Create a 10-word scroll-stopping headline for: Durham Poet Arielle Hebert On ‘Bottom Feeders’ | Vibe NC

Bottom Feeders release party | Friday, June 26, 6:30 p.m. | Letters Bookshop, Durham

“I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing about Florida,” said Arielle Hebert, author of new poetry collection Bottom Feeders, speaking from a Durham office crowded with lush-looking monsteras. 

The Florida Hebert evokes in Bottom Feeders, out this month from Black Lawrence Press, is a place of vivid contrasts—waterfront mansions and invasive snakes; parking lot loosies and cheap beer; storms that blow in suddenly, the air buzzing “with live heat and salt.”

There’s a certain come-and-go baked into the Sarasota landscape, with its snowbirds and circus vanishing acts and rising sea levels; erosion slowly gnawing at shorelines. OxyContin is a specter. As Hebert writes: “Between 1999 and 2013, prescriptions of opioids increased by 400%. … Police said getting an opioid prescription was as easy as buying a cheeseburger at McDonald’s.” 

Woven throughout these lyrical, atmospheric poems is a fierce love between two teenage girls, as addiction hooks its teeth into one, while the other tries to help, to ride out the storm, before resigning to getting out while she still can. Then comes North Carolina, with its seasonality and “acorns so fat they pop like glass bottles” under tires. Visits back to Florida, Hebert writes in “The Dead Layer,” are a “training exercise in breathing underwater / and I was never the strongest swimmer.” 

Hebert is a graduate of North Carolina State University’s MFA in Creative Writing program and the director of operations and marketing at Blair, a nonprofit publishing press based in Durham. Ahead of the book’s release and several local readings, the INDY spoke with Hebert about creating a poetry coven and navigating writing about addiction, place, and grief. 

INDY: This is such a cohesive collection—what was the writing process like? Was there a moment when you knew there was going to be this shape to it?

ARIELLE HEBERT: I started writing Florida poems, I guess we can call them, in grad school. That was a little over 10 years ago—so the first seeds were sown quite a while back. One of the early poems that felt like “OK, maybe this is going to turn into something” was the title poem, “Bottom Feeders.” Ada Limón chose it as the winner of the North Carolina State Poetry Contest [in 2019]. 

After that poem got recognized by Ada, it made me think about the collection in a different light. I didn’t realize, at first, that it would focus on this relationship between the speaker and her girlfriend, her friend. I did want to write about the opioid epidemic in Florida, and realized after writing “Bottom Feeders,” and it winning that contest, that it felt like the root of something and that the relationship was a big part of that poem. It lays the groundwork for a lot of scene-building taking place in Sarasota and felt like the heart of the collection. 

The opioid…