Category: Authors

Interview with Ruth Foley, Author of Dead Man’s Float

Ahead of the publication of Dead Man’s Float, author Ruth Foley talked to Sundress editorial intern Erica Hoffmeister. They discussed the ocean, grieving, and the order of the book, among other things.

Erica Hoffmeister: Did you set out to write poems about the ocean? Is that something inherent in your writer’s identity?

Ruth Foley: If anything, I try to avoid writing poems about the ocean. It doesn’t work. I grew up spending summers at my grandparents’ house on the south coast of Rhode Island, as much time as I could, anyway. My cousin Turquoise was there, and my brother, and the rest of my cousins—every summer, my grandparents would have us all there for a week. That time with my cousins built all sorts of aspects of my personality—from my sense of humor to my relationship with the water. In a long, agonizing process, we lost my grandmother, and the house, and Turquoise, among others, and the ocean stopped being a place of solace for me.

I have tried extremely hard to break up with the ocean, with that particular piece of the Atlantic, and I can’t do it. And with all of the writing I’ve done about the landscape there, I’m still not done, even though I also find myself writing poems about the woods and fresh water. I haven’t yet found a way through it all. Maybe I never will. Part of me thinks—maybe knows—that I could go to Wyoming and write in its vast expanse for the rest of my life and somehow the ocean would still be there.

EH: What is the relationship between this book and your chapbook, Dear Turquoise?

RF: Dear Turquoise tells a less-complete version of the story. I wrote the vast majority of the poems titled “Dear Turquoise” in a rush, during the last two months of her life—she had held off on telling me how serious her condition was, and I don’t know if I could have been prepared for her death anyway. She decided to stop treatment, and my brother and I made plans to see her in California in May, as soon as my classes had ended for the semester. We didn’t know if we’d get there in time, and I spent that April writing poems. I couldn’t stop writing poems for her, to her. In all that, I still haven’t written much about her—they’re all about me, essentially, and the process of me trying to wrap my mind around losing someone who was so entwined in my life that I knew I wouldn’t understand a world without her in it.

As I write this, seven and a half years after her death, I still don’t understand the world without her. I have reached the point where thoughts of her usually make me laugh (there will never be a funnier person on the planet than Turquoise Taylor Grant, I promise you) instead of cry, but something reminds me of her every day, no exaggeration. She lived long enough for my brother and me to spend a few days with her, and she was awake and engaged for most of that visit, but it was clear she had very little time left. She died a couple of weeks after we went home. I am endlessly grateful that we had that time, that Turquoise’s brother was also there, and that my brother went with me. The four of us have a lot of our childhood woven into each other, and it was a gift to have that time to be that quartet again.

The chapbook was really an exploration of my pre-grief, for lack of a better way to put it. It contains a handful of the “Dear Turquoise” poems, and it came out after her death, but it’s very much situated in the days before she died. It ends with “Dear Ocean” while Dead Man’s Float begins there, backs up a little bit, and then moves through. I put the chapbook together fairly soon after her death, when everything was still unmoored and surreal, and it sits in the unknowing a bit more than Dead Man’s Float does—though I couldn’t have put together the full-length collection without the chapbook. Dear Turquoise also taught me about how I wanted to present that larger experience, not just in terms of ordering the poems or creating a narrative line, but in the exploration of grief as a testament to love.

EH: Can you speak to the ordering of these poems, and what each section hopes to accomplish?

RF: There’s a narrative arc, certainly, though it’s very low-slung, I think; it starts in anticipation of grief and ends with only the tiniest lightening of it.

I came to the bulk of the order during a retreat in Connecticut with some of my dearest poet friends, who were all very patient with me both in the aftermath of Turquoise’s death and the following year, when I spread bits of the manuscript all over every surface of my room. I had printed out pretty much every poem I’d ever written and I brought this giant pile of paper with me in the hopes of sorting it all out. I knew I wanted about twenty of the “Dear Turquoise” poems but the rest of the book hadn’t revealed itself yet.

Most of the rooms at the retreat have both a double and a single bed, and I had poems fanned out and stacked up across both of the beds, the dresser, the desk, and parts of the floor. I had to be careful to keep the poems in order when I moved them off my bed every night, and in the morning I’d put them back where they had been. When I got home, my husband and I put one of the leaves into the dining room table and I color-coded the poems I had decided were contenders, making notes of themes and recurring motifs. When I ran out of colors in my pack of markers, I opened up a 64-count box of Crayolas. That’s how I finished the first cut of the work, which changed a bit in subsequent drafts, but not a lot. If I showed you the first cut and you compared it to this final version, you’d absolutely recognize it as the same collection.

All this to say it felt huge to me, the ordering process. It was important to me that I did the poems justice. I wanted them in an arc that would make sense in terms of the impact of her death, because of how important she was to me, but also because I was creating a monument to grief itself. I’ve known people who have given copies of Dear Turquoise to other grieving people—one of my friends gave her copy to a stranger on an airplane—in an attempt to let them know they weren’t alone. Grief is monumental. I wanted a through-line that reflected and honored that.

The poems in the second section have changed and grown by the way they’re included here, in my mind at least. The infidelity poems were originally born of my fascination with the ways in which people can be terrible to each other, but here they are an examination of a different kind of loss and hopelessness than the poems in the other two sections—the speaker in these poems moves fairly quickly from one sort of abandonment to another, finding no real comfort or ease. The speaker in these poems isn’t Turquoise or me, but in order to use them in this way, I had to come to terms with the idea that readers might see her as one of us. I don’t think she would have minded. Section three is the path to the very faint beginnings of hope, of the life we leave when we’re deep in grief, one we might feel like we can never get back to.
 
