New Books Network: Interview with Concetta Principe on "Disorder"

Host: Holly Gattery
Guest: Concetta Principe
Date: November 10, 2025

Overview

In this engaging and introspective episode, Holly Gattery interviews poet and scholar Concetta Principe about her latest poetry collection, Disorder (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). The collection explores the metaphorical relationship between home and mind, focusing on how mental illness destabilizes the supposed sanctuary of the home. Principe discusses her creative process, the autobiographical nature of her poetry, how she uses form (enjambment, prose poems) to express difficult emotions, and her thoughts on writing about mental illness. Selected poems are read throughout the conversation, deepening the discussion on poetry’s capacity to capture the complexity of lived experience.

Key Discussion Points

1. Origins of "Disorder"

• Autobiographical Roots & Emotional Dysregulation:

  • Principe explains the book grew retrospectively, as she assembled poems written over years after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). The earliest poem, about blueberries and a disastrous breakfast with her son, did not make it into the book but set the thematic tone:

    “I was trying to get across this anger with what I had done to the food and this, the way I was behaving with my son…” (03:14)

  • She reveals she did not perceive her emotional struggles as “emotional dysregulation” until her diagnosis with BPD:

    “I wanted to convey the feeling of, well, confess in one way about my emotional dysregulation, which I didn’t understand was emotional dysregulation at the time…” (03:48)

• Poetic Form and Emotional Flow:

  • She experimented with enjambment and line break, allowing meanings to “slide” from one line into another, mirroring the instability of emotions:

    “So when I say slide, it’s like we come to the end of the line on a word that has one meaning, and then by the time we get to the next line, that word has taken on a different meaning.” (04:48)

2. Technique: Enjambment and Language Distillation

• On Breaking Lines and Double Meanings:

  • Principe’s approach was largely intuitive, feeling her way toward significant words and line breaks:

    “I’m writing something and then I feel a word has significance, double significance. And that’s when I end the line.” (08:44)

  • She cites modernist influences, especially William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”, around how interruption and breath shape reading and meaning.

• Intentional Distillation:

  • Holly admires the distilled, concentrated nature of the poetry:

    “I really do feel like in these line poems that they… really, really shine so beautifully.” (13:03)

  • Principe connects the tightness of her poems to the reductive, sometimes violent energy of anorexia and rage, themes she explores directly.

3. Poem Readings (Kirby Sampler)

• “Anorexia” poem (11:51):

  “Dirt this pitcher / Dig this girth with debt / Denching off excess...”
  (11:51–12:36)

• Second Anorexia Poem (13:25):

  “The anorexic starch, the steak, pepper the park before you plate… Five seconds is all you need.”
  (13:25–13:59)

• On “Sad Thighs”: She describes the difficulty of assembling the long poem, how fragments hold intense, compressed emotion:

  “There’s one, so I’m going to pull a Kirby… cries of don’t desert me of herself. She cries at the atom of history / Cries a four year old girl on the street fumbling after Mum striding away / Cry the flowers.” (17:04)

4. On Writing Mental Illness

• Against Narrative Resolution:

  • Both Gattery and Principe agree that poetry’s form resists the contrived “cadence” and expectations of narrative prose about illness:

    “I don’t believe that there’s any of that framework that inhibits… relaying the actual experience of what it’s like to live within a mental illness.” (22:06) “There’s no way to create a narrative of your health. There’s no way to say that these are the causes.” (23:12)

  • Principe reflects on how her poetry emerged from childhood memories of grief, anger, and “not rightness”—feelings foundational to her experience of BPD.

• The Slipperiness of Experience:

  • Gattery likens the poetic experience to a “biofilm brain”—a sense of emotional slipperiness and instability captured perfectly in Principe’s verse:

    “Like you say that... I don’t have the word. I’m like, yeah, I don’t have the word either, but I know what you’re talking about.” (29:44)

5. Poetry, Prose Poems, and Artistic Contamination

• Shift to Prose Poems:
  • The latter part of Disorder contains prose poems, which for Principe provide a way to “move through the contamination and explore it” (38:42–40:14):

    “With the prose poem, I can move through the contamination and explore it...” (39:09)

  • She reads from a prose poem that explores language and memory, highlighting her attentiveness to voice and rhythm:

    “Where are your lips as you read this? ... Let me say about that. Let me say that this day. Day is everything…” (43:16–44:26)

6. The Reader–Author Relationship

• Books as Dance & Bridge:
  • Gattery describes the reading experience as a collaborative dance between book and reader; Principe is delighted by the resonance her poems find:

    “They spanned the bridge to the other side.” – Principe (42:34)

7. Current & Future Work

• Works in Progress:
  • Principe is composing a lyric nonfiction piece titled “My Mother’s Memoir”, a meditation on ageism, and a novella about depression and suicide:

    “I just finished a novella on depression and suicide… Actually, I love novellas. They are perfect.” (44:41–46:43)

  • She and Gattery express shared affection for the novella as a form—intimate, immediate, character-driven.

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On writing about BPD and autobiography:

  “I realized that all of my poetry is infused with this disorder… My poetry, I have to admit, is autobiographical.” – Principe (05:23)

• On emotional ambiguity in poetry:

  “There’s kind of interference that goes on, which is actually, I think, the best way to describe emotional dysregulation. And it’s not one emotion. It’s all the emotions that are squashed into one.” – Principe (05:04)

• On the ‘off’ feeling in childhood:

  “I don’t even… I’ve never known how to explain this one. But the feeling that it’s not right, the day is not right, the color of the sky is not right. I don’t like the feeling.” – Principe (24:36)

• On the impossibility of narrative closure in mental illness:

  “I don’t think there is another side to your disorder. There’s only… the continuation of it through your life and how you’re engaging with it at a given time.” – Principe (32:43)

• On artistic ‘contamination’:

  “I worried that I was contaminating people with my… my stuff.” – Principe (40:14)
  “It’s interesting that what I worry is contamination is actually artistic expression.” (41:08)

Important Timestamps

• 03:14 – Origin of the collection: the (unpublished) blueberry poem, emotional dysregulation, and line-breaking.
• 08:44 – On enjambment and double meanings at line breaks.
• 11:51 / 13:25 / 17:04 – Poem readings: “Anorexia”, second poem on anorexia, “Sad Thighs” fragment.
• 22:06 – Poetry vs. prose for mental illness: resisting narrative, embracing discontinuity.
• 24:36 – Childhood root of “off” feelings, metaphor of the house/mind.
• 38:42 – Why transition to prose poems, processing “contamination”.
• 43:16 – Reading of prose poem: exploring language, memory, and sound.
• 44:41 – Current and future works, thoughts on novellas.
• 47:16 – Novella as the form of our time, character-driven narrative.

Episode Takeaways

• Principe’s Disorder is a raw, inventive collection drawn from lived experience with BPD, childhood memories, and the fluctuating boundaries between home and psyche.
• Through intuitive enjambment, wordplay, and the use of both lyric and prose poems, Principe articulates emotional ambiguity, instability, and the impossibility of “curing” or narratively closing off mental illness.
• Poetry’s “weirdness”—its ability to hold and express the unspeakable—makes it particularly suited to capturing psychological complexity and the undercurrents of daily life.
• Collaboration between poet and reader, as well as among mothers, children, and selves, is at the heart of both life and literature.
• Principe continues to write, now focusing on lyric nonfiction around the maternal and on ageism, as well as shorter fiction exploring depression.

“There’s no way to create a narrative of your health. There’s no way to say that these are the causes.”
—Concetta Principe (23:12)

“Poetry is where emotion is generated or emotion is housed.”
—Concetta Principe (31:42)