Red Room Interns: Going Deep Into MAD Poetry

This past month, Red Room Poetry was joined by two paid interns who supported poetry reading and other behind-the-scenes vital tasks that keep our projects running smoothly. As always, these talented team members left their mark in the Red Room legacy.

As their time with us came to a close at the end of October – which is also Mental Health Month – we've asked them to go into the depths of MAD Poetry’s archives and reflect on a poem that touched them profoundly. These are their observations.

Pooja Mittal Biswas’s ‘hive’, chosen by Sonal Kamble

Pooja Mittal Biswas’s ‘hive’, commissioned for MAD Poetry in 2024, opens with a proclamation: “each mind hides a thousand minds”. The unflinching intensity of the piece is probably what spoke to me the most of all the MAD Poetry commissions Red Room has done. Amongst a landscape of noise, the piece is filled with creatures: bees in the brain, muted voices, and the non-indigenous blackbird “trapped in that warm, butter-browned flour”.

‘hive’ embodies the ethos of MAD Poetry by presenting the lived experience of mental health in a manner that resists self definition, and subverts the picture of exile that so often plagues the theme. This is not to say the spectre of exile is the invention of writers; the historical and ongoing sequestering of individuals with mental health issues into institutions, and marginalisation, surely does not help. I think it does create a real challenge, however, to articulate such a deeply interior experience in a way that refuses to isolate the speaker. Biswas does exactly this. The others are “untouched by their own sounds”, she writes, incognizant of their own constitution.

I like ‘hive’ because it's deep, and reflective, and mysterious, like the “black black water within”. I’m always grateful to read good poems; to remember the remarkable joy of being destabilised by one striking image, just to plummet into the next.

Meet Sonal: Sonal Kamble is a writer based on unceded Dharug land. You can find her work in Cordite, Voiceworks, and Going Down Swinging, among others. You can find out more about her work here.

Kendrea Rhodes’s ‘Sansomnia’, chosen James Stanwix

The title of Kendrea Rhodes’ 2025 MAD poetry commission is Sansomnia, a multivocal Portmanteau that moves with me through her poetics, enacting the role of partner, someone I can tap on the shoulder and ask, “do you think you could speak to me about sleep and health and without”?

Titles are nearly always significant to the poems I read. I will often think of them as a sort of line zero, but they don’t stay neat, they smuggle themselves behind stanzas to meet me at my final thought. The commissioned pieces for this year’s MAD poetry challenged, reclaimed and adopted names and terms in title, using them to speak solidarity, grief, masculinity, neurodivergence and “veneers of Madness”, as put by Kendrea in her posted poem reflection.

Language is important in this MAD poetry space, giving shape and communicability to the expression of lived mental health experience; concurrently, poetry is a gorgeous vehicle, encouraging its linguistic passengers to mimic its mobility. I try to see this meeting of shape and dynamism as active. When I read Kendrea’s Sansomnia, its title moves along each line precisely, telling me assuredly that unknowability is needed and should be preserved.

Assured unknowability stands out in Sansomnia’s lines 26-30, all fractured by caesura and colour: “The earth greys out [caesura] (a baby-sized sock)” (line 26). ‘Sansomnia’ the living Portmanteau is helpful here, reminding me of the persona’s waning energy and the poem’s thematic interest in sleep and health. With the idea of the poem preserved in its title, I am free to explore the poetic liberties of Kendrea’s piece. For instance, line 26 plays with the concept of distance as a phenomenon felt both externally – in the caesura between ‘…greys out.’ and ‘(a baby…’ – and internally, through the fading of black to grey. This line reflects the power of language back to me, showing distance in two ways across a singular expression. In black and on the left, the persona speaks metaphorically which then plays out literally and in grey on the page’s right. In this line and in Sansomnia as a whole, Kendrea playfully controls language in a manner that reads as representative of MAD poetry: a project through which language and titles and names are moved by where the poet decides to lay their road.

Meet James: James (he/they) lives on Whadjuk Noongar land and enjoys writing and taking photos. They have been published in Cordite, Westerly, Pulch and elsewhere, and run a poetry night called 'Hem' in Walyalup/Fremantle. You can find more about their work here.

If you'd like to intern at Red Room Poetry in 2026, keep an eye on our channels. Sign up to our newsletters and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.