Mini-interview with Cassandra de Alba

Please help us welcome new Underblong reader Cassandra de Alba!!!

Cassandra de Alba (she/her) is a poet living in Massachusetts. Her chapbooks habitats (Horse Less Press, 2016) and ORB (Reality Hands, 2018) are about deer and the moon, respectively, and Ugly/Sad was released by Glass Poetry Press in 2020. Her work has appeared in The Shallow Ends, Big Lucks, and Wax Nine, among other publications. She is an instructor at the Redbud Writing Project and was recently named a finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship. Visit her at cassandradealba.com. twitter: @cassandraintroy.

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What themes, emotions, questions, etc. will always speak to you in poetry/art?

I love poems that feel like poisoned little treats. Beautiful aesthetics with a terrible secret. An exquisitely sugared jelly donut but it's filled with the blood of your enemies? That general energy.

What have you been snacking on recently? (food or non-food!)

My food snack has been popcorn with adobo from my extremely janky air popper that will probably burn down my apartment one day; my emotional snack has been those Buzzfeed videos where two men argue about whether ghosts are real.

What excites you most about joining the blongteam?

I'm excited about being part of Underblong because the magazine has such a well-defined editorial mission that really meshes with what excites me about poems! I love assessing a poem for its blonginess. (I have also begun assessing everything else in my life this way. When my cat tries to steal my food but then realizes she doesn't like pad thai noodles: that's blongy.)