PROFILE: Hell Yeah for Rachelle Toarmino

Lucy K Shaw travels to Buffalo, NY to write about the pregnant, Peach Mag superstar

The sky was 9/11 blue over downtown Toronto as the bus pulled out of the station and into the morning rush hour traffic. I was in town visiting old friends and had been hoping poet, publisher and teacher, Rachelle Toarmino would make the trip up across the border from Buffalo to visit me while I was, for once, relatively close by in North America. She had been noticeably absent from my virtual life over the past few months, long enough that I’d been involved in a speculative conversation with a mutual friend about the prospect of her somehow secretly, inexplicably and independently being mad with both of us. But then when she announced her pregnancy on Instagram, using the caption: ‘sorry for flaking all summer i’ve been sleeping 12 hours a day and having a profound experience of big naturals’ just a few days into my nostalgic Canadian trip, I decided it would be more appropriate, or polite at least, for me to go to her.

Homer had his Odyssey, Kerouac had his road, Cheryl Strayed has the Pacific Crest Trail, and I have the Greyhound bus from Toronto to Buffalo. I have been taking this bus for the past fifteen years, most often continuing onto New York City, but often enough since 2014, I have disembarked at the Buffalo terminal and shared a few days with poet friends below the border. Today I’m reading Rachelle’s new book, HELL YEAH, as a PDF on my phone as we trace the edges of Lake Ontario and suddenly feeling vastly unprepared to conduct this interview — Toarmino has gotten serious.

Rachelle Toarmino, who I have known for almost a decade now, first came into my life by way of Matthew Bookin, another Buffalo writer I first met by publishing his stories in the early days of Shabby Doll House. The first time I published Rachelle, as far as I can remember, was in May of 2016 when she and Bookin wrote an experimental side-by-side dispatch about an evening they spent locally in the presence of Karl Ove Knausgaard. In an email at the time, Bookin told me, ‘All credit for the format has to go to Rachelle. She was really the mastermind on this.’ Two sentences that could surely be used as a blurb for everything I’ve ever seen her do since.

Once she appeared in my life, it felt as though I had just been waiting for her. Shabby Doll House published her seminal poem, You up? a few months later that summer — a poem that took on a life of its own as it spun into virality. And by the autumn, she had launched her own online publishing project, alongside editors Matthew Bookin and Bre Kiblin with design by Mickey Harmon: Peach Mag was born not long after the fall of alt lit, during the same season that Donald Trump, sorry to mention him here, was elected for the first time. And it provided a bright spot for our culture. A youthful, warm and inviting space. A safe haven for developing talent against a backdrop of utter shit.

So I’m reading her new book on the bus and I’m struck by how many of these poems I recognise, maybe having listened to them before at readings, or read them in various publications over the past couple of years. It’s strange because I almost think of Rachelle as a new friend, at least in contrast to the people I’ve been visiting in Toronto over the last few days, and the distant life of my early twenties I’ve been revisiting — but what I actually mean is that I have the sense we’re still very close to the beginning of our trajectory as writers working alongside one another. (My life expanding like an accordion.) And I think, how can this book be only 96 pages? She must have cut it down to the absolute bare minimum. All killer.

The border crossing is chaotic just like always. When you do it by bus they make everybody get off with all their bags and stand in line to present passports and answer questions from a TSA agent. I’ve had experiences before where they’ve questioned me extensively, taken me into the secondary room, gone through my phone and belongings, been watched through the double sided mirrors for indeterminate periods of time — but today they don’t seem particularly interested in me. They’re more focused on a family who don’t speak English at all save for a small child. One might have assumed that the framed photograph of the president grinning down from the wall as they’re questioned is merely a consequence of his personality, but I distinctly remember the previous portraits of Obama, Bush and Biden that used to hang in the same place above the counter.

