CNF: from Paradise

by Stephan Viau

every time a window opens, a bumble bee saunters in, as though it had been knocking. i sit and make it tea to ease its mind. we chat about this and that over what biscuits i might have lying around. it didn’t hope for anything special. it’s not out for some devastating truth, but when it dies looking for the window on the way out, i know everything comes to us whether we want it to or not.

Stephan Antoine Viau is a poet, translator, and reviewer. He earned his MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. HEIRLOOMS, his first book of poems, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2026. Work of his has appeared in The Hong Kong Review of Books, The Colorado Review, ABSTRACT, The Word’s Faire, HASH, New Delta Review, among others. He lives in Maryland with his family

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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “from Paradise”?

Coming down from a summer having read and re-read James Shea’s translations of Sayumi Kamakura’s haikus in Applause for a Cloud, I felt strangely connected to nature in late July, but not in the way that nature might act as a healer. Rather, in the way that nature can mirror the same crises that flower and bloom and overgrow in our heads–how nature is full of anxieties if you immerse yourself in it. Like if you stare too long at anything, it can go strange.

Writing Paradise then started when I saw a leaf float ever-so-gently past me in the Monocacy River near my home. For no reason, it came across as surreal. The leaf seemed to be pushing silently past me on a trajectory of its own, as though I were in the river with a stranger who was excusing themselves as they walked by. There was no chance of getting to know that leaf better; no chance of befriending that stranger before he disappeared–certainly not without imposing myself on him in a way that would have felt like an overt act of control.

In this mode–and undoubtedly influenced by some of the modes present in ancient Chinese poetry or in the haiku form of Sayumi Kamakura’s Applause for a Cloud–the world of Paradise was born, where suddenly all of my writing sustained this note: where the natural world becomes a mirror. Paradise is a vessel for witnessing the people I know; witnessing my failure to attach; witnessing my own internalized insecurities. As the comparisons deepen and the forest in Paradise become more dense, the poems push toward the notion that every metaphor is only permitted because we are willing to suspend our disbelief–to look at the rain as the tears of the world, as it were. As it progresses, Paradise ventures to the outer edges of the natural world, where we leave this place; It questions the afterlife and our incessant tendency to want to believe in one, particularly when we have lived a life full of graceless aging and wasted years spent in recursive self-persecution. Paradise is about the horrible effort of permitting that ultimate metaphor of an afterlife–a safehaven–of trying to strip away the curtains to see, beyond the trees that crowd our every view, something other than simply “graveyards in the distance.”

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