“Gaslighter”: Eight Questions for Kristin Bock
Through my training and experiences as a volunteer for a nonprofit focused on supporting dancer mental health, I have learned about different types of relationships, communication strategies, and how one’s perspective can warp their reality. My experience as an emotional leader of an organization that was created in response to the abusive relationships that arise in the world of dance competitions drew me to “Gaslighter” by Kristin Bock. Featured in the 2022 edition of Best American Poetry, this poem captures in gruesome detail the depth of how devastating it can be to lose oneself to a toxic relationship.
Along with her appearance in Best American Poetry, Kristin Bock has been published in numerous journals such as Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and Prairie Schooner. She has published two collections of poetry entitled Glass Bikini and Cloisters, which won Tupelo Press’s First Book Award. Beyond her accomplishments as a poet, Bock is a senior lecturer of business communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Isenberg School of Management. Prior to her position at UMass Amherst, Bock began her teaching journey as a high school English teacher. For the past two decades, Bock and her husband, Geoffrey Kostecki, have enjoyed co-owning a company focused on the restoration of liturgical art.
The first body part you mention in the poem “Gaslighter” is the hand. The image of a hand, and a severed hand no less, can have many possible meanings. Why did you choose the hand to be the first body part to be lost, and how does this choice contribute to your overall meaning for the poem?
I chose the hand as the first body part to be lost because it’s such a potent symbol of agency. The hand is how we reach out, hold on, create, defend, and express ourselves. In the context of gaslighting, which is a psychological manipulation that erodes a person’s sense of reality and self-trust, the severed hand represents the initial rupture — the moment when the speaker begins to lose their grip on what’s real.
Gaslighting often starts subtly, with small distortions that make you question your own perceptions. The loss of the hand mirrors that first disempowering moment — the inability to grasp truth, to push back, or to hold onto one’s own narrative. It’s also an act of rhetorical violence; hands communicate through writing, touch, and gesture, and severing the hand is a metaphor for cutting off the speaker’s ability to express or resist.
By opening the poem with this image, I wanted to evoke a visceral sense of fragmentation — both physical and psychological. It sets the tone for the unraveling that follows, and underscores how gaslighting doesn’t just distort reality; it dismantles identity, piece by piece.
The ending of the poem explores themes of identity loss, exploitative friendships, and guilt, while the title provides clear context for the poem. Is there a singular, clear-cut message you wish to develop through this poem, or do you prefer to leave meaning to the reader’s interpretation?
If you’ve never been the victim of a gaslighter, you’re lucky. Too often, we don’t see the signs of a relationship that gradually dismantles who we are. Through Gaslighter, I aim to reveal that process—not with conclusions, but with imagery that unsettles and stays with the reader.
The poem explores the erosion of identity, the pain of being used by someone you trusted, and the guilt that shadows that betrayal. The title sets the psychological tone, but I didn’t write the poem to deliver a single, tidy message. I’m more interested in creating space for readers to bring their own experiences to the work.
The central image—a beautiful handbag that turns grotesque—was my way of showing how something that seems generous or loving can conceal harm. I wanted to capture the disorientation of realizing that what once felt safe is quietly undoing you. That kind of betrayal doesn’t always arrive with fanfare; it can be subtle, surreal, and deeply confusing.
I don’t aim to resolve that confusion. Instead, I try to reflect it—how it feels to be caught between knowing and not knowing, between trusting and doubting yourself. For those who’ve lived through gaslighting, the poem might feel like a mirror, or a wound, or a whisper they’ve heard before. My hope is that Gaslighter gives voice to that experience and invites readers to sit with the discomfort, the ambiguity, and perhaps find a flicker of clarity in their own stories.
I noticed you chose to include the one explanation point of “Gaslighter” after the line “They are blindingly beautiful!” Why did you choose this line, which juxtaposes the images of “blind” and “beautiful,” for the sole change in punctuation?
The exclamation point after “They are blindingly beautiful!” is the poem’s only outburst—a flash of awe and alarm. That line holds tension: beauty that dazzles but also blinds. It marks the moment the speaker is swept up in illusion, before the erosion begins.
I chose that punctuation to reflect emotional intensity—a spike in feeling that’s both admiration and danger. It’s the turning point, where something radiant begins to distort. By isolating that exclamation, I wanted it to echo, to signal that what dazzles might also deceive.