As soon as everybody boards back onto the bus, we cross a bridge and we’re in Buffalo. The sky now more a Bud Light blue as we enter late morning. Rachelle picks me up from outside the station right on time and I make a conscious note of how different the two cities feel, although there’s no real reason to make comparisons. Toronto, a major world city and Buffalo, a rustbelt dream half in love with its past. I have been reading a lot about its historical art scenes recently in (Rachelle’s husband) Aidan Ryan’s new book, I AM HERE YOU ARE NOT I LOVE YOU, and so it feels odd to be unexpectedly arriving. I think of two simple sentences within the book that explain why there are always poets and artists here, always readings and gallery shows happening, always people able to devote time to running magazines and small presses, and why it’s always worth getting off the bus on your way to Brooklyn.

‘Simplify any causal equation in Buffalo history and you will discover them, the underlying laws of the region. They are: cheap rent or cheap beer.’

Rachelle is one of those women who makes me feel, in comparison to her, enormous. She pulls up in what I can only describe as a car, having no memory of the vehicle already, and she’s grinning as she leans over towards me on the side of the road. I climb in and hug her from the passenger seat. The last time I saw her, just over a year ago, we had said goodbye at this exact geographical location. (I took the bus in the opposite direction to do a Shabby Doll House event at Type Books.) And in reality, I think, I’m of a fairly typical size (I don’t mean to brag) — okay I’m quite tall — but aside from her long, thick, curly hair, and now growing baby bump, Rachelle is a remarkably tiny person. It surprises me every single time I see her, because her personality, in contrast, is so powerful.

‘Hi Rachelle,’ I say, as she begins driving us home. ‘Hi Lucy,’ she responds laughing, as though we’re being filmed for a scripted reality show. There’s a slight tension as we both know I’ll be writing thousands of words about our day together, her life story, the history of our friendship, and her entire bibliography:

1990, Born in Niagara Falls, New York

2015, Published first poem online, Week of Waking Thoughts (Metatron ÖMËGÄ)

2016, Published first chapbook of embroidered poems, Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress)

Also 2016, Founded Peach Mag

2019, Published chapbook of process-driven poetry, Feel Royal (b l u s h)

2020, Published first full-length poetry collection, That Ex (Big Lucks Books)

2021, Published ‘sonnet cycle in prose’ chapbook, Comeback (Foundlings Press)

2024, Won Sixth Finch’s chapbook contest for My Science (Sixth Finch, 2025)

2025, Published her second full-length collection, Hell Yeah (Third Man Books)

We arrive at her home and I deposit my bags in the same bedroom I stayed in last year while Rachelle moves around the kitchen making lunch for the two of us. She’s wearing a sports bra that she says ‘no longer fits’ and leggings ‘that are also probably on their last week’ and has already had a busy day by the time of my arrival. Every Monday morning, she tells me, ‘I go for a walk with my friend Janet at this cemetery called Forest Lawn. Then we had our first doula appointment at ten, which I thought was informative. Then I announced my book launch on social media. Those were my big things to do today.’ Being profiled for a magazine afterwards, apparently, is no big deal for her.

She serves me a slice of avocado toast and a gala apple and asks me about my journey, but I insist I’ll be the one to ask the questions. I want to know what it was like growing up on the US/Canada border, and when she first felt an awareness of her position just below the imaginary line on the map.

‘As early as I can remember, because we would walk across the bridge, which was terrifying. Those are some of my earliest memories of being scared as a kid. We’d go to Clifton Hill, which is kind of just casinos and outdoor arcade spaces for kids, essentially, with haunted houses and wax museums and that kind of stuff. And we’d go there a lot on weekends because it’s right there, kind of like another downtown district of Niagara Falls. But I never thought about what happens outside of Clifton Hill. And I don’t even know if, as a kid, that it totally registered to me that we were going to a different country.’

We finish eating, standing up in the kitchen, and decide to go upstairs to her bedroom so we can get cosy while I grill her more on her life to date.

