Alex Mouw’s debut book of poetry The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey (Texas Review Press, 2026) moves between reverence and violence with arresting ease, paying homage to hawks and cockroaches alike. Drawing on the Midwest’s unyielding landscape and a musician’s ear for dissonance, these poems ask what it means to be both predator and prey, both adorned and adoring. The book’s cover—Socorro Rico’s In Mirror of Self—offers a fitting entry point: a bird-human hybrid contemplating its wolf reflection. In this conversation, Alex and I discuss the sonnet’s capacity for surprise, the friction between body and faith, and how to channel that oh-so-very-human emotion of envy.
Laura: I’d love to hear more about the book’s cover. Several of your poems are ekphrastic, so you clearly have a relationship with art—what do you see in this image?
Alex: Unlike the ekphrastic poems in the book proper, the cover image found me after the manuscript was done. My wife and I were visiting the Nelson Atkins museum in Kansas City, and I saw In Mirror of Self / En espejo de uno mismo, a painting by the spectacular artist Socorro Rico. The painting is dated 2023, and it felt as though the artist and I had been pursuing, in different media, the same questions: about the body’s selfhood, about our human admixture with the “natural” world, about the desire for and dread of epiphany.
Wonder and disturbance shine from every angle of the painting. The “Self” is probably the central bird, which leans, humanlike, backwards, and which has a contemplative human hand nestled under its beak. What “mirrors” this human-bird hybrid in the painting is a wolf. The bird looks to me like a mourning dove. There are fruit trees planted on a thin brown line, or is it a row of thorns? A moonlike circle just behind the bird’s face is itself encircled by a kind of pale blue sky, which nests inside a yolky orange. I’m interested (but isn’t everyone?) in who or what we humans are, what we’re doing here, and the almost Dantean composition of the painting, with its torqued symmetries and nesting doll universe, reached out and grabbed me. I adore it, and I guess the book concerns adoration more than anything else.
Laura: Taking the other side of adoration—there’s a predator/prey dynamic that also really struck me in these poems—I’m thinking especially of “Vespers in the Middle of Nowhere” and “Aubade as Prey.” Can you talk about how this tension drives the questions your speaker is asking? What does that hunter/hunted relationship allow you to explore?
Alex: I used to drive between Michigan and Indiana every month, and I would count more than a dozen red-tailed hawks on those each of those drives. Raptors, especially, delight me. When they leave the branch or fence to dive for something, their wingspan seems as big as mine, their screech scary. But they weigh less than five pounds! Just the other day I spotted a hawk that I’ve seen, several times, in the same spot on a trail. I watched him dive to the ground, wriggle with something in the leaves, and then stop. Plopped in the dirt, he blinked up at a tree trunk, where the squirrel he’d tried to grab was clinging.
I love poems that hunt for insight with the speed and determination of a hawk. Yet if the revelation arrives, if the poem does its job and surprises both reader and writer, then the poet is more like prey, shivering under huge wings.
I recently read a philosopher who argued “all things are full of gods,” and he really meant it. The bird’s talons and the way a squirrel uses its tail as ballast are intentional, mysterious, and other in the sense we normally reserve for a deity. If all things are full of gods, then poems hunt and are hunted by epiphanies. It makes me giddy, thinking of that.
Laura: Ah yes! I’ve just had my own epiphany about your poem, “Argument with Orthopedics,” which is concerned with how the medical profession sometimes plays “God;” or in other words, the way in which some doctors think of humans as “body after body / and their numbing rehearsal of symptoms.” But that line of thinking can describe the act of writing poetry too. Can you share a little bit about how the poem frames this energy?
Alex: I spent several years seeking a diagnosis for chronic pain in my legs, and I started the poem thinking about this scene using predictable oppositions: between science and poetry, between intuition and reason, between the body as felt experience and the body that, in order to be repaired like a machine, needs to be imagined like a machine first.
I started with those well-grooved conflicts, but the poem showed me more: a doctor prays before operating, patients rub a statue for good luck, and the poet’s own smugness and combativeness gives way to shared complaint. I used to hate that medical scribes or nurses would say, “patient complains of xyz,” because I didn’t like to be seen as whiney. But complaint actually is a marvelously rich word, an old word for grief and lamentation. So it’s thrilling that medicine takes this up, and ultimately the poet and the physician are in the same predicament: we both try hard to know the nature of suffering—and despite our best methods, our understanding remains partial. The practice of medicine is just that—a practice. Like poetry.
Laura: “Argument with Orthopedics” is unapologetically free verse, a fascinating contrast to the prevalence of the sonnet form that persists throughout many poems in this book. What draws you to working within those fourteen lines? Does the constraint of the form change how you approach a poem, or do certain subjects seem to call for that structure?
Alex: I started writing poetry almost exclusively in forms, not in an act of plucky will but because a brilliant teacher made me. The sonnet stuck, and I still revere its almost magical ability to force the writer into new thoughts.
All poems probably aspire to actually do something new rather than represent something already known, but the sonnet form seems to have special gifts in this direction. When John Donne declares “I am a little world made cunningly,” or when Terrance Hayes tells an authoritarian president “I lock you in an American closet,” or when Elizabeth Bishop asks of a map, “is the land tugging at the sea from under?” I’m taken on board by the sudden turns of the sonnets in which those lines appear. As a reader, I feel it’s really happening, right now, and I admire the force of such authors, as well as the pathos that comes when the spell is broken. The poem is a little world made cunningly, and when it’s over, you’re sent back into the real world, a little changed or charged.
In most of the sonnets in this book, I introduced stanza breaks for each quatrain, as well as the final couplet. Many are unrhymed, but early on I established for myself that the poem’s appearance on the page would help me avoid mere drift and instead embrace the turn, turn, and veer structure that the form demands.
