Winter Sharp with Apples by Annette Sisson
Terrapin Books, 2024
Melody Wilson: The poems in Winter Sharp with Apples cover a broad expanse of time, and many occupy specific times. How would you describe the timeframe of the collection?
Annette Sisson: The collection covers childhood through the unknowable future. “After a Long Indiana Winter” and “Marriage at Ten Years,” set in 1963 and 1964, are the earliest dates the poems represent. My teenage years are present, but in “Late” the speaker is almost fifty though the poem reflects back on college. “Woolsthorpe Manor” and “Origin Story” take us into an unknowable future, into space, and ask where we’re headed as humanity.
Wilson: Some of the most interesting poems in this collection stem from travel. In them, you seem to experience the world differently than you do in poems set closer to home. I notice the more philosophical poems tend to be set farther from home. Why do you think travel puts you in that frame of mind, and is travel is necessary to you as a poet?
Sisson: I love this question because I realize that this is true. Travel is important to me as a poet. When I’m close to home, my mind is more inward and I tend to write about family and memories. When I’m traveling, my mind focuses outwardly. I discover new things and have new experiences, which pull something different out of me. I enjoy writing them because, deep down, it feels like I’m doing something unique and new. Of course, sometimes, when I’m home and remember an experience from traveling, I enjoy reliving and excavating it to write a new poem.
Wilson: So at home you rely on memory. But away from home, experiences trigger thoughts you wouldn’t otherwise have.
Sisson: That’s true. But sometimes at home, I think myself out of the narrative of my ordinary daily life and into the realization that underneath, there’s another, more essential life—and the opposite of that essential life is death. Those moments seize my brain and catch my breath. It’s frightening and absolutely intriguing—a strange ecstasy. Anyway, that existential experience informs some of my non-traveling poems.
Wilson: Many of your poems deal with your experiences in raising your children. Can you identify an image in a poem or even a whole poem that you consider a favorite of this theme?
Sisson: Yes. My favorite poem is “Daughter, Driving at Night,” not because I think it’s the best poem, but because it’s based on a time when I was in bed at night and heard my daughter screaming and crying though she was twenty miles away. She was a new driver and was, in fact, lost in her car, far beyond her capacity to cope. When she got home (with her father’s help), I said, “Evan, I think I heard you screaming and crying” and mentioned the time of the event. And she said, “Oh, Mama, I was screaming and crying on the side of the road at exactly that time.” Neither of us can explain it, but that’s what being a parent can be.
Wilson: Your work is very musical. Can you describe how you use meter and why? And can you point to any poets who have influenced this aspect of your work?
Sisson: My sense of poetry began with James Whitcomb Riley and Robert Louis Stevenson when I was very young. Everything about their poems was musical and rhythmic. Then I studied Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly, Emily Brontë, and Hardy. And I love Gerard Manley Hopkins to this day because he used meter, sprung rhythm, and sound to create velocity and pace and emotion.
I use meter because I feel there’s a rhythm to the narrative of our lives, but beneath that, there’s the constant heartbeat—the other stuff that isn’t part of the daily schedule. We live our lives every day—eat breakfast, go off to work, etc.—but underneath that, the heartbeat is what I try to access and echo.
When I write a poem, I’m not thinking about meter. I am trying to get something down on the page. Nothing but that. I don’t think about meter until I’ve got enough on the page to work with. I’m surprised sometimes, when I move to the keyboard, that the lines have turned out to be somewhat metrical. (Ninety-nine percent of my poems start on paper; I’ve only composed a poem at the keyboard once or twice.) I usually type my poems with four stresses per line, which is, for me, the default.
I do find that thinking about meter challenges me to pay close attention to words and ask myself if I can express the idea more concisely. And for me, there are main stresses and minor stresses in between. When I read the line, I pay the most attention to main stresses, and this leads me to consider line length. I’ve tried to become less wedded to the fact that every line must have exactly the same number of stresses because some words are longer than others, so being exact about stresses sometimes creates a long line followed by a short line. This feels wonky to me, so I will flex a little and let the long one be three and the short one be five. And so forth. Typically, though, my lines turn out to be fairly regular. Most of all for me, attending to meter is a discipline.
Wilson: Do you appreciate meter in the work of other poets?
Sisson: Some people write more formal poems, such as sonnets or villanelles or sestinas, and I’m very aware of that. I don’t really judge other poets according to their use of meter because I consider other factors too, such as what word I need to end on or how I want to begin the line. For me, words that are prepositions and conjunctions come at the beginnings, not the ends of lines, though I know some poets hold the opposite view. Still, I’m juggling all the elements, not just meter.
Wilson: In this collection, poems appear in couplets, quatrains, and diminishing stanzas. Some are in blocks, and some spread across the page. I wonder if you can talk about when in the process you begin to see the physical shape of the poem. Are there poems in this collection whose shape you are still unsure of?
