3 Questions with Youssef Mohamed

Youssef Mohamed is a Muslim-American poet and student at the University of Chicago Law School. He was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and his work has appeared in New South Journal, Ambit Magazine, Nimrod Journal, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. He is a staffer on the University of Chicago Law Review and is also a member of the Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic. When not drowning in judicial opinions, he stress-drinks caffeinated beverages and binge-watches seasonal anime. You can find him tweeting to himself at ungodly hours of night at @YousseffHelmi.

HFR’s Managing Editor Rachel Reeher chats with Youssef about his poem “Fruits Basket” from Issue 68.

If you had to describe your personal writing process in a single sentence, what would it be? 

I’ll cheat by not answering in a single sentence, but there really is not one process. Each poem demands that it be written in a certain way (during the day or at night, with or without music, on paper or computer, etc.), and honestly half my battle is figuring out how the poem wants to reveal itself. And sometimes that process, or those demands, change over time. I worked on Fruits Basket for two years, and the evolution of that process is still a black box to me despite the clear shifts in approach evidenced by older drafts.

Your poem, “Fruits Basket,” acts as a nod to the work of Takaya Natsuki. Can you talk about inhabiting that artistic space? About the experience of writing a poem in direct conversation with another artist’s work? 

I am most in awe of what it means to be human whenever I deeply connect with another’s art—be it music, painting, poetry, manga, etc. Like, how awesome is it that I get to be here to experience this? Fruits Basket, like many of my poems, are my best attempts at love letters to the artist who’s made my life so much richer. From this artistic space I hope the reader can see how treasured and important a particular piece of art is to me, and in seeing that, hopefully they can see a bit of me, too. 

Is there anything you’d like to share about your poem “Fruits Basket” that we don’t know? 

The last line of Fruits Basket wasn’t supposed to be incomplete originally. I had a list of words and images, and I considered listing them in a column straight down or perhaps layering them in Photoshop, but these options seemed unfulfilling. To borrow another poet’s words to express what I implicitly came to realize: the speaker’s emotional momentum had become too great for the medium intended to capture it. So I worked on the poem so that the rest of its language instead could carry the reader to the dark and personal place in which the speaker ends and cannot place in the vessel of words.

You can read Youssef’s poem in Issue 68, available for purchase here.