Tag: interview

Lyric Essentials: Kara Dorris Reads Molly McCully Brown

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Kara Dorris joins us to discuss the work of Molly McCully Brown, video games as a source of inspiration for titles, metaphor, and disability poetics. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?

Kara Dorris: When choosing which poems to read from Brown’s The Virgina State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, I decided to pick the first poem, a proem, titled “Central Virginia Training Center.” This poem does the work of a great first poem by setting up a personal connection and reaching towards the broader, universal truth of disability as a social construction. “New Knowledge for the Dark” takes on the persona of an inmate and explores the abuse, the dehumanizing that has occurred in many psychiatric institutions around the country. In contrast, “Without a Mind” takes on the persona of a worker making their rounds, showing an ingrained ableism, a seemingly integrated presumption that disability is punishment for sin and a waste of a life. Each poem is compelling, revealing yet another injustice, and I can’t recommend this collection enough.

RW: Your collection, HitBox, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2024. What does this collection explore and what was your writing process like?

KD: HitBox feels very different from my previous two collections—it feels angrier, less ready to accept what we are told by so-called authority figures yet hopeful that empathy, inclusiveness, and equality will triumph. As I wrote these poems over the past few years, I didn’t really consider it as a “book” or think to connect the poems consciously. But when it came time to arrange a manuscript, I noticed the violence, I noticed the questioning and the hitting occurring within the poems. I struggled with a unifying theme—beyond punches and feminist anger. Then I came across the term “hit box” used in video games and lightning struck. A hit box is the space around an avatar that registers when a punch lands, or when your avatar scores a hit and the connecting points. This hit box seemed the perfect metaphor for the “hits” the world throws our way, that knock us off our axis. Plus, I am constantly annoyed at the skimpy, over-sexualization of female video game characters, so a cohesive, angry, and hopeful book was born.

Kara Dorris reads “New Knowledge for the Dark” by Molly McCully Brown

RW: When was the first time you read Brown’s work? Why did it stand out to you? How has their writing inspired your own?

KD: This is Brown’s first poetry collection, and I think the title is what really drew me in at first: The Virgina State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Since then, I have also read her essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body. Writing the disabled experience is challenging; oftentimes, disabled writers are considered too narrow or too personal or as trying to elicit pity. Oftentimes when disability is portrayed it focuses on the individual disability or impairment, not the social construction of disability that makes it hard to navigate through this world. Wonderfully, Brown’s collection shows disability as personal, but does not neglect the social stereotypes that create the larger experience of disability. Partly personal/speculative/what if—Brown wonders if she had been born just a few decades earlier, would she have ended up in this place? In this place where women were institutionalized forcibly sterilized, where patients were really inmates without rights or dignity. The poems are also part historical research—Brown embodies the voices that had no voice. Through persona poems—from wards and warders—we understand the helplessness of the inmates and ableist mindsets of those who assumed they knew what is best for the disabled population. I find this poetry collection fits into ideas of crip aesthetics, which shows that disability is socially constructed and celebrates differences; it shows the long history of forced institutionalization, even positioning us into locations such as the Blind Room and the Infirmary, inviting readers to walk through these doorways with the speakers, to never forget our harmful, ableist past. 

Kara Dorris reads “Without a Mind” by Molly McCully Brown

RW: Who else have you been reading lately, and who else has been inspiring you in your own craft?

KD: I think we should all read more disabled poets: Sheila Black, Stephanie Heit, Petra Kuppers, Rusty Morrison, Jillian Wiese, and torrin a. greathouse. All these poets have inspired my writing and the way I write about disability. Growing up no one mentioned disability, even though I was born with a genetic bone disorder. In graduate school, I was never offered a disability studies class or a literature class that interrogated disability representation. For a long time, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe my experiences, to put words to the socially constructed ideas of shame revolving around disability. These poets helped me find these words, and I will always be grateful. 

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Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body— which was published in the United States in June 2020 by Persea Books, and released in the United Kingdom in March of 2021 by Faber & Faber— and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020).

Purchase Places I’ve Taken My Body

Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press, as well as HitBox forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2024). She has also published five chapbooks: Elective Affinities (dancing girl press, 2011), Night Ride Home (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Sonnets from Vada’s Beauty Parlor & Chainsaw Repair (dancing girl press, 2018), Untitled Film Still Museum (CW Books, 2019), and Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, RHINO, Tinderbox, Tupelo Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Harpur Palate, Cutbank, Hayden Ferry Review, and Crazyhorse, among others as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Waxwing, Breath and Shadow, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com

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Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in HAD, The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Interview with Caleb Curtiss, Author of Age of Forgiveness

Ahead of the release of his debut full-length poetry collection, Age of Forgiveness, Caleb Curtiss spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Jen Gayda Gupta about the meaning of forgiveness, how memories rebuild, and the longing for stillness.

Jen Gayda Gupta: What does forgiveness mean to you? Whose responsibility is it to forgive?

Caleb Curtiss: In Judith Herman’s Trauma & Recovery, she writes, “true forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution.” I like her angle here. The onus lies with the perpetrator or the negligent party to be accountable to those they’ve harmed.

JGG: You write, “Like a body, or a memory, it has rebuilt itself over time.” How do you think memories rebuild themselves? What is the impact of this rebuilding on grief?

CC: Like dreams, I think memories have to be reconstructed in order for us to understand and grow from them. When we piece together our pasts, we do so with adult brains and in the highly-sensical language of adulthood. But when we experience loss, that highly-sensical language isn’t much use. We have to seek out new materials to build with, a language for our loss.

JGG: There appears to be a separation of the speaker from himself in poems like “Photo Shot on Undeveloped Film” and “I Am Whole, I Am Whole.” What does this separation do for the speaker?

CC: Because this book focuses so closely on my own personal loss, I was aware of, and maybe even sensitive to, how it might read to some as a kind of trauma dump. The poems you mention here, along with a handful of others, are meant to texture the connection between the authorial presence in Age of Forgiveness with its speaker. By presenting my speaker as a kind of character in these poems, I am encouraging my reader to hear him and his voice as a dramatic interpretation of the poems I’ve written for him.

JGG: There are five “Self-Portrait” poems and many references to photos in this collection. How do you believe photos—snapshots of moments—immortalize us and our loved ones?

CC: The simple act of recognition can be a powerful emotional experience. Even if I wasn’t present when the photo was taken, when I recognize the subject of a snapshot, it can transport me back to the moment it captures: spontaneous, fragile, and still somehow permanent. It’s either a mistake that the brain corrects within a few milliseconds, or a momentary little wish fulfillment that allows me to see people I have no way of seeing anymore, or a way to be in times and places that no longer exist.

Maybe you’ve felt this way before. It reminds me of the sensation I have the day after I receive bad news: right when I wake up, I can feel my brain contorting itself to keep the undesired knowledge out of my conscious mind, suspend it in the sludge of half-known truths so I can experience the world, just for a moment, as it is not.

JGG: Tell me about the visual poetry that separates each section. What is the significance of the rabbit that appears both on the cover and in each piece of art?

CC: One of the paradoxes I try to acknowledge in my process is language’s power to express the inexpressible even as it falls short of doing so completely. The visual erasures I made for Age of Forgiveness remind me, and hopefully my reader, of this paradox while also offering up a kind of shadow narrative that compliments and contextualizes each section. It might be helpful to think of the rabbit drawing I made as the main character of that shadow narrative.

