Anthony Ceballos is the author of the new poetry collection Glassful of Prayer. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Yellow Medicine Review, and he lives in Minneapolis.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in your new collection?
A: The oldest poem in the book at this point is just over 10 years old. So in one sense, it began quite a long time ago. With that said, most of the poems in this collection were written over the last few years, but some have been by my side for the long haul.
Q: The poet Sun Yung Shin said of the book, “Glassful of Prayer is a book made equally of fiery longing and cool defiance.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: Sun Yung Shin is a wonderful poet whose guidance and wisdom were an integral part of the manuscript’s formation. She was my mentor in the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program, and was someone who very early on offered great insight into sifting through all my pages and assembling a larger collection.
When I think of this assessment, I think of how in our deepest longings we often encounter our greatest fires, whether it be the kind of passion that makes the world around us seem fully engulfed, or the heat that drives us to action.
And in defiance, I imagine the ways we call upon the fiercest of winds to lift us up and guide us into the possibilities of every tomorrow.
Her words speak to some of the strongest life-forces present in the collection, and to Sun Yung Shin I am eternally grateful.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the poems would appear in the book?
A: With my editor Kris Bigalk’s profound skill! Without, I was swimming in endless pages stuffed into every corner of my existence.
My dramatic flair aside, she truly was able to help me see the strongest through lines in the pages I sent her. From there, we started to order them in a way that would offer a narrative arc of life from youth to now, as contained in the selected pieces.
Needless to say, with her superb counsel, the process was an absolute thrill!
Q: How was the book's title (also the title of one of the poems) chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: If ever I had heard about the anguish a writer can go through coming up with a book title, I now know it for myself, haha. I couldn’t even tell you the exhaustive list of potential titles, there were so many.
Then one day when Kris and I were meeting, exhausting ourselves over my exhaustive lists, she says, “What about Glassful of Prayer as the title of the whole book?” And it was this great moment of clarity, as if a dusty window had been cleaned and the view outside suddenly rendered in glorious technicolor.
I always knew when the book title was ready to make itself apparent it would do so without question. This was that moment.
The actual words of the title came to me one day when I was sitting in a coffee shop (my favored writing environment) and I was staring at the proverbial blank page quite literally, and next to that page was my glass of cold-pressed coffee at its halfway point.
Like a poet, I started to drift toward that age-old question: is the glass half full, or half empty? And in that moment I knew undeniably I was seeing it as half empty.
One of the prominent themes in the book is addiction, and how we navigate through addiction for better and/or for worse.
As I have come to understand it, through my own personal experience, and through witnessing the struggles of people around me, be they family, friends, or strangers, in addiction there is a deep urgency to fill a void, perhaps many voids, left too long to fester.
In alcoholism, we are constantly filling and refilling the glass in hope to fill that seemingly infinite void. Here I offer full transparency; I am a recovering alcoholic myself, and have been for many years.
Looking back at the days when I willingly tossed myself into the arms of excess libation, I can see myself desperately attempting to fill a void, and confusing and using intoxication as a substitute for spiritual connection.
Though I can only speak for myself, I imagine I was not alone in that way of thinking. And I thought about family, my childhood, the heaviness I witnessed, and again, imagined I wasn’t alone in how I felt.
In the context of this title, “prayer” is synonymous with anything I felt would connect me to, as they say in AA, a power larger than myself. Where once I sought that connection through drink, I can say I have now, to some greatly meaningful extent, found it through the creative arts, be it writing, painting, the performance of a poem, whatever the creative realm offers me.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: In the Immediate Now? The answers to these lovely questions!
In the Larger Now? Various preparations for this first book’s publication! Something for which my gratitude is boundless and immortal.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I learned how to read a clock and tell time by my love for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Back in the great ‘90s, the show used to air in reruns every weeknight at 9 p.m., and if nothing else, I knew what 9 p.m. looked like on our old digital radio clock.
I also knew it looked like the lines of some kind of partially drawn square on an analog clock when the hands were of course facing the 9 and the 12. From there, as they say, the rest is history.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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