A Conversation with Emmalea Russo

Poet and novelist Emmalea Russo exists on my Instagram as a wild-haired, tattooed practitioner of the occult who sometimes wears a party dress, sometimes carries a pitchfork, and lives in the green world outside our urban spaces. In the past year, she has advertised online courses on the Psycho Cosmos, an exploration of “overlaps and divergences” between psychoanalysis and astrology,and the Alchemy of the Word, alchemy through the lens of thinkers like Carl Jung and Emily Dickinson. Her timeline is an intriguing scroll of images of medieval and religious art and female archetypes—Kate Moss sleeping in the back of a car in a fur coat, a tousle-headed Michelle Pfeiffer. Russo’s first novel, Vivienne (Arcade Publishing, 2024), which follows four previously published books of poetry, employs a similar mixture of alchemy, archetype, and their overlap to comment on art-making in our time.