I’m sympathetic to the old idea that the sonnet is a wrestling with self, an argument with self. So I’m usually trying to figure something out—about pain and the body, about faith, about human bonds with dogs—and the sonnet forces me to really figure. I learned from G.M. Hopkins and John Donne that the divine makes for a particularly potent addressee—the apostrophic stakes are higher than when addressing the West wind, but the poetic convention announces that the addressee will remain silent. The “My Lord” is very sincere, more painfully sincere for not getting a response in the poem.
I’d like to be surprised, bewildered, full of wonder. The sonnet encourages such feelings.
Laura: Yeah, some of those poems don’t seem to take silence for an answer, though. For example, in your “My Lord…” series you repeat the title as the opening line of each poem. What led you to that formal choice? How does that repetition function for you—as invocation, as refrain, as something else?
Alex: I wanted those poems to feel a little bit like outbursts, as though the reader is falling into the prayerful trance “My Lord” announces. I’m tripping over myself to say “I saw a loon,” “there was this one concert,” “remember that river?” in the hopes that the reader too will feel this sense of arresting singularity in things.
Many versions of the Bible translate the Tetragrammaton as small-caps LORD, which I find charmingly weird: unlike the original Hebrew word, Lord is very much pronounceable, and an aristocratic title, and also an exclamation. It’s strangely familiar, as many of the Biblical uses are a direct address, and yet it’s also estranging, squinting at you from the page. I’d like those sonnets to exhibit a manic reverence for the everyday, filtered through the grand and peculiar apostrophe “My Lord.”
Laura: Speaking of things that can cause “manic reverence,” music turned out to be such a vital presence in this book, which surprised (and delighted) me—there’s nothing in the blurbs, summary, or poem titles (except “Wedding Pianist”) that explicitly signals the theme. Can you talk about the relationship between poetry and music in your work? Is there a specific musical tradition or sensibility that shapes how you write?
Alex: Unlike my relationship to visual art, which is happily awestruck, I have some experience with music, and the poems might emerge from the friction of envy. I grew up playing the guitar, and guitar players, more than other instrumentalists, obsess over their gear. A digital delay pedal vs. the organic reverb of a tube amp, a crunchy screamer or the smooth pop of standard distortion, a Stratocaster or a Telecaster—we judged one another for the things we bought and brought to play. Many good guitar players are also good engineers. They understand sprawling waveforms and know how to manipulate gate, gain, and the tilt of a cardio microphone against an amp cabinet. These things weren’t my strong suit, but I liked hanging out with those who are in the know.
Maybe I would have stuck with music more thoroughly if I were a capable singer, but I’m not, and so poetry seemed like a way to circumvent that limitation and channel the envy I felt as part of a band. As a poet, maybe I could make the whole song.
One of my most-listened-to albums is Igor Levi’s On DSCH, which is a reimagining of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, itself an homage to Bach. I’m no expert on the fugue, but the way the left and right hand move on independent but interlocking courses sounds rather like metaphor to me. Not a metaphor, but figurative language itself. Two things running like freight trains on parallel tracks. As a poet, the delight is putting unlike things together.
Laura: Referring to “parallel tracks” and “putting unlike things together” made me think of this short poem by the Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas: “For we are like rail-tracks / Never meeting / And if we incline towards each other / The wagons of the heart will overturn.” Michigan and water—particularly the Great Lakes—appear repeatedly throughout these poems, “running parallel” rather fiercely to the speaker. I’m curious about this relationship: what does the Michigan landscape mean to you as a poet, and how does this sense of running-alongside rather than merging shape the book’s psychological terrain?
Alex: My hometown, situated right on lake Michigan, is full of beaches and towering sand dunes, many of them open to the public. Growing up, we learned that the dune grass, which would cut your feet and make it difficult to climb up or sprint down, held the dune in place. But every time we traversed up, across, and down the dunes, we unsettled things a bit more, eroded the grass, and the dune, further. So everything I love about that experience—the fact that no one owns the beach, that I can see the glitter of whitecaps from the dune’s peak, that I can’t see Chicago from anywhere on my side of what feels like an ocean—is a little bit harmful to the place. I feel like I belong to that landscape. And yet I don’t belong at all, so obviously.
Water is a pretty pre-loaded image, of course, from Gilgamesh “who saw the deep” to Elizabeth Bishop’s Atlantic water flowing “like what we imagine knowledge to be.” In Michigan, water is core to identity in the same way that football is—in my town tourists buy hats that read ”Lake Michigan, Unsalted” or “Lake Michigan: Shark Free Since ’93.” Yet you can’t see across that lake, and its storms have wrecked even large boats. Again, it seems like belonging and not belonging. We have this regional symbol that’s cute and charming, but it’s always slipping our tidy embrace.
Laura: You’ve got cockroaches in both “Ivan Karamazov’s Confession” (alongside a grackle—the cockroach of birds, perhaps unfairly) and “My Wife Doesn’t Get Either Job.” I have to say, reading your work I thought less of Dostoevsky and more of Kafka or Clarice Lispector, especially The Passion According to G.H., where a woman has an existential crisis about a crushed cockroach. So tell me more about this little guy—what’s the cockroach doing in your poems?
Alex: They’re not really a predator or a prey, are they? Just ugly and undefeatable. It’s like each new one you see is really the last one you crushed, come back to rub your nose in its survival. I like for poems to have a comic edge, and I think the repertoire of animals, from the charismatic mammals to the cockroaches and grackles, gives the larger, goofier sense of creation that delights me.
Evolutionarily, they’re old. And they’ll outlast us. They’re also highly adaptable and rich with their own variety. I recently moved to Alabama, and there are cockroaches here just like everyplace else. They’re huge, silent, never actually sneaking up on you but just appearing in your vision. Here, though, they have wings.
