Jalen Giovanni Jones is a Black and Filipino writer, born and raised in Los Angeles. A Kimbilio fellow and a Lambda fellow, his work has also been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Workshop, the Tin House Workshop, and elsewhere. Jalen’s writing can be found in Electric Literature, Callaloo, Foglifter, and elsewhere. He was formerly the Editorial Assistant for The Southern Review, an editor for Electric Literature, and he has also worked elsewhere. Jalen holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University.
JALEN GIOVANNI JONES: Many of the poems in Behnt take on an elegiac quality, given that they reckon with the passing of the speaker’s mother. How did you seek to challenge the traditional elegy through these poems?
TEMPERANCE AGHAMOHAMMADI: Writing about and/or engaging with grief (not always, but a significant amount of it) often takes the perspective of distance, which lends it a more centered affect. By this I mean the elegy by nature is reflective, and to reflect, one must have temporal distance from the event of death. The nature of reflection is to marry together the temporal past of the event with the contemporary moment of recollection, and all that has occurred in the life of the speaker since the death. This is an important approach, and one that has been expertly and compellingly used by many poets (Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Wreck of the Deutschland comes to mind). Behnt ‘behnds,’ if you will, this relationship. These poems were written during and right after the death of my mother, and so the act of recollection and memory is located in an immediate past, not a distant or medium-distant past. In doing so, Behnt endeavors to mimetically reproduce the grief and various affects I experienced in the immediacy of her death, a grief that annihilated the “I,” which was baroque and maximalist, in which I was told I was grieving ‘too much.’ The poems in the chapbook (and the full-length manuscript) deliver the immediate grief, migrating into theatres of the mind and physical environment to enact grief, sundering, and ecstasy – the moment of extreme pain or pleasure which catalyzes a transcendence of the self (from the Greek ekstasis, meaning to stand outside oneself). The grief in Behnt, the elegy of Behnt, stands within and outside itself, courting the rococo and the baroque to create a vivid, saturated textual brocade that does not fear grieving ‘too much.’
The elegy, I believe, must confront, destroy, and rebuild itself from the atomization of its elements. Grief, especially after the loss of a mother, reorganizes and, in some ways, re-enchants the world; one searches for meaning in magick and dream. And, if magick and dream are real, potent forces which create real change in the world, which I believe, then we must take the immediate experience of fresh grief seriously, and not only what it destabilizes, but what new containers for life, being, and identity it constructs. The elegy is a mode that we can re-adapt as a mode and form of immediacy in order to challenge regimes of affect and overload which occur in this world; it can be an antidote to numbness in the face of calamity.
JGJ: The language of these poems tend toward the eclectic, the maximalist, and the speculative. Were there specific poets that inspired this approach to language? Did you find inspiration for Behnt’s language in non-literary work as well?
TA: I often think “maximalism” is only defined as such in comparison to a vague and abstract baseline aesthetic to which we compare minimalism and maximalism, reproducing a binary in which one falls into one or the other. Does a moderate aesthetic exist between the two? I think not — the place between minimalism and maximalism is not a balance, but the place in which the two forces meet and combat each other. I mention this to say that this proliferates in our experiences of affect (including grief) where we, colloquially, will often say that one feels “too much” or “too little.” In this manner, both become excessive: an excess of presence and an excess of absence. If we take into consideration the manner in which excess governs presence and absence, we can migrate this into the artistic use of language as well. What do we make abundantly present? What do we make abundantly absent? Behnt engages in this dialectical relationship in which presence and absence are co-constitutive and are only made manifest in contradistinction and in relation to the other. Because Behnt was written in the immediacy of death and grief, it adopts speculative language in all three temporal directions (past, present, future) and one atemporal direction (the fabulated).
As Saidiya Hartman has theorized, critical fabulation can serve as a mode in which history can be constructed through a consideration of what might have happened and/or what could have happened. Grief is an inherent organizer of time, and that is where the speculative intervenes, as it braids together the past (your relation with the deceased, as well as what could have been), the present (how do you receive that death? How does it move the body and mind?), as well as the future (how does one live now? Does a future exist?). These questions cannot be concretely answered, but can be broached, teased open, and demonstrated through a speculative mode of language, not only speculating on time and fable, but language that is speculative within itself. The meeting of arcane, esoteric language with familiar language performs the way in which grief denaturalizes the world, rendering it strange. When we inhabit grief, we inhabit a new world and invent stories about ourselves, the ones around us, the deceased, and what another world might look like.
