In-Between Spaces: A Conversation with Rhoni Blankenhorn

by Bridget Kriner

Rhoni Blankenhorn is the winner of the 2024 Trio Award for a First or Second Book of Poetry; Her debut poetry collection, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet (release date July 1, 2025) considers questions of mortality, loss, grief, and friendship. I first met Rhoni Blankenhorn during the summer of 2023 when I attended the Sewanee Writers Conference–Rhoni was a scholar at the conference, and we were in the same workshop.

In our recent conversation, we explored some of the central questions the poems in her collection are concerned with–like how the observational lens oscillates between interior and exterior perspectives. We also discuss the role of art to her poetic process, the visual art both structures and inspires the collection, and the way different types of interpersonal relationships support and shape the process of creation–from friendships to mentors to peers to the writing workshop.

Bridget Kriner: I noticed dogs come up a few times in the collection. That image in the end of the opening poem really stuck with me. You write, “Like a child. Like a bad dog. / Again and again / I arrive at the latch.” There’s something about a bad dog that is very endearing.

Rhoni Blankenhorn: I still dream about my childhood dog. I didn’t intend to include so many dogs in the poems, they just sort of appeared and became metaphorically imbued — cute but with teeth, animals who are supposed to do what they are told. I’m interested in the possibility of violence that lies just below the surface, and in the line between obedience and disobedience. I think pushing against boundaries and finding ways to exist in liminal space are both assertions of self and versions of rebellions.

BK: There are visual sections towards the beginning and end of the collection, as well as several ekphrastic poems, and other mentions of art. Can you share how you relate to visual art?

RB: Visual art and poetry are both rooted in ways of seeing but are different ways of translating personal experience. Both move between exteriority and interiority, for the artist and for the audience. In this collection, even poems that aren't directly engaging with art are in conversation with perception and reflection.

The two visual sections are sampled from Ginny Benson, who was a multimedia artist, and a very dear friend. She passed away a few years ago. Many of the poems reference Ginny. While the book speaks to grief, what I’ve been writing towards is remembrance, love, and the influence love has on my individual experience. How do I carry my loved ones, whether they are living or dead, with me?

Including Ginny’s artwork is a visual representation of that thought process. Ginny’s glitchy, abstracted, and remixed video and sound work pulls from old VHS tapes, and now, I’ve put my fingerprints on it. This all makes me think about memory, and how memory functions. Is memory a kind of appropriation? What I remember about my friend is not the same as the reality of her. The same goes for my parents, family members, and other losses that surface in the poems.

I hope the visual sections speak to the liminal spaces of love and remembrance, and offer portals into and out of the book.

BK: This makes so much sense to me as a reader and changes a lot for me knowing more about the artwork and having that context.

RB: I'll also say that in ordering the book, I leaned on my friendship with Ginny as a sort of framework. I was interested in showcasing love between friends over the familial or the romantic, because I think friend-love is often relegated to a lower status. Though familial and romantic love are also very much part of the poems.

I’m interested in how love can bridge the gap between two people, and how it creates an intimate, liminal space. I’m always drawn to boundaries, and I’m so curious about the space between things. What can happen in the liminal space vs. on one side or the other?

BK: Oh, interesting. I immediately thought of the movie Coco (because I have young children) in the way it represents how memories of loved ones can interact with the living — very much in the way you are talking about liminality.

RB: Exactly. Living is such a solitary experience, but we carry the people we love with us.

BK: Tell me how you came to be a poet.

RB: I was a nerdy little reader as a kid. But the first time I remember being proud of a piece of writing was when I was around seven. I wrote a story about a haunted house, which is kind of funny now that I have a haunted book.

BK: Later, you studied poetry — along with, as you mentioned, visual art.

RB: My first poetry workshop was with Jeffrey McDaniel at Sarah Lawrence. He was hugely encouraging to me as a young poet, and he continues to be. I think sometimes it's those early teachers that help you see what might be possible.

BK: When I'm in a workshop, I find it the most helpful to just hear about how others read my poem. What did you bring to it as a reader? What is the meaning you take from it? Because that is what best informs my revision process, much more so than I don't know about this word or this line break.

RB: In a workshop with Paisley Rekdal, she encouraged us to ask — What kinds of questions is the poem raising for you? — versus — Where does the period need to go in this line?

BK: I was just writing about this idea of early encouragement from writer-teachers. When I was a teenager, I went to a creative writing summer camp at Bowling Green State University that was hosted by the MidAmerican Review. And when I was an undergraduate, in my first or second year, Honorée Jeffers was a visiting Lecturer at Cleveland State — very early in her writing career, probably before her first poetry collection. I was just thinking about how much generosity she showed me and my poems way back then, as such a young person and poet. You know, how important it can be to have someone tell you — you should keep writing poems.

RB: Mentors are so important, and so is finding peers and community.

BK: I agree. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that peers and community occurred to me very recently in my writing life. One thing I took away from Sewanee was that being in community with poets is not just comforting, it's actually essential to my work.

RB: Much of the work writers do is solitary, so finding ways to support each other is essential. I learn so much about my writing when readers share their experience with me. Once a poem is with a reader, I don’t feel like it belongs to me anymore, it becomes something shared. When I'm working on poems, it's helpful to understand how the people who don't live in my brain might encounter the language.

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Bridget Kriner is a community college professor in Cleveland, Ohio where she teaches English and Women's & Gender Studies. Her work has appeared in Rattle (Poets Respond), Variant Literary, Shelia-Na-Gig, Thimble Literary Magazine and Split this Rock, where she won First Place in the Abortion Rights Poetry Contest in 2012. She participated in the Sewanee Writers' Conference as a Poetry Contributor in 2023 and will attend The Kenyon Review Residency in summer 2024. Read more about Bridget on her website.

Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold, and at Trio House Press’ online store. Pre-order in March and get a free book as part of our Women’s History Month special!