For today’s Afterwords interview, I’m so excited to introduce Ivy Rozen, who just released her first full-length collection of poems through Seed Bed Press. If I Love You is a narrative poetry collection I’ve been fortunate enough to hear live, so I am so stoked to bring you a bit of Ivy and her work to experience until you can find yourself experiencing it on paper or in-person for yourself!
S: Ivy, thank you so much for joining me on my Afterwords series this week. To kick us off, would you please provide a brief overview of your book and its themes to my subscribers?
Ivy: Thank you for having me! I’m so excited to share more about If I Love You with your subscribers.
A central pillar of the collection is unraveling family structures. The poems expose gaslighting, conditional loyalty, and a haunting, toxic inheritance passed down through generations of women. The book tackles the predatory nature of “kindness,” and the emotional aftermath of violation. There is a gritty exploration of using recklessness and dissociation as armor against past trauma. The collection details the exhausting daily maintenance of living with trauma and anxiety. The overarching theme of the book is stubborn, defiant survival.
S: Defiant survival feels like…exactly what a lot of us need to name this ache inside of us. This idea of toxic inheritances is a form of grief I love sharing on my Substack because I don’t think it gets highlighted often enough. Thank you for your courage in sharing your story in this way. Although a lot of your book is memoir-like in some ways, I’m wondering about your poetic inspirations for this book. What books inspired you as you wrote? Or which spoken word artists inspired you?
Ivy: I love to share and build community, so absolutely happy to highlight my story! To answer your question though, most of this collection was written before I started to explore poetry seriously. It’s primarily my diary. I think the oldest poem in the collection is “Little Miss Perfect”, and you can really see the difference between that and the poems in the last chapter that I wrote more recently.
I have been inspired by a lot of poets, though, since committing to poetry: I love how Kim Addonizio always leans into the “unpretty” emotions, and Sharon Olds’s use of plain, direct, language to deliver devastating truths about family trauma. I also love how Ada Limón writes about the quiet anchors that save us from our personal chaos, and of course Sylvia Plath’s use of domestic imagery and existential rage to transform familial betrayal into personal mythology.
S: I could absolutely feel the changes your poetry embodies through your collection. Since we’re talking about change and growth in your poetry, I’m wondering about what came up as you wrote that caused you to experience some growing pains. Which sections/poems challenged you the most, and which ones came to you with ease?
Ivy: The first two chapters are really hard for me. Raw is about being taken prematurely, and not being able to trust your protectors. Ripe gets more into detail about the distance that grows between the body and the self after abuse. The rest of the book lives more in my coping mechanisms, but reading those first two chapters always forces me to remember the truth, and the importance of maintaining all that I’ve built since then: love, family, a stable home. For the most part writing the poems comes easily to me; I’m just venting.
The one poem that was hardest to write, though, was “Love, Mom.” It’s the last letter my mom wrote me, and it was so cruel I never wanted to forget that it was really said. I forced myself to make it into a poem to help me stay away from her. It’s hard sometimes. I love her, but I don’t think there’s any coming back from that, and my life has been truly wonderful since that decision.
S: I’m glad to hear that you’ve found healing in your life from this separation, even though it’s painful. Often, I think we are more surprised by the healing we find within pain compared to the pain we know we’re going to feel, you know? While you were writing, what surprised you the most? About the process or the way the book was taking shape? Something else?
Ivy: I was initially surprised to see so many recurring images and tropes (flowers, growth, rotting fruit). It wasn’t planned, but I adhere to psychoanalytical literary theory and view all my work through that lens. I hardly ever edit my work, which I know would elevate the quality, because I like how genuine it is in capturing that specific moment. For that same reason, I can’t take notes on a poem idea to come back to later. It either flows from me immediately in the moment or it passes forever. While I admire the craft of poetry, for me it’s primarily art therapy. Looking back at my healing journey through my poetry, I can see where the recurring themes start to die off, and where I’m reminded of them later on, in smaller ways. It really mirrors PTSD: it never really goes away, but you get a better handle on it over time.
S: I think poetry has many aspects of art therapy to it, in the very least that it is a written artform to experiment with, to play with even, to see how to best capture a specific moment. I’m glad you’ve found so much benefit from writing poetry and now want to share it with others. While you’ve already touched on this a bit in your previous answer, how else has writing your book helped in your own personal grief/healing journey?
Ivy: I’m learning this week that I’m still in the process. I write the poem and let the feeling go, but if I don’t reread what I wrote ever, then I don’t really process that feeling. I’ve been performing some of my older poems for the first time, and while I’d love to say that I’m past all this, the performances have been giving me panic attacks. I don’t like to let those things control me though; I feel like that’s how my abusers win. I’ll always do the difficult thing, sometimes when I don’t need to, mostly to prove to myself that I can. Writing If I Love You was cathartic in its own right, but this tour is the next step in my trauma healing, and it relies heavily on exposure therapy. Luckily, these crowds are the kindest and most supportive people in the world, and I’m always met off stage with hugs.
S: It’s funny you bring up the idea of your audiences being so kind, because that ties directly into my next question! If readers/audiences could only take away one thing from your book, what do you hope they carry with them?
Ivy: I’m going to emphasize this here: survival is an act of defiance.
While you can’t choose the family or the trauma you inherit, you can choose what you build out of the wreckage. Softness, joy, and love don’t have to mean submission; they can be maintained out of spite against a world that wants to harden you. My rage has been harnessed to give me a beautiful life full of the kindness and love I doubted existed. When men shout at me on the street and my body tightens up, I let the fear wash over me, let it turn to anger, and direct that energy toward using my mindfulness tools and focusing my emotions in healthy and productive ways that get me closer to my goals. It’s never easy, but it is possible.
S: It’s never easy, but it’s possible! I’ll snap snap for that! As a closing question, where can readers buy your book and connect with you more after they read this interview?
Ivy: Yes, please connect with me! My book If I Love You is available online at SeedBedPress.org, and you can order the book with the exclusive giftset at my website IvyRozen.com. I’ll be on tour in the northeast through the end of July. My tour dates are also posted on my website.
S: Ivy, congratulations again on your full-length collection! I’ll be cheering you on as you do your book tour. And thanks again for joining me this week on Afterwords!
Ivy: Thank you for having me!