JGG: Many poems contain imagined truths—reconstructions of things that happened out of the speaker’s sight. Can you talk about the role of truth and how it intersects with memory?

CC: Whether I like it or not, every day I have to concede that I share my own subjective reality with those held by the rest of the world. Poems that recall facts for the sake of bearing witness don’t interest me as much as those that aspire to build from their own subjective position an idea that resounds as truth.

JGG: There seems to be a longing for stillness in poems like “Possum” and “Still.” What is the benefit of being still?

CC: That’s a nice catch. I think I do feel drawn to stillness, especially when it appears unexpectedly. I remember when my little brother would pause the video tape I was watching to prank me. We did it to each other, I’m sure, but whenever he caught me, I would find myself in a kind of altered state, again, probably for only a millisecond or two.

It doesn’t entirely matter how long. What matters is, there was a moment when my brain would attempt telekinesis and will the tape forward before I’d catch myself. Moments like this are special, even if they’re a little scary, too: when the gears stop advancing the tape but light still passes through its transparency.

JGG: Can you speak about the role of absence in this collection? How does the absence of something or someone shape the space of our current moment?

CC: This collection looks at absence a lot like you or I might look at a blivet or a Magic Eye poster. There’s always something there.

JGG: You write, “the dead always, eventually, become tropes of the living.” What do you believe is the role of a writer in writing about the dead?

CC: I don’t think the living owe the dead anything. As it stands, they aren’t impacted when we express love or resentment or indifference to them. Of course, we are affected by these things. If anything, as a poet, I feel an obligation to the poem I am writing.

JGG: The final poem in this collection, “Doe,” captures a violence towards women that is shown in several earlier poems. What is the significance of the doe being mistaken for a buck?

CC: The rhetoric we generally use to discuss domestic abuse or gender-motivated violence comes from the necessity to determine and recognize accountability. In the world of “Doe” the rhetoric of justice, accountability, restoration, etc. doesn’t really exist. It’s a different place, different from any of the other places in the collection, even as it maps the book as a whole to some degree.

Could it be that the doe was in fact mistaken for a buck as it appears? It could be, but my hope with “Doe” is that its clarity grows, over time, out of its ambiguity.

When I started writing this one, the manuscript itself was still coming together. As it did, the poem changed quite a bit, from a sonnet to blank verse to hexametric couplets, and so on until it became a prose poem. The point being: as the book changed, “Doe” also changed.

Pre-Order your copy of Age of Forgiveness today!

Photo of the author of "Age of Forgiveness," Caleb Curtiss.

Caleb Curtiss is a teacher and a poet from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. His poems, essays,  fiction, and visual erasures have appeared in Image, American Short Fiction, New England  Review, Passages North, Witch Craft Magazine, and The Southern Review. Age of Forgiveness is his first full-length collection. 

Photo of Sundress Editorial Intern, Jen Gayda Gupta.

Jen Gayda Gupta is a poet, educator, and wanderer. She earned her BA in English at the University of Connecticut and her MA in Teaching English from New York University. Jen lives, writes, and travels across the U.S. in a tiny camper with her husband and their dog. Her work has been published in Up the Staircase, Rattle, Jellyfish Review, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.

Interview with Sarah Renee Beach, Author of Impact

Front cover of "Impact" by Sarah Renee Beach—a photo of a shattered window.

On the release of her debut chapbook Impact, Sundress intern Annie Fay Meitchik and writer Sarah Renee Beach discuss themes such as forgiveness and grief. Here, Beach shares her insights about poetry as catharsis after tragedy.

Annie Fay Meitchik: Can you speak to the use of erasure throughout Impact?

Sarah Renee Beach: Excavating the past is tricky under any circumstances, but when you add traumatic memory to the mix, it’s an entirely different beast. It’s difficult to rely on your own account of what happened, so you go looking for corroboration where you can find it. I turned to documents to help ground myself—or to provide a fact from which to work—but the documents themselves present a challenge in that they can complicate, contradict, obscure, or compound what little memory you have. My hope is that the erasures throughout the collection mirror this process of excavation both its illuminations and its failures.

AFM: When dealing with traumatic content, were there instances of self-censorship beyond the stylistic use of erasure?

SRB: I’m not sure self-censorship is the term I would use. In any event, there’s a multitude of perspectives and experiences, which makes silences, retractions, and obfuscations necessary aspects of any writing and editing process. A complete and accurate account will always elude us. Poetry gives us the ability to point to these voids and to give them texture, rather than smoothing over them and delivering a polished point of view. I think it was important for me to incorporate that texture, because—while this was a collective experience that could have been told from many different angles—I have only my perspective to draw from. And even that is a flawed, warped, and biased thing.

AFM: What does an epistolary form allow you to achieve or explore that you wouldn’t have with a different form of writing?

SRB: I find that the epistolary form points to the relational aspect of writing and allows for a level of intimacy that can be harder to tap into when the intended audience is less specific. It highlights what knowledge is shared, what can be offered, and what one wishes to receive. In Impact, the epistolary form gives voice to a perpetually unmet desire to connect, to share knowledge, to give and receive, showing how traumatic events both create and sever connections between the survivors as well as the deceased. I’m sure there are other ways to communicate this, but I chose the form of letters and that seemed to fit.

AFM: Can you share the intention behind writing “New Normal” in two columns?

SRB: I wrote this one many years ago, so it’s tough to remember exactly. I know I liked how the physicality of the two columns mirrored the kind of schism being discussed in the poem. It also creates a kind of hallway down the middle, your eyes darting side to side as you make your way down the poem. I think all of that was accidental, though. I believe I set out to write a contrapuntal and that’s how it eventually ended up.

AFM: In the poem, “Lucky,” there is the line: “Her name means God’s Princess,” which subtly recognizes yourself in the third person. Could you speak to what informed this choice and who the “I” is in the final line: “The heart quivered each time I escaped over the sill and under the pane”?

SRB: This poem speaks to dissociation, so the third person narration hopefully highlights that kind of unembodied experience of trying to escape yourself and your surroundings. Even in the throes of this kind of self-destructive propulsion, though, there are moments of return. The “I” in the last line is indicative of a return to the present and the body and making a conscious decision to keep fleeing rather than turning back.

AFM: Impact explores forgiveness and grief—do you see these things as being distinct from one another or overlapping?

SRB: For me, they were not only overlapping but intertwined. Sudden and tragic loss triggers very complicated emotional combinations, all of which are compounded when the experience is collective. The lack of discreteness and the way blame and anger get absorbed into the communal grieving process necessitates a movement towards forgiveness as well as acceptance—the fifth and final stage of grief. I don’t see Impact as making it to this destination so much as gesturing towards it on an individual level, grasping for a resolution perpetually out of reach.

AFM: With the incorporation of legal questioning, do you see your book contributing to a larger conversation about the way people are treated in the legal system?

SRB: Our legal apparatus, the way it operates out of sight and out of mind for so many people, is fascinating to me. None of us really knows how impersonal and indifferent it is to human complexity and emotion until we are embedded into it. Your story, your memory, your pain all become useful in this necessarily dispassionate way. With this book, I only hoped to shed some light on that experience. In the aftermath of a tragedy like the one my book explores, this is just one of the many processes set into motion, a kind of churning survivors are pulled into and spit out of. Not the whole story, but certainly part of it.

