"In my writing, the personal often gets filtered through the speculative, where intimate themes of loss, grief, and reflection are refracted through the lens of imagined, post-human futures. My poetry is inspired in part by literary modes outside of poetry, particularly science fiction and fantasy, history and myth. Spoiler alert, “Close Encounter…” is a poem whose speaker is intended to be a non-human entity, perhaps an AI, in a post-human world. Humans may no longer exist, but the culture persists somehow (perhaps in some kind of elaborate simulation), and there is a latent sense of nostalgia and self-awareness when the speaker comes face to face with—of all creatures—a tiger.

The tiger is a potent symbol for me for many reasons. In very real terms, it’s an animal whose numbers decrease every year because of habitat loss and poaching so using the tiger gives the poem that immediate layer of loss, of the horror of what has been wrought on the world. The tiger in the poem is most likely a clone, generated in a lab, reduced to a living artifact for amusement and yet it evokes something in the speaker that speaks to a kind of realness. The poem pays homage to William Blake’s “The Tyger” and hopefully recalls some of that poem’s comparisons between ‘civilized’ beauty and primal ferocity."