An Interview with Torli Bush, Author of Requiem for a Redbird

On October 1st, 2024, Pulley Press released Torli Bush’s debut collection, Requiem for a Redbird. 

Requiem is a collection that is, in Bush’s own words, “unapologetically both Appalachian and Black.” The collection weaves its way through the complexities of death, intimacy, politics, and faith — while still centering joy and hope. 

A month after Requiem’s release, Pulley sat down with Bush to further discuss the collection. 

Pulley: What was the first poem in the collection that you wrote? At what point in the writing did you start to see the shape of Requiem? 

Bush: The first poem of the collection that I wrote was “Appalachian Bestiary” — it came from my time slamming in Pittsburgh, though the first poem I wrote in the sense of working towards a collection was “Catechism.” It came from early on in my MFA studies at West Virginia Wesleyan. 

As to the second question of the shape of the collection: I had originally had the book in four sections with fewer poems and had used the book of Psalms as a kind of inspiration for separating works by category, but in a way that also let them have an internal linking. I still managed to do that with Requiem by changing it to five sections. The work begins in a place that is incredibly personal for the first three sections and then shifts outward for the last two. One major link between each of the sections is they all start with a poem tied in some way to my mother, in expressions of gratitude, questioning, and the grief of her passing and not really knowing her.       

Pulley: In “At the Black Sheep in Huntington”, you say that everything you’ve written is “an atlas back to / family / cryptids / blackness / mine disasters / God.” What keeps bringing you back to these themes? What do you want readers to most understand about them?

Bush: I keep coming back to these subjects because they’re so rich to explore: history, identity, one’s faith. What I would want people to understand, especially as it pertains to the “cryptids” and “mine disasters”, is our stories here are complex: there is this dance between the folklore and the tragedies that define us, which is where most of us live at like all other people: not idyllic, not hopeless but in a truly liminal space where we are always in this process of becoming ourselves and tearing ourselves away from being placed in any kind of box.     

Pulley: Who are your writing influences? Who inspired you to write poetry?

Bush: I had several authors that I’ve picked up on during my program at Wesleyan, but I would have to say Terrance Hayes and James Longenbach affected me greatly from a craft perspective. My favorite piece in Requiem is “WHEREAS Appalachia was always Black, queer, and wild” and the inspiration for that came from reading Layli Long Soldier’s collection Whereas. There’s several other influences that I give a nod to in the book.

As to who inspired me to write poetry, I mean seriously take it up, I owe that to my first mentor Joe Limer. He was from Clarksburg, WV, graduated from WVU Law, and wound up teaching out at Palomar College in California. He was also a member of the San Diego poetry slam team, and  I met him while I was slamming in Pittsburgh. He took notice of me and really set me on the path that would eventually lead me to go to West Virginia Wesleyan for grad school. He passed in 2023 after a battle with cancer, but several of his poems are still on YouTube. My favorite is “Technology”           

Pulley: “JD” is a standout poem, and we know it was written before JD Vance was nominated by the Republican Party for Vice President. Do you have anything else you want to say to him?

Bush: I have some more poems with regards to JD in a manuscript of a second collection that I’m currently working on, but there’s nothing else I really want to say on him at this time. Appalachia and the country deserve better leadership than the fear mongering he used during the campaign.   

Pulley: Could you elaborate further on what you mean by Requiem being a work of hope? How do you balance hope against the starkness of poems like “The Death Of Appalachia”? 

Bush: Requiem is a work of hope because of what it holds witness to; yes, there are poems of deep nadir like “The Death of Appalachia” but even in something that dark, there is a defiance and resistance in that poem presented in Appalachia as one of the characters. Within each section of the book, there are pieces that hold harsh tension and lament but others that look to my family, friends, this region, faith, love in all its senses; there’s just so much that says, “Yes all of that is present here, the joys and sorrows. It’s life and it’s worth telling in all its facets.”