My main interlocutors in terms of the development of this language and approach were the paintings of Hilma af Klint and the musical Cabaret, both of which I saw in London immediately after my mother’s passing. The ritualistic pastel forms on Klint’s paintings, as well as their mystical qualities (See her temple series), felt prescient to my grief and understanding of language, which I consider an enactment of image and song on the page. According to Klint, her relationship to her paintings was one of mediumship; she channeled a spirit which gave her inspiration and instruction for paintings. This aspect of mediumship in relation to art resonated with me, being a medium myself, as well as my mother, and so forth in our family line. If art can be the mode in which the dead can be evoked and listened to, I wanted to evoke the dead possibilities of myself and this world, as well as the spirit of my mother. To enact this in language, I had to take an approach that is anachronistic in order to honor and report the language of these dead possibilities. In terms of my second major influence on the book, I saw a performance of Cabaret in the round starring trans performer Mason Alexander Park – I immediately cathected to this staging, which engaged with the exquisite, while also being, of course, a story about despair and violence. Holding these two forces together in one aesthetic experience became a guiding principle in Behnt: how does one make a death beautiful and harrowing at the same time? Finally, in terms of poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Forugh Farrokhzad are constant inspirations, as well as Alice Notley and Sylvia Plath.
JGJ: Behnt presents readers with a God that appears, disappears, and reappears throughout. What is your relationship to worship, and how would you say that relationship influences your writing?
TA: God stands in as the organizing principle of the world, elementally and psychically, as well as a spiritual force. Worship is the act of surrender, and while we can worship a deity, is there not, too, a worship of emotion? Of grief? Of love? To feel and think recursively about an emotion, a person, etc., is to worship them, even if the affect or person plays a negative part in their lives. We can find ourselves slipping into the surrender to this worship willingly or unwillingly.
Writing, then, can be a place to intervene — to choose surrender or to disavow it, to worship oneself or others, to find both the material and the spiritual meeting in one place. Writing is the worship of curation. We are devoted to the ordering of image, sound, and language in order to create a novel field of experience and meaning, one that endeavors to transcend the page. This feels similar to my spiritual practice, in which absence, presence, and reappearance are the guiding principles of belief. My writing endeavors to reach the limits of absence, presence, and (re)appearance as conjuring and curatorial forces in an individual’s life, and how our perceptive faculties (or our phenomenological stances) summon encounters between what is and what isn’t there. My iteration of God feels, to me, as a spirit which is and isn’t, whose power is both in their presence and their absence, and their unexpected appearances. Writing must function in the same way to construct a language that is and isn’t, such that the reader’s experience with the text defamiliarizes their world and their set of relations, and brokers a deal: to stay within one’s previous world, or to embrace a new world.
JGJ: Babette Straub, the seamstress who Carl Jung had analyzed and considered to have schizophrenia, is quoted in this collection’s epigraph and described as a kin in suffering. Would you say the writing process can act as a salve for one’s suffering? Was that the case for the creation of Behnt?
TA: Behnt did absolutely nothing to alleviate my suffering. My mother is still dead. I am alive. That will be true for the rest of my life. Writing does not change your material world. To suffer is, as it etymologically derives from Latin, to carry under. You move under the pall of grief and the suffering it creates; whether you endure it or not, you carry forth under an immense weight. You are caught in an echo. You live with the reverberations. You are an auditeur to what is no longer there, and that absence is a terrible spell, a terrible music. While this may fade into a quiet hum, it’s still there. That’s not a reprieve; it’s not a salve; it’s merely the lowering of volume. I can still hear the song. I never can unhear it.
JGJ: You’ve published your first full-length collection, BATTALION SHAPED GIRL, and are currently working on your second full- length to follow it. Where does Behnt fit into your bibliography? Did writing it alter how you’ll be approaching your second full-length collection?
TA: Behnt is both before, during, and after BATTALION SHAPED GIRL, insofar as it was written simultaneously with the full-length, finished first, and published last. The elliptical, vertiginous syntactical structures, as well as the surrealistic and phantasmagoric imagistic ambitions of Behnt influenced BSG as much as the harsh punctuation and fury of BSG influenced Behnt. The two works are a Janus face. Both books have changed how I relate to writing, now approaching it as a gestalt of gesture and music which constitute specific performances, and each collection is a specific stage. Behnt, however, is more representative of the next full-length collection I am working toward, and Behnt may emerge as a full-length collection within itself, insofar as the manuscript does exist. The death of my mother was a clear rubicon crossed in my education and life as a poet. In other words, BSG is an archival self, while Behnt and the next full-length after it behave mercurially in the present and the future. The project in progress operates in a similar, but different, speculative mode – traversing a mythic past but, this time, a deeply rooted, material, ‘real’ present. It is a work which, I hope, interlaces how the present bears down upon, affects, and changes the past. It will be a testament to and a theorem of sacrifice.
Winner of the New Delta Review’s 2025 chapbook contest, Temperance Aghamohammadi’s Behnt is
unrelenting. Written in the aftermath of her mother’s death, Aghamohammadi’s chapbook captures the resulting annihilation that a daughter experiences amidst the throes of intense grieving. The self collapses. Time collapses. God both is and isn’t. Reading Behnt is putting your ear up close to the cacophony of grief, and hearing it miraculously render itself a symphony.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Aghamohammadi about her chapbook. We discuss the limitations of the elegy, making death simultaneously beautiful and harrowing, and living forever amongst the echoes of grief — no matter how much you write.
behnt, temperance aghamohammadi, new delta review, 2026. 59 pages.
Volume 16.2, Summer 26
Jalen GIOVANNI Jones