In the simplest terms, section one is about the anticipation of grief and the early stages. Section two explores a very different kind of betrayal and abandonment and the total emptiness of that sort of false promise. Section three is where we begin to claw our way out.

EH: What is the meaning between the use of first or second person, and why does it change throughout the book? Is there a certain emotion or connection that leads you to this decision with each poem, or was/is it strictly intuitive?

RF: Generally, if I’m using the second person in a poem, it’s because of direct address. The “Dear Turquoise” poems are very much addressed to Turquoise, and so are some of the other poems. Many of the “you”s in the infidelity poems are addressed to the specific male character involved. Other times, the second person is meant to reflect the way we speak to ourselves when we’re giving ourselves a pep talk or maybe if we’re unhappy with our decisions or actions (or maybe that’s just me doing that!). “One More for Your Baby” and “The Rules” are both examples of that kind of voice. I rarely if ever use “you” to mean “people in general,” and while “I” is often literally me, sometimes it’s just the speaker.

As with formal decisions, I try to let the poem tell me what it wants to be. Any choice of person (third person, too) can help create closeness or distance, but the level of distance doesn’t hang exclusively on that one choice. In any poem, success in creating the desired response in a reader is a combination of many of these kinds of decisions—diction, syntax, line breaks, rhythm, verb tense, and any number of other aspects of language.

EH: What is the meaning behind the title, Dead Man’s Float?

RF: Learning the dead man’s float was part of learning to swim when I was a kid. It means lying face down in the water and relaxing, despite the fact that it’s impossible to breathe. The dead man’s float requires loose muscles: if you’re going to try one, you need to let your arms and legs do what they will, which for most people means something halfway between sinking and floating. It’s about giving in and finding stasis—that place which is neither swimming nor drowning nor simply standing up and walking out of the water. It only works for a brief time before the need to breathe takes over.

For me, Turquoise’s death felt a lot like doing the dead man’s float, but it also was about not being able to do it—I wanted a moment to rest, and a moment where I was able to simply let things be, while simultaneously being desperate to come up for air or, really, control anything at all. It was all the terrifying aspects of floating combined with all the helpless aspects of sinking, and I lived in that in-between for a long time.

EH: There are several poems that begin with a salutation. How did you decide what parts of the earth or of experience to address specific poems to?

RF: They’re deliberately epistolary poems, and they started with the “Dear Turquoise” poems. Turquoise and I grew up in the days of long-distance charges, long before the internet, so even though she lived only about 45 minutes from me, we couldn’t usually talk to each other unless we were in the same place (or arranging a visit). We wrote letters, countless letters. They were filled with jokes and stories and drawings and benign lies. Once we had cell phones and the internet, we moved to texts and emails. She told me about her diagnosis over Facebook messenger. We had long since stopped using an epistolary form of address, but when the poems started coming, there was never a question of how I was going to title them. In many ways, I didn’t title them.

The first poem I drafted, the one that opens, “Not with everything I do,” titled itself and the rest followed. What would I tell Turquoise if I weren’t worried about upsetting her, if I didn’t want to impose my grief on her dying process? I wrote those letters. I never showed her.

The other epistolary poems come from those same roots, in that I was desperate to establish connections and understanding in a world that no longer felt like my own. I wrote very few poems in the year or so after Turquoise died, and those I did write felt extruded as if the words were forced through my teeth under immense pressure. And I suppose they were. I did find I was able to revise, sometimes, and when I knew I was putting together a manuscript for her, I revised towards that impulse of seeking connection and communication. I was trying to break up with the ocean, as I say above, but I needed something to take its place, something that would speak to me the way the Atlantic does.

EH: Do you consider these poems elegiac?

RF: I couldn’t go to Turquoise’s funeral for a variety of reasons. Friends and relatives wrote pieces for her—elegies, eulogies, stories of shared love—and I couldn’t. I couldn’t do her justice or do my feelings for her justice, and I couldn’t bear the thought of struggling to do so publicly. Even if all other obstacles had been erased, I don’t know if I would have been able to go. I needed time to come to an understanding of what the rest of my life was going to look like without her. It was selfish of me, but it felt like survival, and at that level everything we do is selfish. The poems aren’t elegies in the sense that they’re much more about me than about her, but she was three years older than I was; not only could I not remember a life before her, there literally was no life for me before her. I suppose they’re elegies to the places in me where she once lived, which are forever changed because of her absence.

EH: Poetry is often felt as a healing tool for both reader and writer – how much was this true for you in this process?

RF: My initial impulse is to say, “Not at all,” but that’s not exactly true. For one thing, I firmly believe grief needs to be experienced. It’s not healthy for me to pretend I don’t have the feelings I do, so I’m not going to just suck it up and push forward. I have to live through it, and I often don’t feel like I’ve processed a major event until I’ve written about it. It’s possible they were healing for me in that way, though it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. The most important thing the poems did for me, though, was allow me to focus on Turquoise when I went to see her shortly before she died. I wasn’t distracted by things I wanted to say, because I had said many of them in the poems. It helped me to focus on my love for her instead of my grief, which freed me to take those last few days with her almost entirely on their own terms, without dwelling on what was soon to come.

Order your copy here!

Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for Wheaton College. Her work appears in numerous web and print journals, including Adroit, Sou’wester, Threepenny Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her poems can also be found in several anthologies, including the Best Indie Lit New England anthology. She is the author of the chapbooks Sink and Drift, Creature Feature, and Dear Turquoise, and the forthcoming full-length Abandon.

Erica Hoffmeister holds an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Chapman University, and teaches college writing across the Denver Metro area. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019). She’s obsessed with pop culture, cross country road trips, and her two daughters, Scout and Lux.

Shitty First Drafts Episode 4, Featuring Lance Dyzak, is Live!

Picture1Sundress Publications announces the fourth episode of the podcast, Shitty First Drafts. A podcast made for and by writers, the show playfully investigates the creative processes of different artists to determine how a finished draft gets its polish.

Lance Dyzak joins Brynn Martin and Stephanie Phillips to discuss his short story “Extra Innings,” based on a bizarre event he witnessed at a park while walking his dog, and the various forms it went through before reaching its completion.

lance-dyzak-headshot.jpgIn the end, though the event helped Dyzak write a good story, he took it out and cautions writers against “injecting weirdness for the sake of weirdness” they are afraid to write something that feels like it’s been done before. He says, “A lot of writers are afraid of writing a boring story [but] it’s all in the details.”

In this episode, we also discuss the enneagram test (he’s a 5w4), baseball puns, killing your darlings (or filing them away for another time), and the world of online forums.

Lance Dyzak is a Ph.D. student in fiction at the University of Tennessee, where he is writing his first novel. His work has previously appeared in Southwest Review, Southern Indiana Review, New Limestone Review, and Per Contra. He is also the co-director of the Only-Tenn-I-See Reading Series, set to kick off in September.

 

Sundress Releases Chickenhawks and Goldilocks by Grey Vild

Sundress Releases Chickenhawks & Goldilocks by Grey Vild

Sundress Publications announces the release of Grey Vild’s new chapbook, Chickenhawks & Goldilocks. Vild’s chapbook looks at the trans suicide epidemic. Vild explodes the topic with loss, rage, reverberating anguish, and fusions of love.

The honesty of Chickenhawks & Goldilocks washes in like a wild tide on grief’s jagged shoreline, embracing the confusion and complexity that accompanies losing a loved one to suicide. Instead of a one-note lament, this chapbook recognizes confusion and examines how that confusion can make a person and a relationship seem improved through absence. Chickenhawks & Goldilocks reveals how a love can fill in our cracks and seams and make us feel whole. By juxtaposing poems that acknowledge this feeling with poems that delve into flawed relationships and the abandonment the speaker cannot help but feel, Vild portrays a more complete grief. Thoughts and feelings are intertwined, wrapped in each other such that they cannot be separated. Betrayal, love, rage, anguish, and guilt all bleed toward each other, trapped in the cage of our chests.

“Chickenhawks & Goldilocks adroitly renders the liminal experience of grief, with notes of tender specificity dovetailing expressive and purposeful abstraction, each poem a shout against the silence absence carves into our lives. But make no mistake, Grey Vild doesn’t wallow in these poems, nor allow us to do so; here we, poet and reader, overcome the loss that would have us lose ourselves—a loss all too present for those in and aside the Trans community—and find resolve to carry forward in the beautiful project of living, to make the choice every day while still honoring those who felt they couldn’t, hiding nothing about how difficult, at times, the living is and will be.” —Cortney Lamar Charleston                                 
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Grey Vild is a goddamned transsexual. A recent graduate of the MFA at Rutgers-Newark, his work can be found at Them, Vetch, EOAGH, Harriet: The Blog and elsewhere.

The chapbook is available here.

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A 501(c)3 non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology.

Website: www.sundresspublications.com    Facebook: sundresspublications

Email: erin@sundresspublications.com        Twitter: @SundressPub

Interview with Eloisa Amezcua

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Eloisa Amezcua sat down with our editorial intern, Grace Prial, to discuss her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly,(Sundress Publications, 2018). Amezcua touches on the gendered experience of restraint, the literary expression of silence, and the act of loving oneself in all its various forms.

Grace Prial: Silence seems to be a particularly important concept in your book, from being willfully silent, placing an emphasis on the inner self, to being silenced, whether by an exploitative partner (as in “On Not Screaming”) or by your own body (as in the poems on fainting). Yet the title, as the book itself, insists on voicing the interior, not hesitantly, but “quietly.” How did you come to this title?

Eloisa Amezcua: The title for the collection was pulled from a poem in the book, “Mission Bay.” When I was revising the manuscript, I sat down and made a list of potential titles using both poem titles and lines within the poems. It was important to me that the title of the collection speak to as many of the themes or poems, to give readers an idea of what they’re going to encounter before diving into the work. I wanted a title that considered silence as an opening, a way into language.

GP: The poetic speaker “I” is, of course, not always meant to indicate the author themselves. However, you have such clarity of voice and certainty of point of view throughout the book that I can’t help but ask, to what degree are your poems autobiographical?

EA: I’m not sure it’s my job as a poet to say how much of the work is or isn’t autobiographical. Have my mother and I driven to Mexico alone together? Yes. Do I have an older sister with whom I’d play house? Yes. What I will say, is that the emotions and feelings in the poems are real, were/are experienced by me as the author of them.

GP: There are four sections to the book. My read is that the poems mount to an interrogation of pain and an adamant assertion of self-preservation. The focus seems to be on things broken, while the presence of the mother becomes more pronounced as both a safety net and someone in pain. How would you describe the organization and development of your book?

