Home Is Always a People: A Conversation With Poet arushi (aera) rege

arushi (aera) rege is a candid young poet crafting a constellation of literary projects. For rege, poetry is largely confessional. They imbue their work with deeply personal threads, from their Indian-American identity and their Arizona origins, to their fascinations with music and interpersonal connection.

(A Sense of Purpose.)

I am excited I was able to speak with rege about their recent poetry chapbooks, as well as their publishing and editorial experience with various literary magazines. Diving into their inspirations, intentions, and communities, rege offers transparency and encouragement for other writers seeking a similar path.

I first want to congratulate you for being named a winner of the 2025 Garden Party Chapbook contest! Your selected poetry chapbook, suburban suicides, chronicles love and longing across vivid landscapes of the desert and night sky. What was your inspiration for this collection, and how do you view the role of place or home in your poetry?

Thank you so much! My inspiration for this collection truly was Arizona as a whole. I wrote this when I was applying to college, and like most of my peers, I was hoping to get out. I’ve always had very complicated and, in comparison to most people I know, very contradictory feelings about my home state. I’m very proud of being from Arizona, and very thankful for the unique community that it creates and offers, however, I, like many people who have lived there all their lives, have always wanted to get out. I think that this dichotomy didn’t really hit me until I was actually presented with the chance of getting out.

I had gone from being very anti-Arizona to falling in love with it, all in the span of a year, and even now that I’m out of Arizona, I feel as though I’m very protective of it. I love California; I love its people and its politics and its climate, but I think that I’ll always think about home as Arizona, and its hundred-degree summers and its desert sunsets and the smell after it rains. It’s one of those places that is truly unique, that you really can’t get anywhere else. I modeled my collection off that, mostly. As usual, love plays an extremely large part in all my collections, and this collection centers both romantic love and love for my home.

Home and place in my poetry are often at odds with each other. I think that I have very contradictory poetry when it comes to this, especially because home is not just a place. Places, to me, are just settings; they’re more vehicles for poetry rather than the poetry itself. Home, however, is mostly just a feeling. I can feel at home with people, and I can feel at home in a specific place, but I can’t equate place and home. I think that shows a lot in my poetry.

Like I said, love plays a large part in all my works; home, to me, is often characterized by love. For example, Arizona is both a place and a home, while a lot of my newer drafts feature California, which is only a place. People like my partner, my friends Tara and Campbell, my actual family, and others are what I consider home, but a lot of these people are part of a place. It’s very much a square-rectangle situation in my poetry; home is always a people in a place, but place is not always a home. In suburban suicides, I’ve tried dramatizing that a lot more, and I’m hopeful that it comes across well.

Your other recent poetry collection, BROWN GIRL EPIPHANY (fifth wheel press, 2025), features pieces such as “dust storm season,” in which you plead that “i need you / to stop thinking of me / as if i’m the storm / i need you to learn who i am / i need you to turn off the siren / i need you to say my name right.” What is your perspective on storying connection through your Indian-American identity?

Identity as a whole is something that I think centers most, if not all, of the pieces I write. There are a few major parts of my identity that I tend to highlight: my queerness, and my racial identity. Growing up in the US, especially as an Indian-American person, I feel as though it’s become increasingly important to force connection to my heritage, to my culture, to my language. I’m fairly fearful of losing that part of my identity, especially since I’ve moved away to college and find it more difficult to stay connected. I think that it’s especially important to me to keep that alive, and part of keeping my relationship with that aspect of my identity is by writing about it, by centering it in my poetry. I also think that it’s a really large part of me. Sure, I’m always going to be queer as well, but people don’t particularly look at me and go “oh they’re queer.” People are always going to look at me and see that I’m brown first.

There’s also a certain level of connection I feel with other poets. I do tend to enjoy identity poetry a lot, especially when it comes to experiences and identities that are relatable to me. I think that an important part of understanding poetry, and understanding that connection, is ensuring that you continue to write about it. I consider it both a form of connecting with other South Asian poets and a form of connecting back to myself and my culture. I feel as though there’s always been a level of stigma, especially in the U.S., of being a descendent of an immigrant and being proud of your roots—and especially in today’s political climate, it is even more important to stay loud and stay proud of one’s culture and roots. I don’t think that my writing poetry about my culture and my heritage is any sort of political advocacy or protest, however; I think it’s mostly just me attempting to understand who I am and what different aspects of my identity mean to me.

In addition to your book publications, you’ve also published pieces of prose and poetry in dozens of literary magazines, such as Querencia Press, ALOCASIA, and beestung. What has been your experience as a young writer publishing your work, and is there anything you would recommend to others with the same goal?

For me, the biggest issue was overcoming self-doubt. I was always super worried to put myself out there, and I always found it very difficult to promote my work. It definitely takes a lot of time to overcome that worry and to actually figure out where you stand in the literary world, especially when it’s as fast-moving as the indie lit scene. In my experience, everybody that I’ve met and been around for a while has been nothing but supportive—both of teen poets and of me. I find the community to be exactly that: a community. It’s a genuinely welcoming and lovely place to be in, and if people choose to get involved, it’s possibly one of the most supportive groups of people you can encounter.

I have a fantastic support system when it comes to people who read and who genuinely love my work. My friends Tara and Campbell, my partner, my English teacher Mrs. Meade, and others are all extremely supportive of my work in different ways. I’m eternally grateful to them for being there and reading each one of my pieces, from draft to final copy.

