Consider the Rooster—out today from Nightboat Books—is a collection that both celebrates and challenges the pastoral. The titular rooster refers to one Bendorf cared for amid the COVID-19 pandemic, whose crow could “scare away the devil and rouse the dead back to life,” and whose presence led a neighbor to call the police. The response—a carceral one—led to a radical shift in his political and poetic life.
We discuss that shift in our conversation below, and the call to “slow down, pay attention, and tend to what remains.”
—Dante Silva
Dante Silva: I’m interested in the literary lineage of the rooster; you reference Jack Gilbert’s poem “The Rooster,” the poem “Roosters” by Elizabeth Bishop, etc. What do we learn from that lineage?
Oliver Baez Bendorf: The rooster in Consider the Rooster draws from not only literary but also cultural, mythological, and spiritual lineages, with appearances from gods such as Asclepius and Minerva. El gallo is a cultural icon in Puerto Rico, symbolizing strength, pride, hope, fortune, and masculinity, and “pico de gallo” literally means “rooster’s beak.” Ai’s poem “Cuba, 1962,” from which one of my book’s central epigraphs is drawn, powerfully renders the rooster through color rather than sound. The poem depicts a world soaked in blood and exploitation, where a rooster becomes a stand-in for colonized people and their bodies. This synesthetic subversion of the iconic rooster’s crow feels particularly urgent in Ai’s work.
In my own work, Walter Mercado, the rooster at the heart of Consider the Rooster (named for the beloved Puerto Rican astrologer, Walter Mercado), exists as a living and mythic figure, a presence that reverberates beyond metaphor. Lucas de Lima’s Tropical Sacrifice also deeply informs my thinking, though de Lima centers a sacrificial chicken rather than a rooster. The chicken in their work embodies both spiritual and physical transformation, weaving connections between Black, Indigenous, and nonhuman worlds. Like Ai’s rooster, de Lima’s chicken bears witness to the historical violence and ecological devastation inflicted by colonialism. In Consider the Rooster, Walter’s crow, like these other figures, calls us to reckon with ongoing legacies of colonization, while also hinting at the potential for renewal and transformation.
Dante Silva: The collection is inflected by place; the poem “Michigan” recounts the speaker’s experience in a region that he later leaves to “move between city and country.” You write of regional anxieties, the experience of life in a place that “was early death.” How do you craft your poems so that place and emplacement are central?
Oliver Baez Bendorf: Place in my poems is alive and active. It collaborates, often demanding more than I’m prepared to give and revealing more than I realize I’ve absorbed. In my craft talk Red-Gold Wings, which close-reads Ai’s “Cuba, 1962,” I explored how poems ascend from speech to song. In that process, place moves from being described to being embodied, lived in, sung.
In Consider the Rooster, the poem “Michigan” recounts a time when I was rooted in a specific plot of a specific neighborhood in a specific city, tethered to its land, its flora and fauna, its Indigenous history. The anxiety of staying in a place that “was early death” speaks to the exhaustion of living within a hostile ecosystem, where the body senses imminent collapse—whether environmental, political, or otherwise. Ecopoetics, for me, is about writing from my particular body in relation to a specific landscape and the living beings who inhabit it.
In the section alternatives, I use an epigraph from the City of Kalamazoo’s zoning code, language that reflects the violence of bureaucracy and land control. These poems were written in landscape orientation, designed to immerse the reader in an experience that unsettles, reflecting the instability of land ownership and habitation. The entire book is printed in landscape format, reinforcing that conceptual framing. The first poem in the next section, “Becoming Upright After a Strange Siesta,” acknowledges this portal-like shift. It’s not a return to the old ways, but a passage through and transformation by the land itself.
Aurora Levins Morales expresses this tension when she writes, “How can you own something that changes under your hands, that is so fully alive? Ecology undermines ownership.” In Consider the Rooster, I grapple with how place is both lived and mourned, how it resists ownership, and how it changes us as we move through it.
Dante Silva: You write that Walter, the titular rooster in Consider the Rooster, is “not a metaphor.” I love that distinction, that the rooster is not a metaphor but instead the referent that returns us to a conversation of settler colonialism (and its attendant structures of violence). How do you think and write with Walter?
Oliver Baez Bendorf: Walter Mercado, the rooster in Consider the Rooster, is not a symbol—he is a real animal, an iridescent being whose crow punctuated my life. The decision to write Walter as a non-metaphor allowed me to think more critically about settler colonialism, and how we use and manipulate the rest of the natural world for our own ends. His crow is not meant to be interpreted so much as felt.
In Ai’s “Cuba, 1962,” the rooster stands in for colonized people whose bodies were exploited by the sugarcane industry in Cuba, built on the backs of enslaved labor. Ai’s rooster announces something like a witness statement, but also a resistance to that history of violence. Similarly, Walter’s crow in my book announces a different relationship to the land—one that resists settler colonial frameworks of domination. He un-settles me, like the shifting dynamics of land ownership, queerness, and the constant negotiations we make with space, identity, and survival. Walter is no more a metaphor than decolonization is—a real crow for real land.
Dante Silva: I love the speculative ekphrasis in “I WANT BIODEGRADABLE SEX,” in which you construct a (speculative) amalgamation of cardboard, sheepskin condoms, etc. What are the generative potentials of the speculative?
Oliver Baez Bendorf: Speculative ekphrasis, as in “I Want Biodegradable Sex,” allows for a collapse of boundaries between the possible and the impossible, the organic and the synthetic. In that poem, I assemble materials like polypropylene and moss, human hair and coffee grounds, to think through the impact of my transition on the plastics industry and the Earth. The speculative gives me permission to take risks, to imagine new relations that critique consumption while celebrating the body’s adaptability. The poem isn’t, ultimately, about what already exists but what could be.
Saidiya Hartman said, “So much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination.” To speculate is to liberate the imagination—to ask, what if this? It allows us to cast future spells, to disrupt, and to reimagine relationships with ourselves and the world. The generative potential of the speculative lies in this very insistence on possibility and change.
Dante Silva: The ethnographer Thom van Dooren wrote Flight Ways about various bird species living on an extended edge of extinction. He proposes a process of mourning that “should open us into an awareness of our dependence on and relationships with those countless others being driven over the edge of extinction.”
Part of Consider the Rooster is an elegy, a mourning. I want to ask how might we mourn, tend to, and grieve together, and how that might implicate the human in different relationships of dependence?
Oliver Baez Bendorf: Mourning in Consider the Rooster isn’t just about personal grief, it’s about communal loss and responsibility. Grief is not only an emotional experience, but also an ethical one. It acknowledges that we are part of a web of life, that our actions or inactions affect other beings. Among beings under threat, cross-species grief can be an act of solidarity. The rooster’s crow, like mourning itself, is an act of presence and recognition. The poems in Consider the Rooster ask how we might grieve not just for the dead but for the systems of care, land, and community that have become fractured through colonization and capitalism. I hope that by elegizing the specific being of Walter, and by writing and publishing this book at all, I can offer space for others to mourn their own Walters, and the Walter in them.
In poems like “Elegy for Walter, From the Future,” I’m asking how we might mourn collectively, in public, and how that grief can become care, not just for humans but for the ecosystems we are entangled with. Mourning is work, and it requires community. Some of us are always grieving, and it’s not work we can or should do alone. As Essex Hemphill writes, “They don’t know / we need each other / critically.” Grieving together might implicate us in new relationships of interdependence, where we’re more attuned to the needs of other beings, human and nonhuman alike. It could call on us to slow down, pay attention, and tend to what remains.