We became aware of American poet Alex Gurtis through his work as a literary critic and then further familiarized ourselves with his work in the literary community—specifically, his work uplifting Canadian authors. Then, we learned more about his poetry, and our interest was doubly piqued. We picked up his chapbook, When the Ocean Comes to Me (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and were blown away. His work is wild and rangy and polished and devotional. We had to talk to him, and are delighted he agreed.
Welcome, Alex, to our Power Q & A series.
When the Ocean Comes to Me (chapbook) by Alex Gurtis, Bottlecap Press, 2024.
Q: Your poetry seems to exist in the midst of perpetual motion: a ribboning out to times and places and people. Would you tell us about creating this energy in your writing which makes it feel alive and electric.
A: My creative process for this collection was grounded in answering how we project our emotions onto the landscapes around us and how those spaces come back to us. As someone living in an area that is a North American ground zero for climate change, I wanted to capture the interplay between, as you put it, “the ribboning out between time and place and people.” That last word, people, is the most important. My work is very anthropocentric, focused on real people living within changing spaces. There is an ecopoetic aspect too, but I wanted to focus on humanizing the climate crisis and parallel political crisis. In the same way a landscape painter pulls from their surroundings, my subject matter was the people around me. I like to think I applied an ekphrastic gaze in freezing the world around me like a still life in motion and then bringing it to life on the page.
In my opening poem, “Hurricane Party,” the anxiety of watching a storm barreling at you non-stop for 48 hours while you are being told the apocalypse is now, is mentally exhausting. It leaves you a little unhinged. It’s a space where you “walk backwards out of a store/with a bottle of wine” and “watch a man as cracked as the sidewalk/ juggling a baseball, football, and basketball” as entire communities are devastated. None of those experiences are made up. A lot of these poems started as collages of images around certain thematic events like Hurricane Ian. The other half of the collection is political by way of economics and really pulled from my time working in grocery, as a barista, running a bookstore, and working as an adjunct. So many people in my life have been close to or spent time houseless. Rent is high and pay is low in Orlando, Florida and the storms keep coming. My poem “Absence of a Diet Coke” began as a riff off a comment made by a peer in MFA who couldn’t buy a coke. Her credit card bounced because our TA pay got delayed a month.
Ultimately, the real currency we are lacking isn’t dollars but time. We are reacting too slow to stop the climate crisis. Florida is under Neo-Fascist control (as is America as a whole) and the life plan we were all sold, the “American Dream” is a bunch of bollocks. “Post Capitalist Americana” could be retitled “Life in Late-Stage Capitalist America” but wouldn’t have the same snap. Still, it raises a question about identity and how it relates to place. What is America after capitalism? Is there one? Similarly, what is the Floridian identity after “the sea began to rise”? Worst case is probably an archipelago thanks to the Lake Wales Ridge but that's a lot of displaced people when we are just struggling to survive. This isn’t a uniquely Florida problem either. So many people around the country are dealing with disasters like fires that are forcing us to rethink where we live.
Anxiety is a perpetual motion, a sort of flight response, I’m trying to capture though, to borrow a phrase from Carolyn Forché, “the poetry of witness” which I try to apply to communities and spaces that are being erased by extreme weather events incited by the political refusal to accept carbon’s role in changing our planet. Similarly, I want to create a space to help readers find anxious affirmations and grieve while also maintaining a space for readers to hold hope for the future, even if it looks vastly different than we imagined or want it to be. There is something powerful in recording the stories of the people now so people can look back and see that the world was scary, we were scared, but also, we lived.
More about When the Ocean Comes to Me:
When the Ocean Comes to Me is a collection dripping with the anxiety of the Anthropocene. Salt water rises along Florida’s coast as inhabitants watch a clock’s “hands chase each other/ along their predestined path.”
These poems meditate on how “education is a type of trauma” and ask how we can cope with the knowledge that our planet is changing before our eyes. Imagist studies of built environments come unraveled as late-stage capitalism erodes cities and natural landscapes alike.
Writer Alex Gurtis
More about Alex Gurtis:
Alex Gurtis is the author of the chapbook When the Ocean Comes to Me (Bottlecap Press, 2024). He is an assistant editor for Burrow Press and runs an occasional interview series at Barrelhouse.
A ruth weiss Foundation Maverick Poet Award Finalist and a winner of Saw Palm’s 2022 Florida Fauna and Flora contest, Alex received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. His work as a poet and critic has appeared in or is forthcoming in anthologies and publications such as Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Barrelhouse, Bear Review, HAD, Heavy Feather Review Identity, Identity Theory, Rain Taxi, The Shore and West Trade Review, among others.
An avid believer in community and leaving the world a little better than he found it, Alex serves on the board of the Kerouac Project of Orlando and is often found at the intersection of writing and place making. You can follow him on Instagram @apbg_alex, Bluesky @alexgurtis.bsky.social and Substack,