Rachelle lives with her husband, fellow writer Aidan, and their four cats: Gio, Penny, Diana and Nico in a large, rambling old house in a part of Buffalo that I feel compelled to describe as ‘leafy.’ In contrast to Toronto, where everybody I know seems to live in increasingly compact quarters, I don’t think I’ve ever visited the home of a writer in Buffalo and not been surprised by the size and apparent comfort of their living situation, which is a blessing, given the weather conditions in the city throughout much of the year. Rachelle sits down on the bed, and I take a seat by the window. She puts on some stylish glasses which I compliment and she tells me she bought them with HSA money, which she then explains to me as a concept. I ask about her prescription and she says she doesn’t know, but I think she’s being honest. Rachelle is not the kind of person to hide her glasses prescription from a journalist. I tell her, ‘I have a list of things that I want to talk about but I think it makes sense to start at the beginning. So can you just tell me about your childhood?’ We both laugh. She describes catholic school, undiagnosed ADHD, and an early predilection for curating writing: ‘When I was in the fourth grade, someone gifted me a journal and the way that I wanted to use it was with my three best friends in my class, we would each take a turn writing in it at some point throughout the day, like the Sisterhood of the Traveling Journal, essentially. Almost like a shared Tumblr or magazine where we would just write, and we weren’t writing to one another, we were just writing our experiences as if it were a diary. But that was our way of passing notes and keeping in touch with what the others were thinking about throughout the day. It was quite an early desire to see my friends’ writing, I think.’

In retrospect, she can trace the path that led to her becoming a poet, publisher, editor, etc., but when I ask if she knew this was a possibility, something living adults do, she just gives me a knowing smile and shakes her head vehemently, ‘No, certainly not.’

We discuss her bibliography and I propose to her that I have noted three distinct periods beginning every five years in her work.

1. In 2016, she returned to the US after living in Spain for a few years post-college, began publishing online, launched Peach Mag shortly thereafter, started building a profile as a writer, and published a couple of chapbooks. She started to gain a following, published poems and essays online, built a persona in what she now calls ‘the most ultra feminine drag’ and began building her first collection: ‘A lot of the poems were influenced by who I was reading at the time. When I think about the poems specifically in That Ex, I think there’s something interesting in the process, not just sitting down and writing the poems, but doing so many more readings. I was going to open mics in Buffalo several times a week. And there was always an awareness of friends being there. I wasn’t reading nearly as widely as I do now, and I certainly wasn’t challenging myself with what I was reading. I would read what I immediately liked, whereas now I try to challenge myself to figure out: what’s this person trying to do? And so I think that the tone of that book captures that particular time of my life and how I was in the world, socially.’

