An Interview with Stephanie Yue Duhem

When I first became aware of Stephanie Duhem’s poems sometime in 2020 or 2021, they were the work of an anonymous and mysterious Twitter presence, someone who published in journals I had never heard of and wrote obliquely on occult themes. I instantly perceived an intricacy and playfulness (a “ludic” quality, as Blake Smith has put it) that gave them authority of a distinctly poetic kind—the kind that comes from tuning oneself to a different wavelength than that of ordinary speech, one beyond the power of the ordinary self.