Adriana Beltrano is a poet from Jupiter, Florida. She was named a 2024-25 Jake Adam York Prize finalist and is pursuing her MFA in poetry at Johns Hopkins University, where she is an assistant editor of the Hopkins Review. Her work is forthcoming in the South Carolina Review, Susurrus, and Little Patuxent Review.
You can read Buck in the April 2025 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
I wrote this poem in response to a prompt given to me by my professor, Bruce Snider. I’d been writing sort of vague and ambiguous poems in the fall, and at the end of the semester, he gave each of his students a personalized prompt. My task was to write about a mother’s clothes, but I love animals in poems, and I guess drama, so I wrote about buck velvet and a wedding dress. The poem revolves around illness, grief, and change, and I think the presence of the shedding antlers suggests cyclical or continuous change, which in turn suggests a sort of acceptance.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
I look at “Song” (the singular poem, I mean) by Brigit Pegeen Kelly a lot and must have been looking at it while writing this. I reread it whenever I write poetry about death in the natural world. More broadly, Diane Seuss and Sylvia Plath are poetic touchstones for me, and I was also reading Joy Harjo’s “How We Became Human” and Donika Kelly’s “Bestiary” at the time I wrote this.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
For me, a poem begins with a phrase or sentence or rhythm appearing in my mind. I came to an actual intentional practice of poetry relatively recently, but I feel I have always mentally worried or palmed thoughts I liked the feel or sound of. This can be frustrating, because when I’m in a slump where parts of poems are not springing forth to me, I can have a lot of difficulty generating new work! But when I do get that initial idea, I usually type it out in my Notes app for accessibility purposes and come back to it with the intention of fleshing it out later when I have access to my laptop. I then leave it alone for a while, but I eventually come back to revise it, which I really have to force myself to do because I get so attached to the original forms of poems!
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
Music, definitely! I find myself really inspired by the lyrics of Robert Hunter (of the Grateful Dead), Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, etc. I often go through periods where I am obsessed with the way a certain song’s sound or lyrics or feel, which definitely influences what I’m interested in and how I write. Most recently, I stayed up all night listening to Frank Ocean’s “Chanel.”
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
I am so lucky and gratefully to be in community with the poetry cohort and faculty at Johns Hopkins. Having my poetry taken seriously by the phenomenal writers around me has helped me gain a certain confidence in my own abilities that I otherwise may have never developed. I’m also really fortunate to have friends who, even if they themselves are not poets, have an interest in poetry and who are always willing to read what I’m writing.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
I began writing poetry after an unexpected health crisis in my family; after my mom was diagnosed with ALS, we learned that genetic ALS runs in our family. I felt my only option was to turn to poetry. I was so afraid of loss and change, and I wanted to preserve the quotidian details of my and my mom’s lives before they were lost to us. I feel that poetry can be so valuable in times of crisis, especially if you, like me, find it impossible to talk about painful life events with loved ones. It is a creative outlet that I am so glad to have found and continued with.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
I’m currently really thinking about being more intentional in my writing. I got this vocabulary from a professor, but the majority of my poetry thus far has been pretty instinctual. or Dionysian, rather than planned-out, or Apollonian. I want to develop more of a grasp on craft; I want to actively choose the aspects that make a poem work. More specifically, I’m currently experimenting with non-narrative poetry and making claims in my poems. I’ve been looking at Rae Armantrout’s work as an example of both.