2. That social element, perhaps, defined the first era of her ‘poetry career’, and then overnight, it evaporated. In 2020, three months into the pandemic, she put out her debut full-length collection, That Ex, with Big Lucks Books. It had been a long time coming, and yet when it finally arrived the celebrations were naturally muted. There was one ingenious drive-in event at the Penn Dixie Fossil Park & Nature Reserve just south of Buffalo, in which Rachelle stood atop a car in a long, flowing leopard-print dress and read poems to an audience of people in parked cars with their windows rolled up, listening to her speak through an FM transmitter to their radios — but aside from that, it was just a couple of Zoom occasions and by the following year, she was enrolled in an MFA program in Massachusetts, where she took the first year of classes through her computer. ‘I got my call on February 1st but I didn’t accept the offer until March, about two weeks before the pandemic really hit. And then basically, everything was going great. I was thinking, my first book’s coming out and I’m going to do an MFA, but then it was Zoom school, two of the three faculty quit, I mean, it happened to everyone, but things went downhill. In the end, it was great, but it was not what I thought it was going to be.’ Of course, the work itself was impacted by the shift. ‘In HELL YEAH, many of the earliest poems were written in the first year of COVID when I wasn’t seeing anybody, and so they weren’t shared in that same way, and they could be a different kind of intimate without the expectation or the desire to make other people laugh, or the idea that my friends would be the ones hearing them first instead of people I just met in a workshop space, so they could feel a little more private. And I think because of that privacy, I freed myself to use language in ways that didn’t always have to feel clear. And that experience of withdrawing for a bit and writing the book allowed me to sharpen other techniques and ideas, without the pressure of, what are people going to think about me?’ In the summer of 2023, after seven years of publishing new writing online every Tuesday and Friday, Peach went on indefinite hiatus. That September, Rachelle and Aidan got married. I was there — I was here. It was almost exactly the same date, their second anniversary is tomorrow. That summer, Rachelle moved back to Buffalo and started teaching workshops, at first independently through her own Beauty School and other online teaching venues, and by the following year she had begun teaching at a local university. As far as I could tell, it seemed as though things were getting more and more professional in her poetry life. I mean they were, quite literally, in the sense that she was suddenly making a living from it, but when I put this suggestion to her, she bristles. ‘I didn’t intend on doing that. I cringe a little bit at the professionalized thing, because I think that there are poets out there who have these careerist tracks where they do or like certain things because they want the job in poetry. And I don’t feel that way about myself at all. I don’t care if The Paris Review publishes me or Shabby Doll House publishes me.’ Then I bristle and say, ‘You would be much luckier to get in Shabby Doll House!’ And she smiles and says, ‘I mean, I know the editor. She’s picky.’ Balance restored. She goes on, ‘Even the university job I did have, I accidentally got that job. I wasn’t trying to find a job in academia. This full time position opened up, and someone in the local community who knew me from Peach Mag and stuff said, do you want this? And Aidan and I just so happened to be talking about, eventually, family planning. And unfortunately, in the States, you have to have full time work to have health insurance. So it seemed like good timing. But I don’t care about getting into academia or anything like that.’ This is fortunate because she was let go in a round of layoffs by the university a year later, due to ‘national and regional challenges facing higher education’ to quote a local news article I pull up. Or, as Rachelle explains, ‘The cost of college is astronomical, and you know, this new generation isn’t as easily duped as mine was about going to college, especially after COVID, when so many programs are hybrid or on Zoom. People are really questioning the value of that kind of education. And when a lot of entry level jobs are being taken over by AI, or disappearing in general, there just aren’t a lot of white collar jobs for the people who get those degrees anymore. It sucks because I had a lot of plans for that job. I was going to bring back the student literary journal this semester, and next semester, I was going to start a reading series. So, ‘circling back’ to this idea of professionalization, it was going to be perfect, because it was just all of these silly things I’ve done over the years, like Clamour Magazine or these Peach Mag parties I’ve thrown in Buffalo... What do you mean that could be something that makes me a valuable candidate for a job? It was very validating to feel like someone actually saw value in that work instead of it just being the stuff I’ve needed to do to stay sane and have fun.’ Diana, apparently sensitive to the mood, climbs onto Rachelle’s lap as though to comfort her and change the subject.

3. The third phase is beginning now, I think, with the publication of Hell Yeah and the gestation of the baby growing inside her. ‘So what’s the book about?’ I ask. One of the most annoying questions. ‘It’s about every kind of relationship that I was imagining I could have, whether with a boss, with a group of people on Yahoo Answers, with my dad, with Frank O’Hara. The poems are interested in common speech and what Jack Spicer would call a poetics of correspondence, responding to one another and trying to communicate, and how that communication relates to knowledge, experience, science and ideas of oneself and one’s world. The title started as a joke, like, what if I called it Hell Yeah, since that’s something I say a lot, and poetry is just things... But then I realized how much of the tone is this ecstatic response to either situations or other people. And it seemed to make sense.’

I don’t particularly know what to expect after this — but that’s exactly what she wants. ‘Any time someone tries to tell me — this is what you do, this is the kind of writer you are — there’s some little shithead in me that wants to say no, who wants to throw it all out the window and do something completely new,’ she says smiling. To celebrate Hell Yeah, she’s embarking on a twenty-two date book tour over the next four months with stops across North America and Europe, so there will be plenty of opportunities for reinvention. The first event was a few days ago in Syracuse and I mention I’d been impressed by a five second video clip I’d seen of her reading online in which she appeared self-assured, perhaps exhibiting a slightly different reading style. ‘I’m so glad that came across,’ she grins, responding quickly to my absurd remark. ‘I think it’s just a different kind of confidence. Maybe a getting older kind of confidence. Believing more.’