AFM: Can you speak to the recurring references to Frida Kahlo’s work? How do they relate to the goals of your collection?

SRB: I’d been looking for a touchstone, for an example of an artist making art from tragedy in a way that resonated with my experience of it. What struck me most about Frida Kahlo—and what has me turning to her art and writing again and again—is that she isn’t translating an experience or telling a story so that an outside observer can understand it. Her art, to me, shows the incorporation of a tragedy into a lived life, one that has not been overcome but endured. That felt revelatory to me as someone who for many years felt rushed through processing and pressured to package the event as something I’d learned and grown from, a story I could quickly and succinctly recite. Frida helped me to resist the pull towards narrative reduction and to honor the complexity. As Hayden Herrera noted in her biography of the artist in the quote that serves as Impact’s epigraph: …the accident was too ‘complicated’ and ‘important’ to reduce to a single comprehensible image. I couldn’t agree more.

AFM: Who do you hope your collection reaches?

SRB: If not ourselves, we all know someone who has experienced tragedy, or we’ve read about something tragic that happened to someone somewhere. I hope Impact speaks to what we like to call “unimaginable.” Because, really, what’s more conceivable than human and mechanical error, violence, a fatal crash? It’s living in the aftermath that we fail to imagine and, thus, reimagine. In that way, I hope it reaches anyone who might otherwise struggle to behold another’s pain, to resist the urge to transform it into something beautiful or useful or meaningful.

Impact is available to download for free on the Sundress website.

A photo of the author of "Impact," Sarah Renee Beach, standing in front of some greenery.

Originally from Southeast Texas, Sarah Renee Beach completed her MFA at The New School. Her poetry can be found in White Wall Review, Rust + Moth, and anthologized in Host Publications’ I Scream Social Anthology Vol. 2. She currently lives in Austin, TX. More information about her work may be found at sarahreneebeach.com.

A black and white photo of Sundress Intern, Annie Fay Meitchik.

Annie Fay Meitchik is a writer and visual artist with her BA in Creative Writing from The New School and a Certificate in Children’s Book Writing from UC San Diego. Through a career in publishing, Annie aims to amplify the voices of marginalized identities while advocating for equality and inclusivity in art/educational spaces. Her work has been published by Matter Press, 12th Street Literary Journal, and UNiDAYS. To learn more, please visit: www.anniefay.com.

Lyric Essentials: Matthew Johnson Reads E. Ethelbert Miller

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Matthew Johnson joins us to discuss the work of E Ethelbert Miller, place-based writing, and baseball in poetry and how surprising topics and discuss much broader themes. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read E. Ethelbert Miller’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

 Matthew Johnson: I first came across E. Ethelbert Miller’s work while I was a graduate student at UNC-Greensboro, so around 2018-2019. I don’t remember how exactly I first saw his name, but I was immediately drawn to his poetry collection by the title itself, If God Invented Baseball; I found it to be creative, as well as his choice for a cover photo, which featured a picture of the legendary Negro League pitcher, Satchel Paige, who is one of my favorite all-time athletes and individuals to have studied and read about. Years later I bought the book, but I initially read it through an inter-library loan; I remember the librarian kinda having this puzzled look when I told them the title of the book, as well as the title of the movie I was checking out at the same time, The Last Black Man in San Francisco. I was really struck by the fact that here was a poet using the sport of baseball to talk about childhood, home, race, politics, and place. Since the ancient Olympics, sports have not just been purely about sports, and at the time, I had seen and read countless articles, documentaries, and non-fiction books about sports mixing with other topics, but not in a poetry book, so to go this collection for the first time was a vastly different experience from the literature I was reading and studying at the time.

Matthew Johnson reads “Fly Balls and Other Beautiful Things” by E. Ethelbert Miller

RW: How has his writing inspired your own? 

MJ: I was fairly new to the publishing world when I came across Miller’s work. Prior to reading If God Invented Baseball, while I had written poems with a focus on different topics around sports, I had yet to come across an author who dedicated a whole collection of poems based on these similar topics. After reading Miller’s work, it instilled in me a spirit that, ‘yeah, people would be interested in reading about these types of topics if you write about it.’ But, while he talks about these athletes who a lot of people know about, Miller personalizes it to his upbringing and background, which I think is important and allows a writer’s voice to come out. I don’t think it can just be about the athlete or sport; the writer needs to be in there somehow, and Miller does a great job at that. It also stirred in me to go out and research and find like-minded readers and writers. There are a bunch of great magazines out there where athletics and literature blend together (e.g, The Sport Literate, The Under Review, Clinch, The Twin Bill, Words & Sports Quarterly, Aethlon).

RW: Where would you recommend new readers of E. Ethelbert Miller’s work start out? What other similar poets do you recommend? 

MJ: Several poems by E. Ethelbert Miller can be found on Poetry Foundation and Poets.org, so I think that would be a good place for readers to get started with his work and style. I greatly enjoyed, If God Invented Baseball, and even if you’re not a baseball fan, readers could still take pleasure within it. Two poetry collections I read within the past several years that are a little similar would be, Joe DiMaggio Moves Like Liquid Lightning by Loren Broaddus and Aisle 228 by Sandra Marchetti. These poetry collections, like the work of Miller, use baseball to discuss broader themes that don’t just pertain to sports. I especially enjoyed the aspect of place in their works as they are both writers from the Midwest. I thought each presents that part of the country in an intriguing light to someone who is very unfamiliar with it, as I have only lived on the East Coast.

Matthew Johnson reads “Before Ball Four” by E. Ethelbert Miller

RW: You’re the author of the recent publication, Far From New York State (New York Quarterly Press, 2023). What was the process of creating this collection like? How did you reflect on place, history, and your own experience while writing these poems?

MJ: Having moved around a bit, I have always been fascinated by the idea of regionalism. In the final semester of my graduate career, I was in an early American Literature class and for the final presentation, my topic focused on the works of Washington Irving. I had heard of his famed characters, Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless Horseman, but I never really read his work until then, and I greatly enjoyed reading his Sketch Book. And it was through research, I kinda went down a wormhole and was inspired by artists and writers of New York, and not from the city, but from the rest of the state. Even though New York City is wonderful, there’s a whole bunch of state and experience and beauty north of it, including the parts where I am originally from (New Rochelle in Westchester County). I wanted to write about these experiences, and I looked inward as well as outward, specifically to my parents, who spent the majority of their lives in Westchester County (New Rochelle and Mount Vernon) and have told me countless stories of their childhood and early adulthood. And though my experience wasn’t as vast as theirs, I did have some, including when I returned to New York in adulthood to work in journalism in Oneonta (between Albany and Binghamton). So I wanted to talk about these histories, as well as the histories of the people who inspired me, including in the form of literature, music, and sports.

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E. Ethelbert Miller was born in the Bronx, New York. A self-described “literary activist,” Miller is on the board of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank, and has served as director of the African American Studies Resource Center at Howard University since 1974. His collections of poetry include Andromeda (1974) and How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love (2004), among others. The mayor of Baltimore made Miller an honorary citizen of the city in 1994. He received a Columbia Merit Award in 1993 and was honored by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House in 2003. Miller has held positions as scholar-in-residence at George Mason University and as the Jessie Ball DuPont Scholar at Emory & Henry College. He has conducted writing workshops for soldiers and the families of soldiers through Operation Homecoming and is the founder and director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, one of the oldest literary series in the Washington area.