EA: Originally, the book didn’t have section breaks but the more I revised and edited, the more I realized that the “E” poems could be anchors for the reader and I wanted to ground the reader a bit before diving into the narrative of the collection and the shifts in the narrative that happen from the first poem to the last.

GP: In “She” and “Self Portrait” (I and II) the speaker is negatively brought into being––they are built out of that which they are not. In your view, does this paradox reflect a restraint of language or of life (or neither)?

EA: Restraint is a kind of silence. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Silence is a kind of restraint. I’m very interested in exploring the ways I as a writer and as a woman have internalized both of those things as necessary to live in this world, to survive. I think I often find myself describing myself not as what I am, but rather what I am not or what I am lacking. It’s a learned behavior of course and so in writing these poems, I tried to do bring awareness to this habit in the hopes of undoing, unlearning it.

GP: Bodies are central to this book. It seems that whether ill or malfunctioning, familiar or strange, sexual, vulnerable, phenotypically or racially identified, or experiencing pain or pleasure, the experience of the body is linked throughout your poems to the experience of family and heritage (for example, the juxtaposition of “On Not Screaming,” “My Mother’s Been Trying to Kill Me Since the Day I Was Born,” and “Boy,”). Could you elaborate on this connection?

EA: I experience the world through my body and the kinds of experiences I had, and continue to have, are informed by the body I live in (as a woman, as a woman of color, etc.) so it is hard for me to imagine poems about certain experiences or emotions, particularly those connected to family or heritage, without a body attached to them—if that makes sense.

GP: Part of the process of this book, I believe, is falling in love with yourself. Would you agree?

EA: Oh, definitely! This book is sprawling in terms of both themes and time, and so it is made up of poems from very distinct and varied iterations of myself as the writer of them. The earliest poem in the book was written in 2011/2012 and the last two I snuck in were from the spring of 2017. A lot changed in my life over those 6-ish years. I changed. And I think when the manuscript was completed, I was able to love all of those iterations of myself for getting me to the finish line.

GP: What poets, authors or artists inspire you most?

EA: There are truly too many people that inspire me to name (and I find myself most inspired by my peers and friends on a daily basis). But if I were to name a “Trinity” of poetry books that have shaped me as a writer, it’d be Ararat by Louise Glück, Cortege by Carl Phillips, and Poems New and Collected by Wislawa Szymborska translated by Stanislaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. A MacDowell fellow, she is the author of three chapbooks and founder/editor-in-chief of The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry. Her poems and translations are published or forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. Eloisa lives in Columbus, OH, and is the founder of Costura Creative.

Amezcua’s collection, From the Inside Quietly, can be ordered directly from Sundress Publications.

Grace Prial is a graduate of Rutgers University-Newark with a BA in English. She lives in New Jersey and is passionate about her studies on the reflection of political movements in literature.

Sundress Releases Marvels by MR Sheffield

Sundress Releases Marvels by MR Sheffield

Marvels by MR Sheffield

Sundress Publications announces the pre-release of MR Sheffield’s new collection, Marvels. An “irreducible kind of book that pivots on every page, refuses to be pinned down” says Julie Marie Wade, author of Catechism: A Love Story and SIX, cautioning that “this book will wild you, Reader, gently.”

MR Sheffield’s Marvels is a séance; a chant of snake bites, wrens, and spiders, nesting and untangling; the instinct of a mother disoriented by her grief; a daughter finding her way in sex and obsession; a family broken and searching for something to pull it back together. Sheffield utilizes H.D. Northrop’s found poems, which describe various creatures, to reveal the wild, instinctive nature of human emotion by repurposing Northrop’s descriptions and applying them to a family. Sheffield couples the poems with manipulated original images from Northrop’s text to drive the skepticism of the poems. Multiplied spiders in the wrong color, transposed boa constrictors, and streaked antelope eyes are juxtaposed with poems about familial grief and resentment, alerting the reader to her instincts. This is the collection that steps back and reveals that instead of visiting an exhibit, admiring the lifelike animals from the soft fur to the magnetizing eyes, we are the exhibit, propped up and trapped behind the glass.

“When the narrator of MR Sheffield’s collection imagines “making a nest of you,” we are invited to make a nest back. Each word and image in this text builds a found and invented structure, layer by layer, for us to writhe around inside of. This multimodal work aims to enthrall us with a nontraditional, visual magic, both human and animal.”

— Nicole Oquendo, author of Telomeres and some prophets

“‘…there is no grief like this and no name for it,’ Sheffield’s speaker confesses in ‘the boa-constrictor,’ which, like all poems inside Marvels, uncoils to reveal monstrous truths about love and loss in a wilderness haunted by the familial. I have yet to find my way out of Sheffield’s collection, months after entering—I don’t believe I’ll ever want to. Between admiring the partnering images and found language from H.D. Northrop’s book of the same name, this collection asks readers—no, dares them—to put their face close to its glass and tap.”

— James A.H. White

MR Sheffield’s work has been published in Black Warrior Review, Hayden’s FerryReview, The Florida Review, and other publications. This is her first book.

Pre-order at https://squareup.com/market/sundress-publications

Charlie Bondhus’ Divining Bones Now Available!

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Charlie Bondhus’ Divining Bones Now Available!

Divining Bones

Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the publication of Charlie Bondhus’ new book, Divining Bones.

