Off Boulder Highway with poet and essayist Jennifer Battisti

A Widdoes Peak interview

“Your childhood is a place I cannot puncture into, my childhood is a cage I cannot climb down from -”

- Jennifer Battisti, from “Naming the Sharks”, Off Boulder Highway

Earlier this February, I had the pleasure of interviewing poet and essayist Jennifer Battisti, who is well known in Las Vegas literary circles. We had a wonderful conversation about her most recent publication, Off Boulder Highway, a hybrid collection of poems, personal essays and flash fiction. Jennifer’s work is so raw and powerful that it grabs you by the fifth chakra and doesn’t let go. She effortlessly writes from an emotionally authentic place about her youth, motherhood and her recovery from addiction.

In October 2024, Jennifer Battisti and I read at the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District to celebrate the launch of the book Desert Superbloom: Las Vegas Writers on Scarcity and Abundance. While I was familiar with Jennifer’s work, I had forgotten that we actually met prior at a Nevada Humanities Pop-up Poetry Feature Series back in 2018, which was curated by The Las Vegas Poets Organization.

We also read at the Writer’s Block in 2019 in celebration of the winners and runners-up of the Helen Stewart Poetry Award, which was an annual contest held by the now defunct Helen, a Literary Magazine. Jennifer was the 2018 winner and I was 2017 runner up. How I have forgotten this I am not certain but I feel like much of what happened before 2020 seems to have been wiped from my memory bank.

Jennifer’s writing dives deep into personal experiences but does so via surrealistic techniques. In “Acid Trip,” one of the essays from this collection, she writes with precision about spending a night taking LSD with a friend when they were sixteen. In this piece she captures teenagers yearning for freedom while being forced to navigate circumstances they should not have had to as children. It is a feeling of nostalgia twinged with regret; a mature perspective from the other side of adulthood:

We beep Fast Eddie - fool us numb. Relief blurs the boulevard. He takes the hard right at White Cross Drugs to St. Louis Suites, where you’ve forged the lease with a fake ID. You stay in school, even after your parents leave you like a past-due bill. You go to work: bake cookies at Mrs. Fields in the Boulevard mall during the week, stomp on peanut shells Saturdays at the steak house. We are sixteen, so we say, this building looks like Melrose Place! Aren’t we chic!…

She then moves into a state of surrealist language as the girls experience an acid trip:

After the LSD tab dissolves into catnip on our tongues, we coax out the tender stray inside our mouths. We yowl until the moon explodes, then inch by inch, two paws stretch out. The dumpster tabby moans under a rosemary bush. We bring her into the apartment. Her eye is crusted shut and dripping psychedelic. Her stomach hangs swollen and pissy with kittens. She labors for six hours. We hallucinate kittens twirling in the curtains - licking the grimy bathtub, swimming in the orange juice, tumbling in our socks.

Jennifer reads several selections from Off Boulder Highway during the interview below. She and I also discuss the process of creating this hybrid collection. She offers tips on how to create a sustainable writing practice. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. If you are interested in reading more work by Jennifer, check out her website where you can order the book. She also has work in Brevity, Split Lip Magazine, KNPR’s Desert Companion, Wildsam’s Las Vegas City Guide, and the anthology, STTAR Storytelling with Tarot.

About Jennifer Battisti:

Jennifer Battisti is a lifelong Nevadan. She is a writer, an artist, a teaching artist for the NV Arts Council, a mother, a hospitality worker and a woman in recovery. Her writing has been anthologized in Legs of Tumbleweed, Wings of Lace, Sagebrush and Sandstone, Las Vegas Writes and Where We Live, an anthology of writing and art in response to the October 1st tragedy. Her worked has also appeared in The Desert Companion, Witness, Brevity, Western Humanities Review, Split Lip, Thin Air, Wildsam Travel Guides and elsewhere. In 2016 Nevada Public Radio interviewed her about her poetry. She was twice voted best local poet by the Desert Companion. In 2023, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her nonfiction. Her writing and collage art have been on display in exhibits for Nevada Humanities, The Collage Collective and Clark County Public Art. Her first chapbook, Echo Bay was released in 2018 and her full-length collection, Off Boulder Highway was released in 2021 (Tolsun Books). She brings journal workshops to people in recovery and has been a Teaching Artist and the co-director for the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in Clark County. Twice a year she facilities an Artist’s Way creative cluster for people who’d like to cultivate creativity in their lives. You can find her at jenniferbattisti.com