Sisson: As I said, I put everything in lines with four stresses first, and then I start asking, “What am I doing here? What does this poem want? How does it need to be supported by its form?” I often write in couplets because I write about relationships a lot. For me, if it’s a mother-daughter poem, chances are good it’s going to be written in couplets. But I also think, “do I want it to look heavier on the page, or lighter, and what does that accomplish?” Then I’ll take couplets and put them in quatrains and think, “how do I like where things break in the poem? What happens if I do that?” Sometimes I write a poem that’s twenty-four lines and then I play with tercets, couplets, quatrains, sestets, and ask myself, “how does that read differently? Where does it breathe with the different stanza lengths?”
Regarding poems I felt unsure about, one that comes to mind is the poem “Unfolding,” about my daughter. I was happy with how I arranged it because it was constructed like the movement of a Spanish fan. It didn’t turn out as well in the book, though, because the lines couldn’t be as long as I had written them. “Reverie” in the first section of the book, which I wrote years ago when my son was young in the ‘90s, changed its form many times. At one point it was a prose poem entirely; at another it was a monostich. I finally decided to try sections. The sections about dreaming are poetry, and the others, about the history of my mother’s family, are prose. I think I am happy with it finally—but that’s after decades of changes.
Wilson: Something you said that was interesting was “Sometimes I wind up with 24 lines and then I change it.”
Sisson: On paper I don’t ever count how many lines I have because often it’s just a blob. But that’s the first thing I do when I take the draft to the computer. It’s ridiculous how many of my poems are 18-28 lines. When I started college, I was a math major. As a child, I loved to go to the board and do what my parents called ciphering, especially if it was competitive. I was good at math, like my dad who didn’t get to finish college though he wanted to be a high school math teacher. I went to his horseshoe tournaments and scored the games. I loved math until I got to calculus, and then I realized that I didn’t want to pursue it any further. Part of the mathematical intrigue, too, is that I started playing piano when I was five, and there’s a lot of math in music.
I’ve always thought in terms of meter; before I even understood that poetry had meter I knew that music did. For me, in poetry, there’s language and there’s math. Music brings those two together, but so does poetry.
Wilson: Can you describe specifically how those interests manifest themselves in your poetry? I’m curious because whenever I describe your poetry, I use the word meticulous, almost always. There’s an order to it.
Sisson: I think that’s my poetry’s strength, but also its downfall. Some people have incredibly inventive imaginations and there’s this whimsical magic in their poems, which I envy. I think I have more trouble accessing whimsy because I am, by nature, meticulous and analytical. I suspect that the marriage of that analytical aspect of my poetry to music and often also to nature redeems my poetry a little, giving it whatever it has to offer—hopefully insight if not magic. I do think that meticulousness (related to the word “meter”!) is why I get the adjective “beautiful” applied to my poetry so much, which I hear as a mixed blessing.
Wilson: How did you decide on your title? And how did you come to your artwork?
Sisson: I had a list of about ten possible titles, most of which were titles of poems or lines from poems that I thought might speak to the whole book. “Winter sharp with apples” is the last line of my poem “Caney Fork.” I didn’t settle on it right away though I thought it was provocative—a line that came to me unbidden when writing the poem. When I figured out that the book’s through-line was going to be cleft grafting. I knew that “Woolsthorpe Manor” and “Caney Fork” would be important poems in the book and that I would use epigraphs about cleft grafting. For me, cleft grafting is a metaphor for the damage and injury we sustain in our human lives, but these hurts often enable our thriving. That’s what happens with cleft grafting: You damage a plant intentionally—a rose, or apple tree—to make it grow in new ways, to create new forms of the plant. When I realized all of this, I knew the title had to be “Winter Sharp with Apples.”
Wilson: And how did you find the cover art?
Sisson: I didn’t want an apple tree on the cover. I wanted an apple, but I didn’t want the book to seem rustic. I love my colleague David Ribar’s art, whether he’s drawing, or making collages, by hand or digitally. I contacted him to see if he might be interested and, surprisingly, he was. He hadn’t been making art in the studio since his retirement but rather had been gardening, which was also a form of art or design. Even so, he wanted a challenge, something to push him back into the studio.
He asked what I had in mind. I told him I thought the cover might be blue—maybe blue, white, silver, and gray because I wanted to evoke winter. I also mentioned, “You do a lot with grids in your art, and I’m very interested in grid work because that will tie in with the physics that informs some of the poems. He said, “Okay, but I just want to read the manuscript. I’m going to read it more than once, taking a lot of notes, and then I’m going to develop some concepts, which I’ll bring to you.” This cover is the result, and I could not be more delighted. I love it.
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Annette Sisson’s poems appear in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, and many other journals. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, was published by Terrapin Books in October 2024. Her first book, Small Fish in High Branches, was published in May 2022 by Glass Lyre Press.
Melody Wilson’s work appears in One, The Emerson Review, B O D Y, Crab Creek Review, Rust & Moth, and many other publications. Her first collection was awarded the Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Review and will be released in March 2026.