Words Gilded in Gold: Aimee Seu’s Luxuriously Tender Velvet Hounds

Author Aimee Seu

Aimee Seu’s debut collection, Velvet Hounds, winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize, pairs brilliant and lavish hybridity—in both content and form—with an unguarded semi-autobiographical examination of matrilineage and disordered eating, queer eroticism and luxury, and liminally, remnants of the tumultuous expansion of self. Donned in the queerest and most magnificently tacky fur coat, Seu exposes the soft underbelly of guttural exultation and sorrow.

In this blunt-chic edition of Sticky Fingers, Aimee Seu discusses literary hybridity, maternal influences, and exuberant fashion with Honey intern Aja St. Germaine then reads “Ode to Pomegranates” from her collection.

Here is an excerpt from Aimee’s stunning poem, “Ox Hunger Essay”:  

2. Mother

at kitchen table drinking her wine
as if distress were a country
I’d save up and go to
someday. I eye the fridge. 
She says All you do is want.

Aja St. Germaine: Aimee, the hybridity inherent in “Ox Hunger Essay” is stunning. I wanted to start our discussion here. I believe that hybridity has infinite power because it defies the strict ideas and misconceptions of genre. For instance, essays are often viewed as the sole “informative” genre, limiting knowledge-sharing in other forms (like poetics). How did you decide on this poem’s form? Perhaps we can talk about its numbered sections and the variations of line and stanza length.

I was thinking too: providing the definition of “Ox Hunger” recontextualizes defining terms as neither academic nor literary, but somewhere in the liminal. Hence, we also get the concept that hybrid creations are the liminal space between two (strict) genres, in this case, poetry and the essay. Taking this idea one more step: the liminal space isn’t just the “in-between” space; instead, it becomes its own entity (due to lack of confinement). 

Aimee Seu: Aw Aja, thank you for such careful looking! I received a lot of help with “Ox Hunger” during my time at the University of Virginia working with the marvelously intuitive and inventive poet Lisa Russ Spaar as well as Queen Rita Dove. I believe we looked closely at both the variances and fragmentedness of The Glass Essay by Anne Carson as well as a longer piece in Sally Wen Mao’s collection Oculus. I stowed bulimia away in a bursting closet of my person and so the concentrated and sometimes explosive sections and line breaks of “Ox Hunger” felt like an honest parallel of that behavior.

Disordered eating itself has felt like such a compartmentalized, secretive difficulty. I wanted the poem to feel like a haunted painting twitching or a face you’re barely sure you saw peering out from the background of a scene in a horror movie because that’s how it is to struggle with it—I felt fully possessed by it when I was alone and privately shadowed by it in even the most mundane daily scenes or bright frequented rooms of my life. I hope I’m making sense—it might be one of those things you only know if you know it too well.

Bulimia nervosa often felt like a monster so much bigger than me that I couldn’t see its edges, as in I couldn’t get far enough away from it to see it fully and so I couldn’t comprehensively or steadily represent it. This form’s little bursts felt like a fighting chance, like if I could just convey one small glimpse, eke out one single note of the massive cacophony that experience was and is, that would be a start.

Your ideas on making the in-between its own space is the goal! Your articulation is gorgeous. I know I’m reiterating something so many people have said and acted upon before but breaking down binaries in one place (even one that seems as low-stakes and privileged as genre) inches toward a future utopia where the no-man’s-(woman’s, spirit’s)-land between other illusory and more consequential binaries like gender, sexuality (even the joy and sadness binary) become granted and easily inhabitable.

ASG: Your approach to childhood memories extends past nostalgia and reaches a wealth of powerful coalition with childhood friends and family, redefining what wealth means in “First Love,” with an epigraph for Dyshea. I’d love to know where you draw power from, both on and off the page. 

AS: My favorite art is work that goes back and gives voice to the childhood self who felt just as much (often more) than our adult selves but who didn’t have the voice yet to articulate or defend itself. Allowing myself to forget or block out how full my interior world was as a kid would give me a pass to not take the experience of children in my life seriously as well. I dedicated VH to my 15 & 16-year-old niece and nephew who are two amazing artists I admire so much. That we’re allowed to go back and voice the unvoiced, like honoring the love of my ninth-grade boyfriend who rode his BMX bike to see me through an ice storm, is some kind of magic trick, a kind of worship.  

ASG: Could you explain the impact of your maternal lineage in your praxis?