Boys become crones; baked bread becomes a baby; electricity turns out to be Jesus; a first grade class stages Oedipus Rex. At the center of it all stands Baba Yaga, the child-eating forest witch and earth goddess of Russian folklore. Under her tutelage, Charlie Bondhus uses the occult and the magical to explore the fluidity of age, gender, and self-perception in this radical and playful book.

CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death, had this to say about Bondhus’ book:

“Where divination meets poetry in extraordinary fashion!  After awhile you can look to this book for answers, opening and closing it nine times with a question in mind, the poet Charlie Bondhus leading the way.  Magic spells and paranormal experiences abound among beautifully written lines by a poet we will all want to share and know.  I love this book!”

Charlie Bondhus

Charlie Bondhus is the author of All the Heat We Could Carry, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Missouri Review, Columbia Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Nimrod, and Copper Nickel. He has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers. He is associate professor of English at Raritan Valley Community College (NJ).

Order your copy today: https://squareup.com/store/sundress-publications/item/divining-bones-by-charlie-bondus

Passing Through Humansville Now Available for Pre-order!

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Karen Craigo’s Passing Through Humansville
Now Available for Pre-Order

Sundress Publications is excited to announce Karen Craigo’s new full-length poetry collection Passing Through Humansville is available for pre-order.

Tania Runyan, author of What Will Soon Take Place, had this to say about Craigo’s book:

Humansville

“I’ve been reading Passing Through Humansville during a time of despair, and they are among the few written words that have comforted me. Emboldened me. Spoken. These poems explore marriage and family, nature and politics, and faith and doubt from a wellspring of compassionate wisdom and grace—a still, small (but not timid) voice of a life lived and loved with intention. ‘There are so many / ways to move across Earth’s face and I / would just as gladly move or sit with you,’ Craigo writes. I feel the same way about this book. It’s a companion whose side I won’t leave for long.”

Karen Craigo is the author of two Sundress titles, No More Milk (2016), and Passing Through Humansville (2018). She is also the author of Escaped Housewife Tries Hard to Blend In (forthcoming from Tolson Books, 2018), and three chapbooks. She is the editor of a weekly newspaper, The Marshfield (Missouri) Mail, and she maintains Better View of the Moon, a blog on writing and creativity. She lives in Springfield, Missouri.

Pre-order your copy here! And now through August 15th, your pre-order also allows you to submit a manuscript to our open reading period for free!

Passing Through Humansville Now Available for Pre-Order!

sundress logo

Karen Craigo’s Passing Through Humansville Now Available for Pre-Order

Sundress Publications is excited to announce Karen Craigo’s new full-length poetry collection Passing Through Humansville is available for pre-order.

Humansville

Tania Runyan, author of What Will Soon Take Place had this to say about Craigo’s book:

“I’ve been reading Passing Through Humansville during a time of despair, and they are among the few written words that have comforted me. Emboldened me. Spoken. These poems explore marriage and family, nature and politics, and faith and doubt from a wellspring of compassionate wisdom and grace—a still, small (but not timid) voice of a life lived and loved with intention. ‘There are so many / ways to move across Earth’s face and I / would just as gladly move or sit with you,’ Craigo writes. I feel the same way about this book, it’s a companion whose side I won’t leave for long.

Other advance readers include Sarah Freligh, author of Sad Math, who said:

“In Passing Through Humansville, Karen Craigo is the best kind of tour guide—wise, tender, funny and keenly observant of the moments life serves up however large or small. Who among us cannot identify with the weary speaker in “Advent” who finds herself siding with the innkeeper who turned away Mary and Joseph: ‘Damn / but a hard day’s work / should earn us a little rest, / not crisis after crisis.’ I don’t know of another poet who is able to balance feminism, faith, and motherhood as deftly as Craigo does in these poems. These are wonderful meditations on the fierceness of love and the meaning of the word “humankind.”

karencraigoKaren Craigo is the author of two Sundress Publications titles, No More Milk (2016) and Passing Through Humansville (2018). She is also the author of Escaped Housewife Tries Hard to Blend In (forthcoming from Tolson Books, 2018), and three chapbooks. She is the editor of a weekly newspaper, The Marshfield (Missouri) Mail, and she maintains Better View of the Moon, a blog on writing and creativity. She lives in Springfield, Missouri.

Pre-order your copy here: https://squareup.com/market/sundress-publications/item/passing-through-humansville-by-karen-craigo-pre-order

 

 

 

Interview with Danielle Sellers, Author of The Minor Territories (Sundress Publications 2018)

Jessica Hudgins, an editorial intern for Sundress Publications, asked writer Danielle Sellers about her 2018 poetry collection The Minor Territories. It is available for sale here.

Jessica Hudgins: In the first half of this book especially, we get the sense of something happening that can’t be stopped, even though we wish it could be. Later on, that’s not so much of an issue; it’s done. When, if it’s not too much of ask, were you writing these poems? Did they guide you out of a bad situation as it was happening, or did they help you understand what had happened, afterwards?

Danielle Sellers: I began some of the poems in the first section of the book while still a graduate student at the University of Mississippi over a decade ago. They’ve gone through many revisions over the course of the years. Many are rather new, like “The Germany Poems,” looking back, and trying to make sense of who I was then and why I stayed. That’s the central question women who are abused are asked: Why did you stay so long? The answer is never simple, and I’m not sure it can ever really be answered to anyone’s satisfaction.

