Power Q & A with Mallory Tater
Q: How do the practices of swimming and poetics intersect?
A: I discovered my love of swimming in 2019. One of my best friends had just died, and I was searching for escapism—away from screens, away from work, and, in some ways, away from my own body. The weightlessness of being submerged in the public pool eased my angst and softened the tension and grief in my neck and shoulders. The quiet beneath the water cleared my mind. The rhythm I could build toward, channel, and disrupt brought me a sense of control and steadiness. Stripping down my body and taking a warm shower before and after felt reverent. Small talk with strangers—those quiet good mornings in the lobby and the lanes—became part of the day’s calm order. The pool, like the poem, became a place of repetition, refining, and resistance.
The poetic line is like a length—it’s a unit of offering, brief and intentional. Like a chosen stroke, a line engages with a complete thought, opening it into being through movement and language. Like poetry, swimming is the complete interaction of the body. Like swimming, poetry is a practice that commits to being adrift. It is active, afloat. As there are different strokes in swimming, there are different poetic forms expressing both constraint and release.
In my creative practice, I consistently write poems in response to inquiries I wish to address—and these inquiries often surface at the pool while I swim lengths. While writing Lockers, I always surfaced back to the world of competitive athletics: the cultural impact sports have on youth, their mental and physical health, and the ways they haunt the adult body. Other recurring themes include grief, girlhood, and memory. In the book’s titular long poem, the speaker contemplates death, the body, gender roles, and language while watching a swim team of skilled athletes warm up before practice. It’s an act of vicarious envy for their talent and fear for their vulnerability.
Poetry lives in community, but also in the solitary urge to create—like a public pool where we are alone together. Our bodies pass in a shared liminality, each holding strength in individuality, like the poetic voice itself. Swimmers thrive among swimmers; poets thrive among poets. To read water is to swim in a poem: immersion, fluidity, and sensory awareness merge in a call that welcomes all of our bodies into this shared language.
Lockers are for Bearcats Only by Mallory Tater offers poetry that traces the complexities of grief, the importance of destigmatizing dialogue around suicide, and the beauty and complicated core of girlhood friendships while improving our collective understanding of mental health awareness and suicide prevention in an approachable, concrete, and empathetic way.
The poems spill out from the confluence of grief and water. After losing one of her closest friends, the poet began swimming laps—part meditation, part therapy, part escapism—immersed in the depths of the public pool. There, she found herself haunted by the strange tension between fitness / surrender and memory / motion where ghosts of girlhood, catholicism, and addiction rose to the surface.
These themes haunt Lockers Are for Bearcats Only – a tender, unguarded exploration of loss, embodiment, and the currents that carry us through life with and without those who shaped us.
About Mallory Tater:
Mallory Tater is the author of This Will Be Good: Poems (Book*Hug Press, 2018), The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2020), and Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming, ECW Press, 2027). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing. Lockers are for Bearcats Only is her second poetry collection.