Following the Impulse: An Interview with Poet Rachelle Toarmino on Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025)

Re:Viewed by Spencer Williams

RE:VIEW

Writer, editor, and cultural icon Rachelle Toarmino’s second poetry collection Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) is alive with the thrashing sounds of pleasure and play. Like taking a gummy edible while a pop-punk love song plays on repeat, Toarmino’s poetry stimulates the body as often as it stimulates the brain. Whether you’re terminally online or  powerfully offline, Hell Yeah has something beautiful to jostle you with, if you let it. I was lucky enough to catch Toarmino before her Jack White–sponsored world tour (not sure if this is accurate, but go with it) to discuss meme culture, curated playlists, and all the things that make a person say Hell Yeah.

Spencer Williams: Hi Rachelle! How is your big book tour going?

Rachelle Toarmino: Amazing, challenging, life-affirming. So fun. I don’t want it to end.

SW: I’m interested in all the ways light permeates this collection. There’s a blanking “like film in light” in the poem “Normal Neurotic,” tricks of light in “Traitor,” the light of day in “Utter,” the unveiling of truth that light ushers in in “Midnight Animal,” the heat of light in “Fool Enough,” and the desire for light with its absence in “Con Te Partirò,” among other instances. How does this fixation on light—–in all its forms and meanings—–inform your language or thinking in poetry?

RT: I was intentional about many of the patterns in this book, but not about the repetition of light, at least not in the way you describe. It’s interesting that you find it resonates between poems, as I was thinking about light a little differently in each one, or it was doing different work in each place. Sometimes it’s an experience of nothingness or awe—immersiveness either way—as in “Normal Neurotic” or “Midnight Animal”; other times it’s about curiosity or desire for life and being alive, as in “Fool Enough” or “Con Te Partirò.” The most important image of light is probably the very final moment of the book, but I don’t want to overdetermine a reader’s experience.

SW: Obviously, I love the book’s title Hell Yeah. It immediately evokes a kind of excitement, a kind of closeness, an impulsivity with language that is both comforting and dare I say, millennial. “Hell yeah!” also seems to be an appropriate reaction to many of these poems as a whole. As in, she ate that. Hell yeah, that line. Hell yeah, that ending. Boom. Bap. How did the sentiment of Hell Yeah shape—–if at all—–this collection or your thinking about this collection? 

RT: It began as a joke in my group chat with Lucy Xiang-fu Wainger and Colin Drohan, two poets I met in Western Massachusetts while writing this book. I’d been at a standstill in which I knew the manuscript needed a name—not because it was finished, but to give a direction to the poems as a collection—when Lucy texted that she couldn’t stop saying hell yeah, thanks to me. what if i named my book hell yeah, I texted back. I wasn’t being serious at that point—more just meme of guy pointing to butterfly asking, “Is this my book’s title?”—but when they both responded enthusiastically, the just kidding became just kidding… unless? The name helped me re-see the book’s interest in common speech, response and correspondence, and optimism as its driving force. I love that you wrote impulsivity because that’s it too: for all the book’s interest in knowing and knowledge, the immediacy of a hell yeah captures that first felt reaction to discovering something and being together in that discovery.

SW: Do memes often jumpstart poetry for you? They do for me. I’m really interested in the “re-see” moment you describe. There always seems to be a period when I’m writing, when I kind of lose track of what it is that I’m actually writing. And then there’s a period after, of like, acknowledging that the track has been lost. Beyond titling, how have you navigated the “re-see” moment in the past, not just in a book-length project sense, where you have all these moving parts to negotiate, but like, for an individual poem? Are there poems here that began as one thing and then something shifted for you where you knew they needed to be something else?

RT: Memes—really any form of idiom or common speech that can be riffed on or fucked with—are absolutely generative for me. To your second question, it’s rare for me, if ever, that I write what I set out to write. Your experience of getting lost and needing to re-see the poem is deeply familiar. It’s not that my intention changes as I write; I just hardly know (or want to know) where a poem is headed when I begin. Often I give myself a prompt or challenge to gamify the generating stage, but ultimately I know I’m just warming up or clearing my throat. For example, “Utter” began as a response to “Disclosure from Mars” from Venus’s perspective, and though I still feel her in the final version, the poem became something else entirely throughout the making of it.

SW: I’m so drawn to the sparseness of form in the “Flowers” section of the collection. My question here is kind of broad: how do you arrive at form and how do you know when a particular form is meant to be a life partner for a poem? Does the poem come first for you, or the form, or both at once? And, for the “Flowers” section in particular, in what ways were you conceiving of the white space of the page, and the various slanted slashes that fragmentize the poems, throughout?

RT: Sometimes I have a formal experiment in mind, like what if I spooled all these lineated sonnets into prose or what if I ordered these discrete observations using the structure of the scientific method, but other times that’s just what gets me going until I feel the heat and the real poem emerges. In the latter case, it’s all trial and error, writing and revising simultaneously and reading aloud as I go. I know it’s right when, by the end, the poem’s sonics and visual effects work together to create what Yeats called the “click” of “a well-made box.” You know it when you feel it.