In terms of advice, I feel like the biggest thing is that you can’t be afraid to put yourself out there. I made that mistake, and over time, I realized that if I wanted to actually be seen as a poet, I’d have to market myself. There’s also always something for everybody, so don’t be afraid to send in what you think your “worst pieces” are. We are always our own worst critics.

Establish a presence on Twitter, on Insta, on Bsky, on Tumblr, on whatever social platform you want to use. Submit your pieces to magazines with low acceptance rates. Don’t let failure beat you down, and conversely, don’t let constant acceptances inflate your ego. If you start submitting as a teenager, submit to youth-run magazines, but don’t limit yourself to them. Get plugged into the community however you want, whether that’s through workshops, summer programs, or just tweeting into the void. Reach out to poets if you need help; someone is always willing to help out, especially if you’re new to indie lit. Don’t stop writing, even if you feel like you’re in creative retirement.

You’re also involved with the publishing sphere through a variety of editorial and leadership roles, such as your position as editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine and press ink & ivy lit. What have these projects meant for you, and does your editorial involvement influence your own writing approach?

Recently, I’ve been thinking about an email that a contributor sent us after Bus Talk’s inaugural publication, saying that it was really beautiful that co-editor Campbell and I were high school students running a magazine, and that our forewords and afterwords were both very introspective and older-than-our-years. I think that has been sticking with me through approaching editing at ink & ivy, especially because I feel like my visions for those two magazines are so wildly different from each other. ink & ivy, to me, was always about platforming amazing poets and being able to give back to a community that’s given me so much. Bus Talk, on the other hand, was more about catharsis, about having an experience shape you so thoroughly and being unable to truly parse through how it affected you.

A lot of the places that I’ve worked for and worked with have meant a lot to me. I like to think that I place a lot of value in working with different magazines, and that this value changes based on the publication. For example, ink & ivy has always been about community, about creating a platform, about genuinely loving poetry. I’m always grateful for the people that have submitted to us, and to A., the other half of our masthead, for working pretty tirelessly on it.

In terms of my editorial involvement and how it maps onto my writing approach, I can honestly say that I haven’t really thought about it as such. I don’t particularly think that there is any influence the two have on each other. For example, I’m not writing a piece and thinking about how it’s going to be received by editors, and I’m definitely not writing for an editor. I feel like I’m always writing for myself, and if the piece I have happens to fit what a magazine is looking for, then I’ll submit it there. I like to keep the two processes fairly separate, just because I recognize that how I edit and how I write aren’t particularly compatible. They’re not equal processes; I’m often much more critical of my own writing.

In my opinion, being super critical or very harsh on someone else’s writing, as an editor, does a lot more harm than it does good. Most, if not all, the pieces I receive have at least one thing that makes them somewhat enjoyable. On the other hand, my own writing isn’t often as enjoyable to me on the first or even second drafts, and so I’m very evaluative of every part of my work. For me, it would be a disservice to submitters as well as my own craft if I were to write with editorial influence.

In your poem “the last winter before atlantis sunk,” you echo the line “i played my violin until my blood dyed the strings red.” Your work often nods to musicians, from Frank Ocean and The Smiths, to Debussy and Beethoven. In your view, how do music and poetry intertwine?

Music—especially classical music, both Western and Indian—has been pretty formative in my life. I played the violin for upwards of eight or nine years, and danced Indian classical pretty much all my life. My sister and mom dance Indian classical too. My dad sings extremely well, and recently performed at his first concert. I do listen to music a lot; my Spotify Wrapped numbers are usually insane and around 250k minutes or so. All in all, I feel like my life has been pretty entrenched with music, and because of that, I feel like it’s only natural for it to appear in my work.

I think the central part of my work is based on lived experience, and because music is so deep within my lived experience, I try to incorporate it in my work whenever I can. In my experience, poetry and music are also fairly intertwined, because that’s the nature of both of them. Poetry often relies on music, and music often relies on poetry. They’re essential parts of each other, which is essential to my poetry.

When I first took an English class in high school, my teacher, Mrs. Meade, had made it fairly clear to me that rhythm and poetry are intertwined. You see this in a lot of really classical styles: couplets, haikus, ghazals, etc. In that sense, I’m not sure I uphold more traditional views of poetry, because I don’t often write form poetry, I tend to be more free-flowing or free verse with it. I do, however, think that it’s always been really important for me to have music involved in some way.

On Instagram, the posts that I make pretty much always have music attached to them, usually whatever I think fits the vibe or what I was listening to when I wrote it. All of my chapbooks have playlists when I write them. Music in general is a pretty big inspiration for me, and it’s always really interesting to see how songs or classical pieces are reflected in poetry. I think magazines like Major 7th Magazine are even more fascinating; the way they create a space for poetry that connects with and is inspired by a specific song is incredibly cool to read through, and also allows for insight on the ways different poets connect with music.

You mentioned future projects such as forthcoming chapbooks; is there anything else you would like to share about your writing plans at the moment?

ink & ivy has a few books that are coming out soon! I’m super excited for nat raum’s WANT, and we have another announcement coming soon on those fronts. I’m judging this year’s chapbook contest by Garden Party Collective, as well, which is super exciting. Other than that, unfortunately, there’s not much that I’ve got going on. Mostly, I’m just trying to find my writing again, and working through the block I’ve been facing recently, but hopefully I’ll have some more good news soon!

Asterism Books page