Purchase If God Invented Baseball here.

Matthew Johnson is the author of Shadow Folks and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books) and Far from New York State (New York Quarterly Press). His forthcoming chapbook, Too Short to Box with God, is scheduled for a November 2024 release through Finishing Line Press. His work has appeared in Front Porch Review, Roanoke Review, Northern New England Review, South Florida Poetry Journal Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. A former sports journalist and editor (The USA Today College, The Daily Star in Oneonta, NY), he has also been a Sundress Publications Residency recipient and a multi-time Best of the Net nominee. An M.A. graduate of UNC-Greensboro, Matthew is currently the managing editor of The Portrait of New England and the poetry editor of The Twin Bill. You can view more of his work and his social media platforms at his website: www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com

Purchase Far from New York State here.

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Interview with Heather Bartlett, Author of Another Word for Hunger

The cover of a book, showing a white background with a feminine silhouette in black. On top of the silhouette are bold words in orange, "Another Word for Hunger." The word "poems" appears below the title, and Heather Bartlett's name is printed at the bottom right.

Ahead of the release of her new book of poetry Another Word for Hunger, Sundress intern Mack Ibrahim and writer Heather Bartlett discussed themes such as desire and human connection. Here, Bartlett lays it all out on the table in a raw, honest, and insightful way.

Mack Ibrahim: Is there a connection between your collection’s title Another Word for Hunger and your poem’s title “That Kind of Hunger”?

Heather Bartlett: If I were to make a list of synonyms for hunger, it would start with desire. “That Kind of Hunger” is a poem about exploring desire in its simplest form. The speaker in that poem is still young enough that she isn’t constrained by gender norms or societal expectations, even if the reader is keenly aware that these forces exist within the poem. So, the speaker plays the role of the prince when she plays fairytale. She climbs the tree and admires the princess. She doesn’t yet know what is going to change, what is going to be lost, and what the consequences of certain kinds of desire will be as she outgrows this moment.

MI: What is the significance of saying “my lover,” such as in “Tonight I Am,” versus “my love,” such as in “I Spy”?

HB: Distance. Tense. A lover is in a present-tense physical relationship. In “Tonight I Am,” the speaker is so close to her lover that she begins to imagine them as one. But a love, well a love can be anyone, past, present, or future. In “I Spy,” the speaker is so far removed from all these loves that she is watching/missing/admiring them all from a computer screen.

MI: In terms of structure, why is “red | wolf” not included in the three sections of this collection?

HB: The book’s epigraph, “There are things lovely and dangerous still,” comes from a poem by June Jordan. I view “red | wolf,” in many ways, as speaking to that line and its resonance in the collection. The poem draws on the familiar—Red Riding Hood and the Wolf—to begin to explore the roots and meanings of hunger. I let this poem stand on its own because it serves as a prelude. This poem opens the door to the collection.

MI: Can you speak more about your use of parentheses in “red | wolf” and “Mockingbird”?

HB: Sometimes there are two voices speaking at once in a poem. They speak to each other. They speak over each other. They interrupt each other. They give meaning to each other. I’m using parentheses to make space for these voices.

MI: You write powerfully about a few key experiences with your mother. How would you say your relationship with her has influenced your writing?

HB: There are instances in the collection in which the mother figure is based on my relationship with my own mother, yes. She did teach me how to spot the constellations. She did brush the knots out of my wet hair every morning (Hi, Mom). But the mother in these poems is really an amalgamation of influential voices and forces, not just mothers, or parents, or even people in just my life. The mother in these poems represents a larger voice and force. The relationship I explore between mother and daughter in these poems is speaking to a much larger form of hunger—the need to be loved and accepted and valued in the world. So many in the LGBTQ+ community have people in our lives who struggle to accept or understand us when we come out. So many of us live in places where our lives are being devalued. The mother and daughter in these poems are trying to find their way toward something better.

MI: How do the different kinds of love—your feelings for your mother and for your partners in Another Word for Hunger influence each other?

HB: Love is a kind of hunger, isn’t it? It takes on many forms, but it’s always rooted in the desire to be Seen and Recognized. I think I’m seeking a form of that in every relationship, in every poem. It’s miraculous when we find it. And it’s devastating when we don’t.

MI: How would you describe the intersection of spirituality and queerness within your poetry?

HB: I think there is something quite spiritual about the process of coming out. In order to get there, we need to come to know ourselves so fully, so clearly. That process of self-reflecting, self-recognizing, and self-accepting is one of discovery. In the collection, I explore this in a few ways. One of the biggest is through the series of “Eve” poems. Much like the mother figure in the collection, Eve is not simply one figure. She isn’t just Eve who bites the apple; she is many things at once—a symbol of spirituality, of femininity, of “otherness.” She is an idea, a feeling, a version of the self. Throughout the collection, Eve morphs from an external figure into a vital part of the speaker’s own self which she comes to recognize and nurture.

MI: You describe the body and physical touch as signs of intimacy and love. What would you say about the moments where intimacy and love don’t intersect?

HB: Intimacy is a form of longing and of searching. Sometimes it comes out of love and connection. Sometimes it comes out of loneliness and grief. To me, these are equally strong forces.

MI: What do you believe this collection says about loneliness and the desire for acceptance?

HB: Loneliness and desire are not mutually exclusive. They’re parts of one another. They’re born out of the same hunger. We can feel everything all at once and still keep looking for more.

Order your copy of Another Word for Hunger today!

Heather Bartlett, a white woman in a black blouse, peers into the camera with a soft smile.

Heather Bartlett is a poet, writer, and professor. Her poetry and prose can be found in print and online in journals such as the Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, RHINO Poetry, and others. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the State University of New York College at Cortland, where she teaches in the Professional Writing Program and directs Cortland’s visiting writers series, Distinguished Voices in Literature. She is the founding editor of the online literary magazine Hoxie Gorge Review.

Mack Ibrahim, a non-binary person with glasses and short hair, grins. They wear a floral black and red top with black jeans and sit with their arm propped on their knee.

Mack Ibrahim is a second-year at Wheaton College in Illinois. They are majoring in English with a Writing concentration and minoring in American Ethnic Studies. Their hobbies include obsessively reading the webnovel Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, going to concerts, and making memes for their D&D group.

Interview with Tennison S. Black, Editor of A Body You Talk To: An Anthology of Contemporary Disability

Following the release of our new e-anthology A Body You Talk To: An Anthology of Contemporary Disability our Editorial Intern Max Stone spoke with editor Tennison S. Black about the importance of sharing and amplifying work by disabled writers, their editorial vision for the anthology, the story behind the title, the inclusion of visual art in the collection, and more.

Max Stone: Could you talk about the title of the anthology? Why this title? Where did it come from and how do you see it unifying this collection of work?

Tennison S. Black: The thing about me that few realize is that I have to coach myself through chronic pain to complete basic tasks. Sometimes I’m really kind to myself, “Okay, here we go. You’ve got this.” And sometimes I’m irritable with the pain or outright inability to accomplish what I want, “Just do it. Oh for fu**’s sake.” But the thing is that I talk to my body all the time. Opening a car door requires a conversation in my mind, “Focus on the ring finger and let it do the work—don’t use the thumb—okay maybe just hook it then turn your shoulders and it’ll work as leverage.”

