“The Interviewer Acknowledges Grief” is, to me, a pivotal poem in Faizullah’s collection Seam. It is pivotal in a dual sense—both crucial to the work, and a turning point, where the speaker delves into the interior in a way that exposes the reader to a new layer of vulnerability. There’s a graceful nuance in the way the interviewer simultaneously addresses and mourns the sister who cannot allay her self-doubt, which builds a wall around the poem. Instead of addressing the audience and acknowledging the fear of failure or misunderstanding, the interviewer allows us to glimpse the intimacy of her sisterhood and her anxieties. The porous barrier between the living and the dead becomes an “opaque window.” The generator going out becomes the powerlessness of grief, and when it flickers on again, the question asked is not rhetorical, but impossible to answer for anyone but the speaker herself. In many ways, this poem is Seam’s finicky generator, jostling the reader between the dark and light places of what it might mean to belong to a place or a person.
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