AS: My mother is a fundamentalist Christian tea party republican. She writes for a conservative magazine. In my lifetime she’s become increasingly more zealous and we don’t see eye to eye on anything. I used to have this self-aggrandizing idea that my poetics were on a mission to combat her publications, just like every time I vote I imagine I’m just canceling out hers. Eventually I realized what a microscopic vendetta that was and that I wanted to take joy from my work too, to let it be whatever it wanted. More importantly for my own life, I realized how much my work actually is owed to my mother. Beneath any gnarly political views or religious fear, she’s a talented writer. Being raised by someone who sees the world through language was the greatest gift to my path. I have a distinct memory as a kid of my mother and I drooling over the word elegant: “Doesn’t it sound like exactly what it means,” my mother illuminated “like a bolt of silk unfurling as it falls down a spiral staircase!” These are the moments that defined my obsession with writing. Even as a stressed single mother of four, she taught me good writing just by the magical way she narrated our life. To her, the untamable queerness, oozing want, unapologetic confession, and other illicit partying in my work is horrifyingly immoral. It disturbs her as much as her work infuriates me.

The main failure of Velvet Hounds is that to tell its story, some things must be flattened. No experience can be told as rich or complexly as it was; I believe first books must be the greatest example of this. In the book I was only able to paint the picture of a mother-daughter relationship as though peering through just one face of experience’s many-faceted jewel. My work is nonfiction but telling a story doesn’t mean you told every story. My relationship with my mother is complex and we are both flawed but she is a whole person and that is much more than I was able to conjure in the caricatured mother figure of VH.

Driving alone, just a coral slip
underneath, rolling a blunt, mobwife of midnight
convenience store, buying peach rings,
white chocolate & a lighter
engraved with the initial of everyone
whose name starts like mine.

(Thrift Store Fur by Aimee Seu)

ASG: I am dying to know about your Velvet Hounds brass knuckle rings (our Hive was looking at your Instagram). Equally, I was fascinated by the shameless self-admitted tackiness paired with steadfast power in “Thrift Store Fur,” the first poem in Velvet Hound’s part two. How does your fashion bleed into your work as a poet and as a person?

AS: Yayyyyyy, this question makes me very happy! I had 2 gold knuckle rings made that say Velvet and Hounds. Exorbitant, I know, haha! I guess I believe in tackiness or at least tactlessness when it means an unabashed celebration of the luxe and lush. I’ve been dreaming about my first book of poetry since I was that loser in the back of a middle school classroom writing embarrassing love poems in a spiral unicorn notebook. And I was that raggedy kid your parents were annoyed slept over for three weeks straight and ate all the pop tarts, but who they learned to love (I hope) through some combination of their pity and my charm. I’ve slept in worse places, I’ve felt hopeless—why wouldn’t I lay it on a little heavy that I’ve come a long way and attained something I’m proud of? Why wouldn’t we gild our favorite words in gold? I don’t know how much my fashion and work bleed into each other as much as radiate out from the same impulse within my heart to delight in what’s brutal, natural, thrown away but wonderful, haunted and glamorous, easy and soft all at once. I want to write poetry that feels like wearing fluffy soft pajama pants with an alligator skin, gold studded bra, a motorcycle jacket with too many zippers with the patch your best friend made you hanging off the back.

ASG: It’s so refreshing to read a collection by a queer femme who’s simply so blunt. Could you talk more about this? Your work calls us to be selfish and revolutionarily vain, pairing what mainstream viewership often deems “ugly” with our inherent decadence. How does your queerness redefine beauty?

AS: Thank you for your thoughtful generosity Aja, in every question I can hear your protectiveness of and belief in me as a fellow queer writer. I hope that my unabashed queerness (which gained its courage very slowly and is still finding itself) can do whatever small hex in the slow freeing of the common consciousness. Each of our individual struggles to be gentle, give/receive love and bliss out must do something good for the larger story.

About Aimee Seu

Aimee Seu, the author of Velvet Hounds, graduated from the University of Virginia Creative Writing MFA Poetry Program in 2020 as a Poe/Faulkner Fellow where she was recipient of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. She is currently in the Poetry PhD program at Florida State University.

About Aja St. Germaine

Aja St. Germaine (they/them) is a genderqueer butch interested in queer decolonial liberation through literary praxis. They graduated magna cum laude in May of 2022 with a Bachelor of Arts in Critical Studies English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where they served as the editor of the university’s queer student-led zine, OUT., and student-edited Dr. Debra Barker’s “Post-Indian Aesthetics: Affirming Indigenous Literary Sovereignty” published with Arizona Press in 2022. St. Germaine is a Ronald E. McNair scholar, and was awarded the Kirkwood Formal Poetry Award, Outstanding Queer Student Leader Award, and the Chandra Talpade Mohanty Award by the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. They are currently interning for Honey Literary, a 501(c)(3) BIPOC women and femme literary arts organization founded by Dr. Dorothy Chan and Dr. Rita Mookerjee.

Socials:
Instagram: @ajast.germaine
Twitter: @ajastgermaine