My primary disability seems hell-bent on taking out my hands, especially. Though I’ve had this disease since 2001, in recent years it’s increased the toll and I seem to be steadily losing my access to the use of my hands. So I talk to them a lot. But also to my knee, my left hip, my shoulders, neck, and spine. I guess it depends on the task but I coach my parts toward cooperation.

In the summer months there’s something about the way my bedroom door was originally hung and so when it swells in the heat, it’s really difficult to open. Every day is hard, but when you combine that with a flare in my hands, I can easily get stuck in my room because the doorknob and the strain of opening the door causes me extreme pain but also because I just can’t pull hard enough to get it to open anymore. At some level my instinct is to sit on the floor and have a good cry until I’m rescued. But no one is coming to rescue anyone else, it seems, and also, that’s not who I want to be in this life—I don’t want to give up. Except when I really really do. The way I bridge the difference is to talk to—I don’t know—the arm, the hand, the disease that puts me in that position, myself for eating something the night before that I know could cause me additional pain—all of it. The hot summer air and humidity that causes my door to do this. The inability to pay for someone to fix it—yes and yes and yes. So I have one of those bodies that you have to talk to just to get through the day. From opening a can or jar, yes even with tools, to carrying my bag, to pulling on my clothes, I need a coach so I coach myself. And in this way, I’m not alone.

MS: Why was it important to put together an anthology of poetry on contemporary
disability at this current moment?  

TSB: I haven’t always been good at saying I’m Disabled. It’s not in my nature to disclose my feelings or my struggles. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mostly I think it came from raising my kids as a single parent with no family or friends, and feeling utterly terrified that if anyone knew the amount of pain I was in on a daily basis, or how much I was struggling, I’d lose my kids. Now, that may seem irrational today, but I can’t overstate how alone I was in those years, and how I was just trying not to die. So it took a lot for me to even begin to understand my own disability, and what it may mean to be Disabled in the world, and also what to do with that information. I was trying to just get by, walking to food banks—got evicted, and on and on. Anyway, I’m not always great at it, and I struggle still, but I feel like I need to do better.

There’s not yet been a time when being Disabled wasn’t a radical act. Yet Disabled writers are still routinely excluded in many presses and open calls. Listen, there are several incredible anthologies of this type so we’re not breaking new ground here but until it’s routine and expected that a certain percentage of writers in every anthology are openly Disabled, we all (meaning presses) have work to do. As for Sundress, this won’t be our last effort toward this end, it’s just our most recent. But I still hear from publishers that Disabled writers are “difficult,” or that we “can’t handle touring and promotion,” and that we’re just “too much,” so we still have a long way to go.

MS: How do you see these poems contributing to the conversation on disability and creating more space and empathy for disabled people in the world? 

TSB: Not all of the work in this anthology is about being Disabled except in as much as everything everyone does is influenced by their identity—Disabled and non-disabled alike. But this anthology is not necessarily intended to focus strictly on the experience of Disability as much as it’s intended to offer one more outlet, one more space for Disabled people to speak their minds or to place their art. It’s another marker saying that we’re here. In some cases these artists and writers are responding to other Disabled writers and artists. But in many cases they’re just representing themselves and saying hey, I want to be included in the conversation, please. And what else is there?
 
MS: Talk a little bit about your editorial vision for this book; what considerations did you make when choosing which poems to include? A variety of different voices, disabilities, intersecting identities, and poetic forms are represented; was this a conscious, deliberate choice that you made? 

TSB: If I could have accepted every submission, I would have. But what was my vision—I mean here we sit in this world with fascism rising all around us, trying to gobble up and kill everything good. My daily vision is to defy that push, to offer space where people can be in love and in sorrow, in pain and in hope with each other. And to offer that space up to those who are living in defiance of all that is horrid and terrible in the world.
 
MS: Are there specific poems by different poets that you think speak to or resonate with
each other? If so, which ones and how do they conversate, both in terms of content and
form? 

TSB: There are many pieces in this anthology that speak to one another. I’d prefer not to point them out because first I want the reader to have room here. But, too, I want every writer and artist herein to know that I value their work, none above any other, but with immense gratitude nonetheless for each. They’re all special to me and I chose them for that reason alone.
 
MS: The COVID-19 pandemic is a recurring theme in this anthology. Can you expand on the intersections of disability with the pandemic and the choices you made in selecting poems relating to the topic? Also, did you have an idea of how much of a presence you wanted the pandemic to have in the book going into it? 

TSB: There hasn’t yet been enough said about the impact of the pandemic on our community. Personally, I spent the pandemic with a medically suppressed immune system because it was either that or lose my ability to walk as my disease ravaged my joints. And in fact, it took multiple specialists AND me losing my ability to walk for several months to finally agree to do it because of the pandemic. But my story is far from unique or extraordinary. If you faced the pandemic with a disability, you likely had increased pressure in all of the ways that everyone else had—just more so. From loneliness to financial pressure, to physical challenges and worries amid a potentially deadly pandemic to which many of us were more susceptible—especially to the worst outcomes. I didn’t feel that I could approach the topic of disability at this stage and not also talk about the impact of the pandemic—something many of us are still facing, even if most people have decided it’s over.
 
MS: Several art pieces are also included in the anthology. Can you speak about your thought process in choosing these pieces? 

TSB: Honestly, if it weren’t for capitalism, we’d all be able to lay around and make art and write and tell stories. And I wouldn’t want to be a part of extricating one of these from another. Wherever my writing is, there will always be room for art. And I hope to include art in every editorial effort I undertake. My thoughts in the selection process here were to include pieces that spoke to or advanced the narrative of the whole and some of those were more visual than others.
 
MS: Disabilities that aren’t visible are often overlooked and ignored. How do you see A Body You Talk To tackling this issue and making such disabilities, and the people who experience them, more visible and acknowledged?  
 
TSB: For twenty years I was invisibly Disabled. My disabilities have only become really visible in the last few years, and even then, they again can be invisible to those who don’t understand what they’re seeing. Like so many of us, I have been screamed at for parking in an accessible parking space, or for using the accessible stall in the restroom. I’ve been asked by a very prominent Disability rights advocate why I was there at a disability event and how they could know I was Disabled because I didn’t look disabled to them. It’s awful to be put in these positions so I just don’t think we need to justify ourselves. We don’t owe our medical information to anyone. It’s not really for me to make other Disabled people more visible but to offer them a platform to make themselves more visible (if they choose) is something I can do. And acknowledgement might be nice but what I want is universal accessibility. I want us all to be able to get in and out of buildings and to get around the world without so much difficulty or the need to justify ourselves to others. A Body You Talk To is a place for some Disabled writers and artists to be heard and to publish their work. That alone is, I hope, enough. It’s a room. The real work belongs to the writers and artists contained therein.

A Body You Talk To: An Anthology of Contemporary Disability is free and available to download on the Sundress website

Tennison S. Black (they/she), a queer and multiply disabled autistic, is the author of Survival Strategies (winner of the National Poetry Series, UGA Press 2023). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Hotel Amerika, Booth, Wordgathering, and New Mobility, among others. They received an MFA at Arizona State University. They are the Managing Editor at Sundress Publications and Best of the Net. Though Sonoran born, they reside in Washington state.