My hope for the gaps in the poems of the “Flowers” section is that they emphasize multidimensional uses of speech, connect others, and capture the natural movements and revelations of thought. Take the pause after “to go out on that kind of limb” (“I Have My Limits”), for example, which then picks up at “index finger,” a noun that has appeared previously throughout the section and so naturally comes to mind when one mentions limb, even figuratively. The connection between these moments clarifies something for the speaker. The white space helps me bring these little shifts in thought to life so that the reader, ideally, can feel them too. As for the punctuation, I wanted these moments to be as discrete as possible—they are intentionally piecemeal—and the and/or-ness of a forward slash felt right for how the poems seem to be thinking. Its other uses and connotations—in line breaks, division, fractions, digital pathways—also felt relevant within the broader themes of the book.

SW: “Top Answers” is such a funny and uniquely formal poem. I love the forum-speak, the call and response, the both blunt and esoteric responses to the question of crying… talk to me about that poem’s formation. I think that poem captures so well the tonal gymnastics of the collection—at once funny, brilliant, heartbreaking, confounding, and obviously soooo Toarmino. 

RT: I can’t remember the original question, but years ago I went to Yahoo! Answers to ask something about grief. This was 2020, when so much of our sharing and relating was done online (and so much, of course, was defined by grief). The initial inquiry became a rabbit hole, with each question leading to a new People also asked. Sometimes it was the strangeness of the question that excited me; other times it was the lateral thinking of the answer. And I loved the clarity and personality of each voice—I could hear, in turns, wisdom, innocence, arrogance, aggression, aloofness, pain—as they expressed themselves textually. I followed that curiosity and kept my favorite sets of questions and answers, staying for the most part true to the order in which I encountered them; otherwise, the rabbit hole as a form, which allowed me to present connections between ideas—the relationship between cry and call, for example—through similarities in keywords, wouldn’t have worked. And then there’s also the on-the-nose fun of a poem about crying and calling out, in a book about response, being formatted as a call and response. Within the broader collection, I appreciate the choral nature of the poem and its reliance on collaborative thinking and discovering—a kind of community science—to try to connect over the biggest unknowns and unanswerables we have (ironically, given the title of the poem and original venue of its language).

SW: Extending that last question, how do you conceive of tonal balancing in a collection of poems? Can you talk a bit about the section headers? How do you organize the ebbs and flows of various modes of feeling in this collection?

RT: I didn’t spend too much time consciously thinking about tonal balancing when putting together the collection. Whereas the arrangement of That Ex was all about tone and narrative through tone, these poems asked for something else. I organized the three sections according to different modes of thinking: “Music” presents a variety of situations—in tone, form, and subject matter—as more traditional lyric poems; “Flowers” turns this attention back on itself to pick apart and go deeper on what “Music” sets up; and “Meat” gets to—and then recommits to—the heart of it all. Each has its own movement within it: the poems in “Music” are sequenced so that an idea in one leads into an idea in the next—for example, the way my dad speaks, which I’ve inherited, leading into the way Frank O’Hara speaks, which I’ve also inherited—in a kind of telephone game of echoes; the poems in “Flowers” are arranged internally as three-part logic structures and then sequenced following the steps of the scientific method; and “Meat”—maybe this section is actually organized by tone, as it begins in resentment and ends optimistically.

SW: Can I hit you with a series of rapid fire questions?

RT: Obviously.

SW: For your last book, you used a music playlist to sequence the poems, which I love. Give me a 5-song playlist inspired by Hell Yeah.

RT: Easy—I have a whole Hell Yeah playlist. “Witness” by Sarah McLachlan, “Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling” by Marnie Stern, “Rhythms” by Sum 41, “Nessun Dorma” by Luciano Pavarotti, and “Lost in the World” by Kanye.

SW: Besides your own book, what’s a poetry collection you’d give to someone who, instead of saying Hell Yeah to reading poetry for pleasure or fun, says Fuck No?

RT: I’ve won over a few non-poetry readers with Good Actors by Sommer Browning and Returning the Sword to the Stone by Mark Leidner. Joy Is My Middle Name by Sasha Debevec-McKenney is a new one I’d recommend.

SW: If Hell Yeah were a current cast member of Real Housewives of Salt Lake, which one would it be and why?

RT: Whitney Rose, I fear. She’s all about that red string. Hill Yeah…?

SW: Favourite Jack White project and why?

RT: His solo work, if I had to choose. I like each of his bands differently, but there’s something more unpredictable and exciting to me about the solo albums.

SW: Have you met him yet, since he’s your publisher? If so, how did it go?

RT: Not yet! I hope he likes me.

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RACHELLE TOARMINO is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah and That Ex, as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science, winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor in chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.

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