We’ve been talking for about three hours by now and I’m starting to feel like I want to go for a walk. It feels intense, listening carefully to someone answering questions about their life, not really reacting or responding in a regular conversational style, and instead just trying to piece together a story, creating opportunities for them to speak about what’s important to them. Presumably it’s even more tiring being the person doing the majority of the talking. I tell Rachelle I think I need some air and she says she’s feeling hungry — ‘How about we walk to Cafe 59 and get a sandwich?’

As we walk, I remember other Septembers in this corner of the world. The brilliance of the sunshine and the cornflower blue sky of the mid-afternoons. I note the way the season, once again, brings an air of possibility. For babies, for books, for being together, however briefly. Life feels peaceful in this tree-lined, vaguely hip, residential neighbourhood. There’s an artisanal bakery, an anarchist bookstore, pride flags hanging from the occasional porch. It’s ‘walkable.’ I can see why, when she could probably be anywhere else in the world if she wanted to, she would choose to live in Buffalo.

But the truth is this year has been brutal for Rachelle beyond her job loss. I try to find the words to ask a question I’ve been circling.

‘I don’t know how much you want to talk about him, but you’ve mentioned him a couple of times already,’ I pause and exhale. ‘Mickey.’

‘Oh, yeah, actually, thank you,’ she says, adjusting her leggings and taking a breath.

A plump, grey cat crosses our path then stops in front of us and lays down, belly up, eyeing Rachelle expectantly. She kneels and strokes its stomach while I laugh and take a few photographs of them. She speculates the cat could be pregnant too. Why not? Stranger things have happened.

In March of this year, artist Mickey Harmon was murdered alongside his partner Jordan Celotto, at their Buffalo home. If you’re familiar with the Peach Mag aesthetic, you’ve seen his work. Mickey designed the logo, the book covers, the event posters. He was, with Rachelle, the only person involved in the project for its entirety. I honestly don’t know if there’s an appropriate question I can ask, but I know I didn’t really come here to talk about cats, or babies, or weddings, or funerals — so I say, ‘Let’s talk about what he did for Peach Mag.’

‘I guess, yeah, he, from the beginning, was our graphic designer, like, before we ever launched, he made all those little peach graphics, the logo that says Peach Mag. He made all of our posters for anytime we did something in Buffalo, and then beyond that, when we moved on to digital stuff. So anytime I had a weird idea... He did all the covers for the yearbooks. He was basically the person who I would say I creatively collaborated with, I don’t want to say the most, because that’s not true, but he was the person, usually, whenever I had an idea, I would take it to Jakob [Maier, managing editor], and he’d be like — I love that. Here is my feedback, and let’s work out how we’re going to do it. We would agenda together, and then we would, you know, there’s always collaboration involved in picking work for the journal, like I would with the poetry editors, but with Mickey, it was always more — I have this idea to make a book, to do an event, to do a literary journal to begin with. And I’m not a visual artist in that way, but he would just take the idea and run with it, with his very fun, community-minded, just kind of, goofy comic-adjacent style, and the way he could represent the vibe that I would give him just by saying, here’s what I’m thinking, here’s the thought — we were just always — it was so fun. Very collaborative in a different kind of way, and I’ll miss that forever. Putting together the science fair book launch that I just announced today, I was really emotional last week, because I would have loved to see what poster he made for this. I would have loved to see what project he made for this. Yeah, it’s just going to be a loss for the rest of my, for the rest of Buffalo. It’s just, he’s so missed.’

‘And he was the only other person, apart from you, who was involved with the magazine the entire time.’

‘Yeah, it sucks... Every time I think I want to bring Peach back in a new way, the idea of doing it without him is excruciating, like, truly heartbreaking. And I just immediately try to push it away from my mind.’

‘Right, because how would it look, for one thing. You wouldn’t be able to do it.’

‘Exactly. And you know, there are some other people out there who are really talented graphic designers who we’ve worked with over the years, or who I know and love, both in Buffalo and outside of Buffalo, many of whom knew and loved Mickey and were friends with Mickey because he was such a big part of the visual arts community here, and so I think about that maybe... sense of lineage, because I think Mickey would want us to keep doing it. It’s just that I don’t want to do it without him. Right now, at least.’