Throughout your life and career, have there been any notable people, experiences, or adventures that have shaped you as a person? How have these factors influenced your journey as a poet or as a person?
Long, long ago in the galaxy of a creepy painting, I encountered the dark side of the image. My father was an artist, and, as a child, I was always at his side watching him paint. He created a series featuring a naked, porcelain doll with two holes for eyes and a larger hole on top of its head where hair should be. Once, I peered down the hole and saw some balls of dust, a few dried bees, my father’s crushed cigarette. The doll was cocked awkwardly to one side, and its right arm stretched out to the viewer. As a child, I was frightened but fascinated. I came to identify with the doll, which became my first conscious metaphor.
My father’s paintings made me aware of symbolism, the language between objects, and the haunting power of art. In short, art taught me the vocabulary of poetry. Two lines from Emily Dickinson— “Tis so appalling–it exhilarates,” rung true for me then and now. In fact, the doll makes two ghastly guest appearances in Glass Bikini in the poems “My Father’s Chiaroscuro,” as well as “How Drones are Born.
What, in your mind, are the advantages and disadvantages of writing poetry in America today? Have there been moments in your life that have shifted your relationship with the current state of poetry, or poetry in general?
Oh my gosh, yes—absolutely. I used to believe I would never write a political poem. Ever. My first book, Cloisters, is deeply personal and intentionally avoids engaging with broader social or political contexts. In contrast, Glass Bikini is saturated with political poems, largely because much of it was written during the first term of the current administration. It felt impossible to look away—like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
That said, I believe the political often emerges from the personal. For me, poetry is a kind of dream—both individual and collective. My dream is shaped by my lived experience, but as a woman of this time, I carry centuries of messaging, misogyny, and generational trauma in my body’s memory. That makes my dream a collective one.
I often talk about this with my friend, Chad Sweeney, an extraordinary poet and scholar of surrealism. He’s helped me see that I’m a surrealist of the body—my work radiates from it. Historically, the woman’s body has been a site of control under Christian, capitalist systems and seen as servant, as vessel. My poetry seeks to resist and reimagine those roles.
In Glass Bikini, nature is feminized and subjected to grotesque suffering at the hands of a male, militarized, industrial complex—embodied in phallic rifles and church steeples. Several poems in the collection feature militant, commercial, phallic imagery suppressing the divine feminine. This isn’t something I consciously write toward; it’s how my conscious mind gives form to the nightmare of a suffering earth.
I like to think that my personal crisis is part of our shared human crisis. In that way, the book is both intimate and communal.
I notice that many of your poems are written in prose and incorporate references to recurring symbols, such as the human body and the color blue. Can you explain why these choices often make their way into your poetry?
Another great question—dream logic! I’m blessed (or cursed, depending on your perspective) with a very active dream life. I tend to remember a good number of my dreams and nightmares, and I often record them. Even if I don’t recall an entire dream, a single image or feeling might translate into an intriguing line, which then becomes a springboard for a poem. In that sense, I’m an unconscious writer—I begin from the subconscious, and if I’m lucky, I make associative leaps between the conscious and unconscious until the poem reveals its own wisdom.
The illustrator Virgil Burnett once said that the artist bears the responsibility to recreate the world with such care and precision that they invent a reality of their own—“one that counterfeits dream.” He believed in a kind of double vision, where the artist sees everything as both object and emblem. I find that idea deeply compelling.
Dreams are where our desires and anxieties surface, where our concerns about humanity rise to consciousness, and where our shadow selves enact the taboo. They’re also rich terrain for mining signs of our interconnectedness—a kind of collective unconscious. There seems to be a shared iconography we all recognize when we explore dream logic, something akin to symbolism. So, to answer your question more directly: I don’t make many conscious choices as I write. Much of the poem arises from a place that surprises me as it manifests.
Are you currently working on any new poetry or projects?
Yes! I just finished a collaborative chapbook, Dream of the Rifle, with an incredible poet and visual artist, L.I. Henley. It’s an anti-pastoral and lyrical fable centered around the disappearance of a young, teenage girl told by a chorus of animated objects—a scythe, a clawfoot bathtub, a rifle, a field of red poppies, etc. The choir of voices acts as unreliable witnesses, as jury, and as sorrowful chroniclers of an all-too-common occurrence. Slowly, the voices reveal the girl’s story while also posing questions about the reader’s complicity in systemic violence.