Max Stone is a poet from Reno, Nevada. He has an MFA in poetry and a BA in English with a minor in Book Arts and Publication from the University of Nevada, Reno. He was born and raised in Reno, but has lived in various other places including New York City, where he played soccer at Queens College. He is the author of two chapbooks: Temporary Preparations (Bottlecap Press, June 2023) and The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful (Ghost City Press, forthcoming July 2023). His work has been published by & Change, just femme and dandy, fifth wheel press, Bender Zine, Black Moon Magazine, The Meadow, Night Coffee Lit, and elsewhere.

Interview with Joy Ladin, Author of Impersonation

Following the republishing of her book Impersonation, Joy Ladin spoke with Doubleback Books editorial intern Pema Donnelly about the revision process of republishing, as well as how her gender transition and relationship with God and religion inspired her poetry.

Pema Donnelly: In your author’s note at the beginning of Impersonation, you talk about what revising was like for you. Could you talk a bit more about what it was like to work with these poems that were coming from all different stages of your transition?

Joy Ladin: My first response to re-reading the book after it was accepted by you was shock. Over the years since its publication, I had occasionally reread individual poems that became regulars at readings. But I hadn’t read it as a whole since the first edition was published in 2015. In addition to being struck by the need for an organization that would make it easier to see the connection between the relations to gender expressed when I wrote each poem, there were a number of poems that simultaneously seemed to cry out for revision, and feel too foreign to re-enter imaginatively. They were my poems, I remembered writing them, but after years of living as rather than struggling to become and grow into myself, they didn’t feel like mine any more. 

As I worked on them, I realized how much my relation to gender when I wrote them had shaped my poetics. Poetics grow out of the problems we are wrestling with when we write—they are ways of using language to explore, or clarify, or navigate, or avoid, or resolve those problems. For example, the earliest poems in Impersonation were written when I was in the closet, hiding my trans identity behind a dissociated male persona. That created two poetics-shaping problems: though I wanted to write poems that were coherent and in some ways true, because I wasn’t present in my body or life, I had little vivid experience, feelings, or even memories to draw on, and because I was in the closet, I dared not say anything that revealed my gender dysphoria or female gender identification. These problems led me to write persona poems about feelings, experiences, and memories that weren’t mine, but which indirectly reflected an unspeakable sense of dislocation, loss, and (internal) exile which, after fifteen years of living as myself, seem like a bad dream. That made it excruciating to revise those poems – to once again approach writing as something that couldn’t reveal or even be about me.  

There are three other poetics-defining relations to gender represented in the book. The poetics of my pre-transition poems were defined by trying to explore or express my struggles with gender in ways that are so abstracted that no one would recognize them. The transition poems were driven by a bundle of exciting new (to me) problems. I was trying to speak from a female subject position I hadn’t yet embodied, and to create language for feelings, fears, and losses that, so far as I knew, no trans poet had yet expressed. I was also, for the first time, trying to write as myself, the person I knew myself to be but had not yet grown into—a problem that lead to me writing a lot in what I think of as the prophetic second-person, as a future voice addressing my struggling, unformed self. Writing about a process of becoming I was in the midst of made it impossible to reach what I now think of as endings or conclusions—like fragments of existential rainbows, the poems begin and end in the middle. And finally, even as I was trying to express the excitement and ecstasy of becoming, because my transition was bound up with the breakup of my home, family, and marriage, I needed to do so in a way that acknowledged the sufferings of those I loved – sufferings I caused by finally being true to myself. I couldn’t revise these poems until I gave up trying to force on them a clarity and conclusion that, I realized, negated the problems that summoned them into being. The only section that was easy to revise was the last one, poems about living as, rather than becoming, an openly trans, female-identified person. Even though I don’t write much about that these days, that relation to gender, and representational problems that grow out of it, are much closer to those I live today. 

PD: You mentioned that the “Transit of Venus” sequence felt very ambitious. What does this sequence mean to you, and how do you feel about it in relation to the book now?

JL: The “Transit of Venus” section represented what were then completely new ways of writing for me—writing about feelings in the present (actually, after 45 years in the closet, openly writing about my feelings was new to me); writing about my life in the midst of living it, rather than fictional lives or abstracted reflections of bits of my life; and what was then a new practice of writing poems composed solely from language sampled from women’s magazines, something which became a staple composition technique, but which then was an effort to learn what it meant to write from a female subject position, as a woman. Those poems were also among my earliest efforts to create language to express transgender experiences and interiority, particularly for the tumultuous emotions surrounding gender transition and the process of becoming. But in the personal sense, the most ambitious aspect of these poems was that they weren’t only efforts to represent and express transgender experience—they were efforts to imagine becoming myself and, in a real sense, my first experiences of being myself. To me, they were crucial parts of gender transition; in fact, I considered their earliest drafts as the beginning of my transition—a crucial test of whether I could write poetry as myself, and so—apologies for being so dramatic, but this was how I thought – of whether I could actually live as myself, or needed to die in order to end my life as a man. 

PD: During the revision process, did any favorites emerge for you? Were there any surprises to revising? For instance, a poem you initially liked didn’t make the final cut, or the opposite, a poem you didn’t like initially made the cut with a few changes?

JL: My biggest surprises came when I went back to poems I cut out of the original manuscript—I have musician envy, so thought of them as outtakes from the original sessions—and found previously unpublished poems some, including “Unmaking Love, “Reincarnation,” and “Letter to the Gender Critical,” and the “Stories” sequence, that seemed relevant and strong enough to include. 

I was also surprised that the father poems in the “Post Mortem” section felt important to me after all these years, and by the sharpness and vividness of some of the “Mind-Body Problem” poems, such as “Photograph 1934” and “To Say You Lived— they reminded me of  a kind of concentration and distillation of image I left behind when I left the closet.

It was a relief to cut three poems I included in the original book even though I had misgivings about them – “Still a Guy,” “She,” and “Exegetical Fingers.” Leaving them out made the book better.

PD: One of my favorite poems while reading Impersonation was “Filibustier”. I think it stands out as one of the more overtly political poems in the collection as well. Was there any specific moment that inspired this piece?

JL: I don’t remember a moment that inspired “Filibustier.” It grew out of techniques I learned during the study of modernist American techniques that became my dissertation and book, Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry, in which I examined how Dickinson would fuse language representing different discourses together in ways that turned them into metaphors for one another. She does it much more concisely and mind-blowingly that I do, of course, but that technique gave me a way to express the intensely ambivalent experience of exploring gender transition while still being in the closet without veering, as I often did at the time, into shame or self-hatred. I suddenly realized that, like gender transition, voting (the metaphorical discourse that makes up most of the poem) is an act of self-expression that is done in private, a self-defining choice no one else witnesses or knows, a way of trying to change the world that may mean a lot to the individual (my mother was a devoted member of the League of Women Voters, and came from a refugee family that saw voting as a gift and sacred responsibility) but which is imperceptible to others. I feared that gender transition would cut me off from society. As I expanded the voting metaphor, the poem surprised me by speaking about gender transition in a way I hadn’t imagined—as a private commitment that would strengthen my social participation, a prophetic glimpse of what happened years later after I started living as myself.

PD: A lot of your poems tend to incorporate God or religious references in some way. What is your relationship to religion & how would you say it has changed & evolved over the course of writing Impersonation’s poems?