‘I think it would be nice to do something in tribute to him?’

‘Yeah, I think about that too. He was involved in so many things, is the other thing, and a lot of groups have been coming together to find ways to honor his memory. I just don’t know yet. I’m trying to be mindful because as much and as dearly as I loved him, and as closely as we worked together on Peach stuff, I wasn’t really like his inner circle. And I’m trying to be respectful of what those people are going through. It’s on my mind, and I think especially because of being laid off recently and having all this time now, I’ve been thinking once the tour planning and the launch planning is over, I have all these things I want to do and I feel in a rush to get them done before our lives change dramatically. And bringing back Peach is always on that list. But I’m just, I’m just not ready.’

We walk in silence for a few moments and then her phone starts vibrating in her pocket.

‘Hi Aidan,’ she says, answering the call on Signal. It reminds me of videos I’ve seen him post on Instagram, face directly to camera. He’s wondering what we’re up to, nearly finished with work and wanting to know if they’re still on for the movie this evening. What’s the movie? I ask. Rachelle responds that she doesn’t know but she thinks it’s three hours long. Aidan tells us it’s called One Battle After Another. I ask if that’s the new Paul Thomas Anderson film — I have heard there’s a new, long, Paul Thomas Anderson film. He says yes. She looks at me and I pretend to be open-minded. She tells him we’re walking to Cafe 59 to get a sandwich. He says he’ll be done in forty minutes or so if we want to meet him at Bada Bing near the movie theater instead. I say ‘Bada Bing?’ And neither of them say the obvious thing but he explains that it’s a bar & grill where they also sell sandwiches. I express that I’m DFW. (David Foster Wallace.) And we arrange to meet there at five as the movie starts at six o’clock. The truth is I’m not interested in movies and I think eating dinner before 9pm should be illegal but I go along with it because I love hanging out with them.

We start walking again toward the bar, and I can feel us giving up on the conceit of the interview. We just want to talk now. The air feels lighter, the late afternoon sun flattering Allen Street in gold. We begin exchanging notes on the writing workshops we both lead — she explains, in depth, how she comes up with her prompts, and I tell her about the progress I’ve been seeing people make. We talk about how much we enjoy helping other people figure out what they’re doing with their work and how we’ve both shifted from simply publishing magazines online to creating these semi-private spaces for sharing writing in progress. I tell her I think she should take the workshops on tour too. We talk about some of the poetic influences on Hell Yeah — Molly Brodak, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara — and how we’ve both grown out of O’Hara, maybe because he died so young. What’s the next chapter for us? We talk about her wanting to write children’s books and the way she speaks with her dad. We talk about Zona Motel and she asks how fulfilling it feels for me, doing this kind of thing? I say, very. We talk about our friends. What’s Bookin up to? I’ll text him. By this point, we’ve relaxed into our typical rhythm and I’m remembering other times and places we’ve been together. Wondering how things will change once the baby is here.

We arrive at Bada Bing and Aidan’s already inside, sitting at a table bathed in red, glowing light. He greets us warmly and I feel glad they are together. Glad to be together with them here. Aidan orders a Moscow Mule and Rachelle, a delicious glass of water. I note that on Mondays there is a special offer for ‘$2 OFF Domestic Bottled Beer Buckets’ but it’s not a bucket kind of night for us. I take a single beer and we half-watch football on the various TVs for a while. They keep calling it soccer but it’s fine. When it comes to the long-awaited sandwiches, Rachelle orders The Big A1. Aidan asks for The Bing. And I panic and order, The Veggie Bing. I’m completely out of my depth.

I tell them the truth: I have no intention of coming to the three hour long Paul Thomas Anderson movie. As soon as we finish eating I’m going back to their house to start writing this all down.

‘Hell yeah,’ Rachelle says, raising her glass of water.

‘Hell yeah,’ I respond, raising my beer. ‘Cheers to you.’