James Ciano holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. He has received scholarships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Community of Writers, and his recent poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, and The Yale Review. His reviews and writings on poetry have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Under Editor David St. John, he is an Associate Editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf, 2026). He is the 2025-2027 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.
Boa. Central to The Committee of Men is an exploration of athletics, hazing, and toxic masculinity — can you explain how your collection came to engage with these topics?
Ciano: I come from a long line of physical education teachers – my father, my mother, my uncle, both of my grandfathers, almost all of whom coached high school sports; even my brother was a physical education major in college. I grew up as an athlete in a family of athletes, and for much of my adolescence I had hopes to play soccer professionally. As I came of age in a world of elite sports, and then as a goalkeeper in college, I moved in and through spaces where performing hyper-masculinity felt like a mandate, and the accompanying silences like a necessary cost. At the same time, I was negotiating an unexplored inner creative life, and when I became a poet, it felt like a radical departure from the life I’d led.
It took years for me to recognize that my experiences as an athlete were not separate from, but rather integral to, who I was as a poet. Then the book began to constellate around explorations of masculinity, specifically its cruelties and performances. I wanted to understand the dynamics that made something like hazing possible, and to trace the toll this kind of masculinity—and the accompanying stifling of creativity and emotional expression—can take on mental health.
Boa. I’ve noticed an insistent use of the simile over the course of the book. Can you talk about your relationship to the simile and how you see it functioning in your work?
Ciano: In a profile of Sharon Olds for the New York Times in 2022, Olds speaks about having “a real simile brain.” It was a phrase I related to and have thought about often. As a poet drawn to image and association, similes have always felt similar to how I experience the world – finding strange congruences in seemingly unlike things. At their worst, they can be a kind of poetic crutch that I rely on, instead of speaking directly. But, at their best, similes can feel like a propulsive engine that both drives and expands the imagistic and linguistic apertures of a poem, allowing me to reach something truer and more surprising than where I began.
I have always bristled at the implied “weakness” of similes and the assertive “strength” of metaphors, a binary I encountered in workshops as a graduate student. In her conversation with David Naimon for his podcast Between the Covers, Alice Oswald speaks about how “similes have always seemed to be quite a female part of speech.” When I think about the violent displacement enacted by metaphor, I find it meaningful, particularly within a book that seeks to interrogate the violences of masculinity, that this alternate figurative register has guided me.
Boa. Does it feel important to you that a book like The Committee of Men is coming out in this political environment?
Ciano: When I see the response to recent shows like Adolescence, or the uptick in think-pieces on “the manosphere,” I think there is an increased willingness to have public conversations about toxic masculinity and its deleterious effects on young men. While the book doesn’t engage with social media’s impact on this issue explicitly, it is in conversation with a larger subset of questions around inherited frameworks of masculinity, and how those frameworks perpetuate cycles of violence and misogyny in insidious ways. It is not hard to draw a line from hazing to harm committed by men in power on a larger scale, like what we’re seeing play out right now in our country. The book, in my mind, would be a tremendous success if someone who reads it finally sees the flashing exit sign above the off-ramp that leads to growth, accountability, and self-forgiveness.
