
So, for example, with “Cape Cod Pantoum,” there is a quatrain that simply describes the canoe’s sinking. In the next line, Billy didn’t just sink the canoe; he blamed it on a dolphin. There’s this subtle slant rhyme that slings unexpected humor.
RS Deeren
Continuing with craft, you’ve mastered the power of the couplet. Over two-thirds of the book is dedicated to them. It’s easy to underestimate the strength and difficulty of writing the two-line stanza. What do you think a great couplet needs?
Maria Nazos
First, you’ve got to know your enjambments, right? A lot of us will break in the predictable places, such as on a preposition. It’s about really being able to manipulate those breaks to maximize double-meanings, enjambments, and pauses, which, if you’re working with distilled long-shorter-line variations, you don’t have a lot of, so you need to maximize.
Because the longer lines have so many syllables, the reader’s ear is going to slacken. Anything after 13 or 14 syllables, nobody’s going to hear. That means you have to draw their attention to that pause differently. Whether it’s playing creatively with enjambments, doubleness, and tension. And I’m not saying every single line needs to be that way, but for me, I try to make sure I understand where my reader is and what they’re anticipating.
Another thing to think about: anytime you use a couplet, out of any other lineation, aside from maybe a single line, the couplet is the slowest rhythmic unit. Note that these delays aren’t bad, but they’re worth paying attention to. Ask yourself: how does a super-distilled, prosey, breathy line affect a reader? How does the form dictate the content?
For me, any time the subject matter refuses to be contained, whether because it’s too resilient, slippery, racing, or uneven, any time chopping it into stanzas feels too neat, then my go-to is the longer couplet. The whole point is that the subject matter refuses to be reined in, so I opt for the longer lines that kind of say, “Hey, I just slapped this poem down in a fit of passion,” even if I spent hours laboring away at it.
“Change in Altitude” is a good example of a poem that didn’t need structure, given that it’s largely about a friend’s terrible struggle with cancer and helplessness, just standing there beside him and witnessing and trying to support him; it all felt like being on a crashing plane. It would have done an injustice to the poem to contain it in stanzas.
RS Deeren
Returning to passion, there is a lot of love in these poems. “What Forever Means” replays in my head while I’m asking this question: how important is love (even the obsessive kind) to these poems?
Maria Nazos
There’s a lot of love and obsession here, and for better or worse, it’s pretty important. “What Forever Means” obsesses about how important love is, but worries about how permanent it is, too. The poem presents an ongoing paradox: What does forever mean? There’s no true definition, and how does it apply to relationships when, realistically, we never get a guarantee they will last?
Part of the obsession in “What Forever Means” stems from the speaker’s awareness of flaws and instability in her relationship, suggesting that they love each other but may not be suited for the long haul. The guy is a handsome ladies’ man; there’s a significant age difference and she faces the reality that he will probably age or die before her, and that sooner or later, she will have to look after his health. The speaker is already considering moving on to poetry and possibly to a guy who’s a poet. Yes, the speaker is still hopeful as they lie together, but she’s certainly not convinced that the relationship is etched in fire on stone.
Another dangerous, obsessive love figure appears in “Looking at Women,” where the narrator’s sex-addicted ex will not stop stalking her, and the aftereffects of her trauma feature prominently. It’s clear that her abuser is so delusional that he’s created these pornographic stand-ins for women, including the subject herself. No matter how often she says no, he sees her as a thing to be controlled and is convinced that what she truly wants is to be with him because he says so. His obsession is angering, yet sadly not uncommon. Controlling, abusive people who refuse to leave believe they are doing so for your own good, and if they can’t control your destiny, they become downright aggressive in their pursuit.
Then, there’s the obsessive love of the speaker’s longing to go back to Costa Rica, a place where, ironically, she was worse off. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for leaving the U.S., especially right now. Does it remove all your problems? No. But are there arguably some terrible circumstances we’d leave behind, like mass shootings and wars? Absolutely, and the narrator keeps obsessing about running toward and away from madness, both self-created and U.S-related alike.
RS Deeren
The book takes readers around the world, often with US expatriates who wish to never return. Sometimes, speakers ground readers deep in the Midwest. Poems like “Oil” and “Flashbacks,” however, ensure readers understand how deeply US imperialism overshadows contemporary life. Do these poems come from a place of hope, exhaustion, or some mix of the two?
Maria Nazos
They come from equal places of hope and exhaustion. As a nation, sadly, when I began writing PULSE, the same issues apparent then are still here, except they are even more egregious now.
The collection explores a question: If we leave the U.S., will life be any better? It’s something that right now, with the current presidential administration, many of us are asking ourselves. Of course, there’s that sense of yearning: if I ran away, would I escape both North America’s problems and my own?
On the other hand, there’s not just hope. The collection is also exhausted. Some issues, like gun violence, are simply not as prevalent in other countries. We impose regulations on everything for fuck’s sake, but not semi-automatic rifles? We can’t tighten a few, so someone can’t walk into Walmart and get a firearm? The whole topic is exhausting to me. Every day I hear about another mass shooting, and I’m just so world-weary. Can we please catch up on the times and data?
Still, there’s more hope and exhaustion. For example, the speaker in “Expatriate’s Pantoum” wants to escape not only problems that are less prevalent in other countries but those that are inescapable, like her own drama. The wildness is exhilarating, yes, but dangerous, too. The speaker realizes that wherever she goes, she doesn’t just attract craziness; she chases it. Finally, with a deranged expat chasing her through the Costa Rican jungle, she’s forced to confront herself. Her choices are literally chasing after her, and she can’t escape them. In other words, there’s hope in seeking out change, but there is exhaustion, especially when the chaos keeps coming back.
Meanwhile, dear friends die terrible deaths, and perfect strangers lose their lives to gun violence. Yet she, the fellow queer community, and her love alike, keep giving life second chances, even if it comes back to bite them. To me, that resilience is hopeful and tiring.
POETRY
PULSE
By Maria Nazos
Omnidawn
Published June 5, 2026
