Interview by Kiera Dennis-Espinal
It’s obvious that your poem “The Past Catches Up to Us” is about wars and horrible situations other countries are suffering through, like Palestine and Yemen. Was there a specific incident that gave you the inspiration to write this piece or was it the whole war in general that sparked the need to write this for you?
Regarding a specific incident that inspired my piece, it’s hard to point to a singular thing. I wrote this with the weight of suffering on my shoulders from the entire war, watching fellow students thrown in prison and beaten by police in this country. The piece was written within the context of a sonnet, where a problem is meant to be presented, and the last lines are meant to “solve” the problem. It felt right to me to view the problem in a political and historical lens of where we are as a country, funding what is happening, and when we fight back against it, we are seen as childish. For me, this was my piece of resistance to fuel the fire (beyond protests, beyond boycotting). It is essential to have resistance written and be able to be viewed.
What were some challenges you had during this piece?
The biggest challenge I faced writing this was writing it without becoming too emotional, trying to keep a tone that was for the reader to decipher and less about my views and feelings about the situation. Perhaps “ambiguous” might be the wrong term, but I wanted to leave people the chance to view it through more than a singular lens, more than a singular incident or conflict or moment.
What are your plans with creative writing and do you plan to write in different genres other than poetry?
It feels weird to take a glance at this and view the future of my creative writing after writing this, but more than anything, I want my writing to maintain this potential and this ambiguity through all else that I do. I want to write in a way that affects people and can be viewed in many ways, and I want to have an impact on people’s lives. Whether making them aware of the world around them, or teaching them to be more self-sufficient or otherwise. I’m strongly considering becoming a professor in my own right and writing beyond just poetry. I’ve worked on a novel, a screenplay and other forms of literature, but they all point back to a non-fiction and almost poetic writing style. Whatever else the future holds for me, I’m excited to experience it.
Read Krstulovic’s poems “The Past Catches Up to Us” and “Why Can’t You See That I Love You?” in the 2025 Lit.
Karlo Krstulovic is a student at LaGuardia majoring in Creative Writing. They play Dungeons and Dragons in their spare time. They also write prose, non-fiction and have written a few screenplays during their residency at LaGuardia.