JL: I’ve written a lot about my relationship to God and religion (two different things!) and how they are bound up for me with my trans identity, including chunks of my memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life, which I wrote before Impersonation, and a book-length work of trans theology, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, which I wrote after it. Long story short, though my family wasn’t religious, I have always had a sense of God’s presence that sustained me through decades of gender-related suicidal depression. My family didn’t talk about God, and I learned as soon as I started taking writing workshops in junior high school that American poets aren’t supposed to talk about God either, unless we occasionally want to do so skeptically or angrily. So though I’ve always written poems with the word “God” in them, for most of my poetic career, I kept my actual relationship with God, like my female gender identification, in the closet. As I did about gender in my pre-transition poems, I wrote about God from a distance, in ways that make God seem like an idea I’m questioning rather than someone who feels like an important part of my life. You can see those closeted techniques for talking about God in several poems in Impersonation, including the first, “A Story About God,” and the last, “Making Love,” in which God is part of a metaphor for queer sexual ecstasy. But in “Gender is Not the Only Transition,” the sequence that makes up much of the post-transition section and was written after most of the rest of the book, I come close to directly representing parts of my actual relationship with God (though still through the veil of the voices to which the poems in the sequence are attributed).

PD: Finally, if you could, what would you like to say to those who are becoming? 

JL: “All beginnings are hard”—that’s a Jewish saying that applies directly to becoming. Becoming new or truer versions of ourselves is hard, because it means living through a series of beginnings. Every time we come out to someone, it’s the beginning of a new relationship. Every time we re-examine our ways of living or thinking or talking or acting from the perspective of the selves we are growing into, it’s a new beginning. When I was in the throes of becoming, everything felt like a beginning: dressing, walking, talking, seeing old friends, going to the bank, sitting on the subway, kissing, waking up as myself rather than to male persona I had to suffer and maintain, even my emotions, felt new, beginnings of a life and self I was just discovering, making up as I went along.    

Because all beginnings are hard, becoming takes toughness, courage, resilience, and hope—and it also takes compassion toward oneself and those who are affected by our becoming. We have to learn to enlist the most grown-up parts of ourselves in caring for the newborn parts of ourselves. As toddlers teach us when they are learning to walk, becoming takes falling down, getting hurt, pulling ourselves up, lurching forward again. 

Most of all I want to tell those who are becoming that though the world may not be ready for you, though it may seem utterly hostile to you, it needs you—because you, and only you, can be the person you are becoming.

Impersonation is available to download for free from Doubleback Books

Joy Ladin has long worked at the tangled intersection of literature and trans identity. She has published ten books of poetry, including her latest collection, Shekhinah Speaks (Selva Oscura Press, 2022); 2021 National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Ana (EOAGH); and Lamda Literary Award finalists Impersonation and Transmigration. A new collection, Family, is forthcoming from Persea in 2024. She has also published a memoir of gender transition, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life, and a groundbreaking work of trans theology, Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. Her writings have been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, among other honors. Many of her poems, essays, and videos of her presentations are available at joyladin.wordpress.com. 

Pema Donnelly is a poet and interdisciplinary creative born and raised in Southern California. In her work, she explores representing queer joy, silver linings, and aspects of her own mental health journey. Today, Pema attends the University of California, Irvine, where she studies English and Education. When she is not studying, you may find her visiting your local estate sales or spending time with her senile tuxedo cat, Rose.

We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Layla Lenhardt

“These moments are punctuated by the smell of oolong tea, memories / of getting drunk off Blue Wave Vodka at Brian’s house, and hiding / from the cops in your car” (14). Throughout Mother Tongue, lines such as these resurrect. What is resurrected depends on your reading. For me, the tactile details and lush symbolism tore a hole in time, through which I could explore my early heart ruptures, while clasping hands with my co-time traveler, the speaker. 

Mother Tongue is a merciless miracle of storytelling. In its pages, readers enter the realms of trauma and passion anew. 

This latest installment of Sundress’ We Call Upon the Author Series contains valuable advice for designing and organizing a poetry collection from Layla Lenhardt, the esteemed author of Mother Tongue and a gallery coordinator. 

The cover of Lenhardt's book Mother Tongue: a face reflected in two hands.

Marah Hoffman: Because I know you are gifted at curating aesthetics, I would love to ask some questions about Mother Tongue’s design. The cover art is perfect for the collection–peculiar and alluring. How did you decide on this image? 

Layla Lenhardt: Choosing the cover art was, admittedly, the hardest part of the entire process. I wanted something that really captured what Mother Tongue was. I spent the better part of three months looking at various artists’ websites and pouring through pages of stock images. After sending three contenders to my editor, we made the decision to go with the image we chose for the cover. It just spoke to me in a way I can’t quite explain. But it felt right.

MH: Any advice for others picking cover art? 

LL: Don’t settle. Take your time and do your research. The cover of your book represents the entirety of it. It is the first idea that the reader digests, so make sure it is something that really resonates with you and your work. 

MH: Would you be willing to explain how you selected titles, for the entire collection and/or individual poems? Choosing titles has always been a challenge for me, but yours feel like essential components, providing texture. One of my favorites was “The Owl Theory.” An awareness of this theory makes readers understand the speaker’s loss so sharply. 

LL: Mother Tongue took on many names during its conception. Actually I didn’t decide on the name Mother Tongue until a month or so before I finished it. It had a different name for years. The idea came from a year of my life where I was unable to cry, and I felt that was akin to forgetting how to speak in my mother tongue. Some of the titles of the poems are names of the actual people. Most of them encapsulate the feeling I felt while writing it. I’d choose to reference things and events that I’d find were parallel to the concept of the poem. 

MH: What are your main sources of creative inspiration? 

LL: I feel the most inspired after listening to music or reading a poetry collection. I think one of my biggest inspirations in writing is Joanna Newsom. Her lyricism is so profound and all encompassing; I always learn a lot from her. 

MH: Any recommendations for music, writing prompts, or books?

LL: Joanna Newsom, especially her album Have One On Me. I’d also like to recommend the following poetry books; Refusal by Jenny Molberg, Field Glass by Catherine Pond, and Vantage by Taneum Bambrick.

MH: Reading Mother Tongue, I felt close to the speaker’s lovers through your consistently tactile and tender imagery. I lost them, mourned them, and watched time morph their memory. What are your views on the art of transferring a beloved onto the page? Dos and don’ts? 

LL: I think you should only do it if you’re ready, sometimes you have to kill your darlings. I find in transferring these people to the page, it’s showing them a small bit of gratitude for the things they’ve allowed me to feel, which in turn makes me very thankful for even the worst experiences; I find it cathartic. 

MH: While the collection flits back and forth between different eras of youth, there is a clear arc. How was the process of organizing the poems? 
LL: The process of organizing poems was a little arduous. Initially, I wanted to put them in chronological order, but I soon realized that wasn’t the best for the collection. So I printed out each poem and sat on the floor and organized them around me so I could literally visualize how to best curate this collection. I liked to pair pieces that spoke to each other. I also chose to move through the general sentiments and feelings, so I’d select the order based off of pieces that encapsulated each feeling: grief, youth, longing, guilt, etc.


