In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Isabelle Correa’s poetry collection Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It is dark, funny, and moving.
David Gate wrote of the book:
“This is a collection that refuses to behave or be boxed or be anything other than full and open hearted. Isabelle Correa writes desire as collision; body, memory, and longing crashing against the fragile idea of safety. These poems are sharp, darkly funny, and devastatingly honest about how we relentlessly return to intimacy, even when it hurts.”
In her own words, here is Isabelle Correa’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It:
I’m very feeling-centered in my work; you could call me a largehearted girl. My poems are often an exploration, a translation even, of internal worlds. Music is one of the best ways to enter an internal world, to bask in it, sit in it like a mud bath—whether that’s in the stage of writing, editing, or reading.
So, the foundation of this playlist is the songs I listened to while writing Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It. And when the collection was finished, I added and ordered the songs so that the playlist is in sync with the emotional tides of Portrait.
Those tides are turbulent but intentional. In reference to Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself,” “My Multitudes” are a recurring character in Portrait. This “character” appears in multiple poems, as if all the different versions of the speaker are a bumbling hive-mind vying for attention and a chance to take control. That kind of back-and-forth is reflected in the playlist.
Another aspect that influenced the creation of this playlist is the fact that art is not made in isolation. Artists are always in conversation with other artists. And I love it—maybe it’s because I was an English major; maybe it’s because I’m a Gemini rising; or maybe it’s just because this is a really cool thing. In writing and organizing the manuscript for Portrait, I wanted the influence from contemporary pop culture to come through. There is a poem from the perspective of Fleabag from the TV series of the same name. There is a poem with lines all from an episode of Judge Judy. References to Beetlejuice, Barbie, Janis Joplin, Maury. And then, of course, a lot of the pieces are in conversation with other poets. There are after poems of Margaret Atwood, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby, and Sylvia Plath. So with this playlist, I wanted to make sure that there were some contemporary artists who could be included in this conversation. Some of them are super well-known, like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and Gracie Abrams, and some are artists that I came across through Instagram or Spotify shuffle that I’ve fallen in love with, like Girlhouse, Ella Vos, Laurel, Ruby Gill, and Sarah Jaffe.
Both the collection and the playlist are pretty long. So here are a few of the songs reflecting a variety of multitudes and why they made the list.
Stream the playlist on Tidal
“Insensitive” — Jann Arden
This is one of the first songs I ever memorized. I was four and it was on the radio all the time. It’s symbolic of how I learned to love, which is the theme and purpose of the first section in Portrait titled “Becoming.” The song belongs near the beginning of the playlist because it belongs at the beginning of the story, when the speaker is learning (from the radio, from movies, from her family) what love is supposed to look like.
“La Vie en Rose” — from French Kiss
When I lived in Saigon, I used to drive around at night when the streets were empty on my scooter and listen to this song. And before that, I used to listen to the French Kiss movie soundtrack in the white Honda I drove in high school, which is a line from the poem “Dear New Year” in Portrait.
“Send me La Vie En Rose from the movie French Kiss
on a cd in my old white Honda.”
This song is the epitome of romantic love and pleasure, which is one of the currents running through Portrait. It is, after all, a collection of love poems.
“Pool” — Samia
Because this song is haunting and confessional. Yes, Portrait is a collection of love poems, but they are love poems that like to take a trip down to hell from time to time.
“Wet T-Shirt” — Ruby Waters
Because just because this collection is sad doesn’t mean it’s not also sexy.
“That Funny Feeling” — Bo Burnham
When the comedy special Inside by Bo Burnham came out, I was still in Vietnam. It was 2021 and there was a strict lockdown being enforced. So I would sit alone in my studio apartment with my dogs and watch Inside over and over again. It was one of those mind-blowing experiences of being not only seen by a piece of art, but being almost complicit in it, because I was experiencing it myself in that moment on the deepest level. So this song made the playlist in part because of my obsession with the comedy special that it’s from, and also because this song in particular reflects someone who is worried about the state of the world as well as their place in it. And that’s reflective of the speaker of Portrait because she is lost in her own psyche, but she also is porous; the world keeps getting in.
Phoebe Bridgers — “Georgia” and “As Above”
Phoebe Bridgers is on here twice, for “Georgia” as the second song and “As Above” as the last song. She’s the bookends of this playlist, and there are layers of reasons for this.
First, “Georgia”: According to Pitchfork, “the earliest composition, ‘Georgia,’ dates back to Bridgers’ teenage years, when she crafted her own lyrics out of a misremembered Feist track.” This is why this gorgeous song full of yearning is near the beginning—it’s a young song. It’s a song that was trying to remember another song and instead became itself.
“As Above,” from her recent new album, Lost Weekend: this song is a poem, with some “line breaks” that made me audibly gasp.
“I thought about my mom /
Drivin’ herself to the hospital”
Nobody writes sadness like Phoebe Bridgers does. This song aches; it traces its patterns (as above, so below). It feels like the same breath as “‘What Went Wrong’ is Question and Answer” from Portrait, a poem about looking back as a way of looking forward and inward.
And lastly, Phoebe Bridgers is in conversation with Bo Burnham. What better way to end a weird, wild, nuanced romantic playlist than with love between artists?
Isabelle Correa is a poet from Washington State now living in Mexico City. She studied creative writing at Western Washington University, is the winner of the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the author of the book Good Girl and Other Yearnings, and the chapbook Sex is From Mars But I Love You From Venus. Her work has appeared in Pank, Third Point Press, The Rebis, and more. You can connect with Isabelle at isabellecorrea.com.