JH: “Memorial Day” is an interesting poem because it uses the context of a patriotic holiday to remember the awful things that this veteran has done to the speaker. Then, your next poem, “Civil,” remembers the same person as capable of tenderness. This is done for “our daughter’s sake.” Yet, the poem still ends on the line, “While I was pregnant, he sometimes rubbed my feet,” which of course is ironic, but still, to my ear, has some regret in it. We hear that regret later in the collection, too. As a poet who is not a parent, but who might want to be, I’m curious about the relationship that parenting has to the truth, or at least to honesty, as compared to the relationship that poetry has to it. I think this might be related to my first question.

DS: I’ve heard many people say it’s important to never badmouth a parent. This is very good advice, but is it still advisable when that parent has done unspeakable things? At what point do we stop protecting monsters and call them out? Monsters don’t deserve our protection. They should be rooted out; their crimes should be announced. That being said, people have many different sides to them. They aren’t just one way all the time. This is what women who are abused struggle with. If their partners were always monsters, it would be easy to leave. Monsters can be angels, too. Perhaps it isn’t the monsters of which we should be afraid, it’s the angels.

JH: We both studied at the Writing Seminars. “Late Inventory” reminds me of a prompt that Greg Williamson would assign, to write a portrait using only metaphor. Is this where the poem originated? What was your experience at the Writing Seminars like, and in an MFA program in general? You teach now – can you tell us a prompt you’re especially proud of, and assign as often as you can?

DS: I loved my time at Johns Hopkins, and several of the poems in the second section were inspired by my time there, but none of them were written while I was a graduate student there. “Late Inventory” is inspired by Dorianne Laux’s “Face Poem” which appears in her collection, Facts About the Moon.

Imitation is a tool I sometimes use when I’m stuck, and is an assignment I give to my creative writing students faithfully. I love to see how a form can be changed with new words. It is often one of the most successful poems my students write because they give themselves permission to use syntax and punctuation they might not ordinarily use.

 


JH: This book has incredible scope. Between poems we might jump decades. How long were you working on The Minor Territories? It comes eight years after your first collection. How did these books take form during the writing of individual poems?

DS: Well, my first collection was largely written pre-baby, as it was my graduate MFA thesis for the University of Mississippi. Being a working single parent takes a toll on your writing life. I worked on the poems in The Minor Territories for about ten years, often submitting it as a collection to contests before it was ready. I really credit the poet Carrie Fountain, with whom I worked as a mentee from a generous scholarship from Gemini Ink, for helping to shape the collection in its current form. Carrie told me to drop twenty poems and write twenty new ones, which I did over the course of about 6 months. It was a tall order, but the collection was much better for it. Sundress accepted it not long after that.

JH: You shift, in the last third of the book, from thinking about your relationship with your ex-husband, to your relationship with your daughter, your daughter’s relationship with her father, and, briefly, your relationship with your mother. What are you interested in writing about now?

DS: For the last few years, I’ve been working on a series of historical poems born out of ancestry research. There are pirates and Cherokee Indians, Bahamian spongers and shell-mongers, West Tennessee farmers, unnamed women who know only hard work and childbirth. It is endlessly fascinating to me. I’m having fun with it.

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Danielle Sellers is the author of two poetry collections: Bone Key Elegies (Main Street Rag, 2009) and The Minor Territories (Sundress Publications, 2018). Her work also appears in many journals and anthologies. When not teaching at Trinity Valley School in Texas, she can often be found writing or cooking.

Jessica Hudgins is a writer currently living in Mansfield, Georgia.

Laura Villareal Interviews With Steven Sanchez About Debut Full-Length Collection

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Laura Villareal: I love the way Phantom Tongue weaves together religion, family, queerness, memory, and a complicated relationship with Mexican culture. With so many thematic strands, what was your approach to putting this manuscript together?

Steven Sanchez: In the beginning, I focused on writing into my obsessions rather than on creating a book—each poem was more important to me than figuring out how any particular poem might fit in with what I already wrote. My poems kept returning to the same themes and images, and my mentor Corrinne (Connie) Clegg Hales said that I should trust my subconscious, that there’s probably a reason why I kept obsessing over these particular topics. When it was time to put my thesis together, I printed all my poems out and started tracking what the main threads seemed to be and had a hard time separating them from each other.

My very first draft of Phantom Tongue had three sections. Connie asked me why I decided to use sections, and I didn’t really have a reason, other than it felt like a book should have sections. She said she didn’t really see a need for sections in this collection and I agreed with her. Then a couple of years later, I wrote more poems, replaced older poems, and tried out sections again—it was actually accepted by Sundress as a sectioned book. Sara Henning, my editor, actually brought up similar concerns about my sectioning and I re-read through Phantom Tongue and decided that the sections needed to go.

At first, I organized my poems based on their topics, but that felt too neat and sterile—I didn’t want a book that had a section of Queer poems, a section of family poems, a section of love poems, and a section of poems about language and internalized racism because those categories aren’t exclusive to each other—these categories, I realized, actually inform each other.

“On the Seventh Day” seemed like the best choice to open Phantom Tongue because a lot of the themes in the book appear in it. Next, I read that poem followed by several potential second poems in the collection until one seemed to fit, then I read that second poem followed by several third poem options, then the third followed by several fourth poem options, and repeated this process until I had a tentative order for the whole collection. (I ended up with dozens of different organizational possibilities to choose from.) The whole process reminded me of when I used to play Guitar Hero—you see the rows and rows of buttons coming towards you on the screen, but you just have to focus on playing the row of buttons closest to you. Eventually, the closest row disappears, then you can focus on the next row, then the next row, until you end up playing an entire song.

 

Laura Villareal: You have two chapbooks, To My Body (Glass Poetry Press, 2016) & Photographs of Our Shadows (Agape Editions, 2017), was the process of putting together those manuscripts different from organizing your full-length?

Steven Sanchez: I feel like I totally approached each chapbook with the Guitar Hero strategy. I definitely couldn’t focus on as many threads in each chapbook, though. For To My Body, I ended up finding all of my poems that relied on body-related imagery. For Photographs, I focused more on poems revolving around memory. Even with those two different organizational focuses, each chapbook still tried to address internalized racism and internalized homophobia, which ended up becoming the backbone of Phantom Tongue.

 

Laura Villareal: While writing Phantom Tongue were there any books that you drew inspiration from? What are some books that you love and recommend?

Steven Sanchez: Two of the books that had a huge influence on me, especially when working on Phantom Tongue, were Rafael Campo’s What the Body Told and Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language.

Campo handles bodies, particularly Queer and brown bodies, with such tenderness and compassion. His book was the first book I’d ever read by a QPOC and it blew me away by showing me the different ways a body is labeled, identified, and understood. It also encouraged me to figure out the stories my own body has told and continues to tell—it empowered me interrogate who shape(d)/(s) my body’s narratives.

Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language lead me to question not just the narratives assigned to bodies, but how language is a dangerous (yet necessary) tool. What’s named can be weaponized. But, what’s named can also give somebody control over their own identity. Dream of a Common Language begins with one of my favorite poems, “Power.” In this poem, the speaker observes that Marie Curie gained her agency through her research on radioactivity. The speaker also observes that her hands-on approach with radioactive materials ultimately killed her. In this poem, power comes from our willingness to make ourselves vulnerable to the subjects that are most difficult to handle. While writing Phantom Tongue, I kept returning to “Power,” and as a result, I still find myself returning to it in newer poems I’ve been working on—I’ve adopted it as my own personal ars poetica.

In addition to these two books, a few more books I absolutely love and continue to learn from are Coal by Audre Lorde, Slow Lightning by Eduardo C.Corral, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying by Laurie Ann Guerrero, Butterfly Boy by Rigoberto González, Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey, For Want of Water by Sasha Pimentel, My Alexandria by Mark Doty, Goodbye, Flicker by Carmen Giménez Smith, and The Taxidermist’s Cut by Rajiv Mohabir.

Laura Villareal: Something I admire about your writing is how you confront your relationship to Mexican culture. As a Latinx who can’t speak Spanish, I sometimes feel fraudulent or conflicted about my identity. I love the lines “small pigeons flying from her tongue, / carrying rolled R’s like small parcels / I’ve never been able to unwrap” in your poem “Past Tense”. I’m grateful for moments like those in your book. I guess I’m wondering, do you have any advice for confronting identity in poems when the relationship you have to it is complicated?

Steven Sanchez: That makes me really happy that you connected with “Past Tense,” I was really nervous writing that poem, especially because I felt like I was “outing” myself as a Pocho. I’ve been thinking a lot about my Pocho-ness, what it means for me to identify as a Pocho, and how this particular identity fits into larger systems of power. I don’t know if I have any advice, exactly, but I can totally share how I approached writing about my relationship to being Mexican and some of the things I got from that experience.

When I first started writing about my relationship to Mexican culture, one particular mentor was very encouraging. He pushed me to start including more Spanish in my poems, pushed me to start incorporating foods like nopales, tamales, and chorizo in my poems. He would say things like “This is so specific to your particular experiences and it’s great. You’ve really found your stride, keep it up.” And I did for a while, until I found myself writing poems to satisfy his expectations rather than writing poems that I felt genuinely connected to—I realized I was exoticizing myself and my poems to fit in with what he expected Latinx writers to write about.

Ironically, when I started writing about my queerness, he told me to stop letting my sexuality define my work and me.

I started understanding that when I was writing, I was writing with a straight, white audience in mind. I was making a Latino caricature of myself in my poems and downplaying queerness in order to reaffirm what some people think is an “authentic” representation of Latinidad. I think I fell into that trap because in workshop, we often discussed the “accessibility” of a poem, but whenever that word was thrown around, I didn’t comprehend that “accessible” has political implications—accessible for whom? People of color? Queer people? White people? Straight people?

When I started questioning who I wanted to access my poems, I realized I didn’t want to write for an audience who had a litmus test for the “authenticity” of my identities. I felt relieved, in a way, because it opened up a space for me to begin interrogating my own concerns about internalized racism, internalized homophobia, my inability to speak Spanish, and how those all affected me.
If I could give my younger-self advice, I would tell him that nobody has a monopoly over any identity. Not speaking Spanish doesn’t make you any less Latino. Write poems that matter to you. No matter what you write, people will label you whatever they’re going to label you, and that’s no longer your concern.

 

Laura Villareal: You reference religion quite a bit in your book. I feel like often religion and queerness can be at odds. I love where you say “Never forget what the Bible says: / when two people worship together, / they create a church / no matter where they are— ” in “What I Didn’t Tell You.” What’s your connection to religion and how do you feel it’s shaped your writing, if at all?

Steven Sanchez: I grew up as a nondenominational Christian, went to church every Sunday, was a member of a bunch of different Christian youth groups, and made sure to memorize the bible verse we were assigned each week in Sunday school—at one point I had memorized close to 300 verses. The interesting thing about the church I went to is that it was bilingual. The children’s Sunday school was exclusively in English, but the sermon afterwards for the whole church was entirely in Spanish, although the pastor occasionally translated some of his sermon into English. Prayers were almost exclusively in Spanish. That church also explicitly condemned homosexuality and banned open homosexuals from serving the church in any sort of capacity. In high school, I was the president of the Hanford High Christian Club and regularly attended services and youth events.

Needless to say, religion had a monumental impact on me growing up. You mention that Queerness and religion are often at odds, and that was definitely the case in my experience. When I started writing about homophobia, I noticed that religious imagery started creeping in without me even really intending for that to happen. When I started writing about internalized racism, religion also started creeping in. Religious imagery helped me interrogate the aspects of myself I was afraid to look at—as I was writing, it felt like internalized racism, internalized homophobia, and Christianity were inseparable. But, at the same time, I think my way of understanding the sacred is very much informed by Christianity even if I’m no longer Christian. I think, at least in some moments, using religious imagery in the context of Queerness was my way to reclaim and define for myself what is actually sacred.

 

Laura Villareal: The image system of your book is so tight. The visceral language makes it feel intensely intimate and resonate. All poets have linguistic obsessions, what are some of yours?

Steven Sanchez: Wow, thank you! I think one of my biggest linguistic obsessions, both now and when I was writing Phantom Tongue, is using “you.” I love the authority and force that comes from a direct address, especially in rough drafts. When I was writing about things that were particularly difficult, the second person address created a helpful distance between the subject and me. The second person made me feel inclined to write declarative sentences, and those declarative sentences built up my confidence as the draft progressed until, at some point in the poem, I gained enough confidence to trust my language, trust my images, and trust that what I had to say was important. Sometimes, the second person stays even after the initial drafts.

I think another reason I love the second person is because it fits with how I usually (attempt to) enter a poem—instead of thinking of a general audience for the poem, I find it more helpful to imagine that I’m writing the poem to a specific person—the images and language I use become my way of understanding my relationship to that person (and whatever topic that poem is trying to address). That being said, I think I’m particularly obsessed with fire, water, trees, and birds—those images made it easier to interrogate my relationships to some of the “you’s” I was writing to.

Another linguistic obsession I’ve noticed is that I love to list things in groups of three; I think it might be because of the way I was taught to end each prayer—“in the name of the son, father, and holy spirit.” It feels familiar and I get a sense of closure.

 

Laura Villareal: In June you’ll be teaching a month long workshop with Lemon Star Magazine focused on persona and social justice poetry, what made you choose those topics?

Steven Sanchez: I’m super stoked for that workshop! A few years back, Gary Jackson visited my school to read from his awesome book, Missing You, Metropolis—it’s a collection of super villain and super hero persona poems. One of my favorite poems in there is “Magneto Eyes Strange Fruit.” In that poem, the speaker is Magneto (of the X-Men) and he comes across two children who have been lynched on swing set for being mutants. The poem is a powerful response to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and it ends with Magneto imagining how he will destroy the world.

Somebody asked him why he wanted to inhabit the voices of so many villains in his book. He responded by saying that poems, ultimately, are a tool of empathy. When we read poems, we are forced to see ourselves in the speaker. But, nobody wants to see themselves in the face of villains, nobody wants to know the horrible things we are all capable of, nobody wants to see themselves complicit in violence and oppression. I think about that all the time, which is actually what pushed me write “The Gunman” in Phantom Tongue—placing myself in the mindset of Omar Mateen in the moments leading to the Pulse shooting scared me, but by the end of it, I knew I couldn’t have written that poem any other way.

Another poet, Maggie Smith, said something else about persona poems that I’ve been thinking about a lot. She was on an AWP panel in Florida and an audience member asked the question (and I’m roughly paraphrasing), “How do I, as a person with relative privilege, write about racism and the experiences of people who are subject to systemic oppression?” Smith responded by saying that if we’re entering a conversation from a relative place of privilege, why don’t we place ourselves in the poem as the oppressor rather than the oppressed? We have more to gain (and risk) by inhabiting the persona of the oppressor—systemic oppression and violence isn’t just magically inflicted upon marginalized groups, it’s perpetrated by specific individuals and when we refuse to name and identify their role in oppression, we are missing our opportunity to actually learn from and understand systemic oppression in a more nuanced way. (Of course, Maggie Smith conveyed these ideas much more eloquently.)

I wanted to lead a Persona Poetry and Social Justice Workshop because I think Jackson and Smith are both absolutely right: we need to be willing to see ourselves in the villains of the world, because then it will help us understand how each of us, regardless of who we are, are complicit in systemic oppression.

 

Laura Villareal: I know Phantom Tongue is just coming out this month, but are you working on anything new?

Steven Sanchez: I am! It’s actually related to the workshop I’m leading. I’m trying to interrogate my own privilege and the ways I contribute to systemic oppression, even as a QPOC. I’ve attempted some persona poems, I’ve leaned into the “you” a lot, and I’ve been journaling a lot about it. Nothing’s even close to ready, but I feel like these drafts—my new obsessions—are leading me to my next collection.

 

You can order your copy of Phantom Tongue today at the Sundress store!

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Steven Sanchez is the author of Phantom Tongue (Sundress Publications, 2018), selected by Mark Doty as the winner of Marsh Hawk Press’ Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. A recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo and the Lambda Literary Foundation, his poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Nimrod, Muzzle, Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, and other publications.

Laura Villareal earned an MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. Her writing has appeared most recently in: The Acentos Review, Freezeray, Reservoir, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from The Highlights Foundation and Key West Literary Seminar.