Mother Tongue is available from Main Street Rag

Layla Lenhardt is an American poet currently based out of Indianapolis. She is the author of Mother Tongue (Main Street Rag, 2023) and a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee. She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency. Her work appears in Rust + Moth, Poetry Quarterly, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and elsewhere. www.laylalenhardt.com 

Marah Hoffman is a 2022 graduate with a bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from Lebanon Valley College. In college, she served as co-poetry editor of Green Blotter Literary Magazine and Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society president. From the LVC English department, she won The Green Blotter Writer Award. She has been featured in journals including Green Blotter, LURe Journal, Oakland Arts Review, Beyond Thought, and Asterism. Now, she works for the Sundress Academy for the Arts, where she enjoys immersing herself in a new and radiant literary community. Marah loves creative nonfiction, intertextuality, whimsicality, cats, lattes, distance running, and adding to her personal lexicon. Her favorite word changes nearly every week. 

Lyric Essentials: Kelly Weber Reads Sara Henning

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Kelly Weber has joined us to discuss the poetry of Sara Henning and world building in poetry, evocative imagery, and memory’s relationship with lyricism. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: How has Sara Henning’s work inspired your own?

Kelly Weber: Henning’s collection was one of many I read as I was thinking about ways to build a sort of complicated family mythology in my first published book, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place. She writes in an unflinching way about trauma and weaves the narrative structure of memory with a lyricism that moves so deftly on the page. There’s such an emotional honesty and directness with luscious sound play and distinctive imagery in her work.

RW: You’re the author of the recent publication, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022). What was the process of creating this collection like? Where did your interest in mythology or formal poetry begin?

KW: This collection really grew out of trying to find a lyric shape and articulation for asexuality and aromanticism, and a lot of the book’s wrestling with the sonnet form and some of its amatonormative traditions are part of the crisis of that book. For a long time I struggled with traditional poetic forms and their restrictions–I still haven’t found a way to write into the sestina that feels genuinely inspiring, for example. But with this book, I realized I loved inventing my own formal changes on the page, like writing a poem with the ampersand as its primary and only piece of punctuation, or really skewing and strangling the traditional sonnet crown into something that was interesting to me. Ultimately the process of creating this collection was about finally finding what was interesting to me about the lyric poem on the page. The thematic concerns followed the formal experiments I was trying, and gradually the themes and shape of the book emerged from there.

Kelly Weber reads “The Truth Only Starlings Will Speak” by Sara Henning

RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically? 

KW: “The Truth Only Starlings Will Speak” reminds me of the vivid, evocative description in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish”–one of Henning’s many fine skills as a writer is her ability to articulate an image with such lush verbs and word choice. Images in that poem like “lymph nodes feverous / in their recursion. Bending to this rapture” are so perfectly observed in both sound and image. This poem is exemplary of her ability to slow down a narrative moment and find the highest lyric pitch within it. Too, she does this brilliantly in “Terra Inferna,” a poem I also love for the girl and the mare “wild enough / to end everything,” the power and agency within those figures. There’s also so much agency and power in “Once, I Prayed in the Water”–a poem that so beautifully celebrates the speaker’s desire, her autonomy, her sense of eroticism and pleasure and living life to the fullest that leads to that sudden, stunning turn to an elegy for the mother, the burial of the person the speaker once was, and a meditation on how “all things   beautiful & terrible / begin to burn.” I love the tension of the water and the fire in this poem, their yoking together through shine.

Kelly Weber reads “Once, I Prayed in the Water” by Sara Henning

RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?

KW: I’m so thrilled that my first book, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place from Tupelo Press, is now out in the world, and I’ve been busy with readings and events and workshops in support of that release. I’m also excited for my second book, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, coming out this fall with Omnidawn Press. It’s a lot happening at once but I’m so grateful for all of it.

Read more from this interview at our Patreon.

Sara Henning is the author of Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, First Prize in the 2020 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (Passaic County Community College), and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry to the 2019 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. She is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University.

Find her website here.

Purchase her latest collection Terra Incognita here.

Kelly Weber (she/they) is the author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022) and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, winner of the 2022 Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize (forthcoming October 2023). She is the reviews editor for Seneca Review. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in a Best American Poetry Author Spotlight, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southeast Review, Salamander, The Journal, Passages North, Foglifter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives with two rescue cats. Find them on Instagram and Twitter at @KellyWeberPoet

Visit her website here.

Purchase their debut collection We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place here.

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Interview with Athena Nassar, Author of Little Houses

The cover of a book with the illustration of a girl of Egyptian descent with a gray head scarf and dark red lipstick against a black background. The girl's neck transitions into a brick wall which forms part of a house, and there are various pieces of different houses and buildings where her shoulders would be. The title, "Little Houses" is written in tan letters, and the authors name, "Athena Nassar" is written in light gray letters below the tile.

Ahead of the release of her debut full-length poetry collection, Little Houses, Athena Nassar spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Nicole Bethune Winters about her poetic choices, poems that were particularly difficult to write and those that Nassar is most connected to, as well as immigration, colonization, and the influence of Egypt, the [American] South, and Puerto Rico on this collection.

Nicole Bethune Winters: Did the organization of the manuscript into different “houses” come before or after deciding on the book’s title? What was the desired effect of presenting the collection in this way?

Athena Nassar: I had divided the sections into houses before I decided on the title of the collection, but the title fell into place soon after. I frequently return to questions of home and belonging throughout the collection, and after having completed the collection, I realize that I was asking myself whether it is possible to make a home out of the body. These houses function as isolated compartments of the self. Each house has its own identity and its own traumas.

NBW: Can you tell me more about the choices you made in poems like “Coming of Age” and “athena as the Garden of Eden”?

AN: The poem “Coming of Age” was conceived after this one time where my brother and I lost our dog when our parents were away. Although I don’t claim to be much of an “animal person,” the knowledge that my family was counting on me to take care of this living thing for a few hours and I failed was very jarring to me. The harsh enjambment and the lack of punctuation, which results in the sentences running into one another, is supposed to replicate a sort of heaving. In this poem, the speaker is submerged in a river searching for their dog who may have drowned, and by the end of the poem, it’s almost as if the speaker herself becomes this drowning dog gasping for air.

NBW: Speaking of “athena as the Garden of Eden,” there is a series of these “athena as” poems that run throughout the second and fourth houses of the collection. What function did you intend for these poems to serve?

AN: Being that these are persona poems, they are meant to function as a departure or an escape from the speaker’s reality, but in some of these poems, the speaker’s reality still manages to slip through. My poem “athena as princess peach,” where the speaker’s “crown has been mauled by a kitchen blender,” is one poem where this slippage occurs. On the other hand, the speaker in my poem “athena as villanelle” successfully escapes from the imposing patriarchal system and assumes another, more dominant role.

NBW: Capitalization seems to play a role in Little Houses—can you tell me more about the reasons you chose to employ it in some instances and not others? Was there a rule that dictated this throughout the collection or was it poem-specific? AN: There wasn’t necessarily a specific reason why I decided to capitalize some poems and leave other poems lowercase. I made those decisions based on what I thought looked the best on the page. Although, I do make sure to capitalize cities, places, and names most of the time.

NBW: Are there any poems that were particularly difficult to write/finish? Is there a specific poem that you feel most connected to?

AN: I wouldn’t say there were any poems that were difficult to write—there were just some that needed to be put away for a while before I could get at the meat of what I had to say. One scenario I can equate this to is when you have an argument with someone, and then you go home, and you think, well, I could’ve said _ , or _. Occasionally, I needed to return to the argument in order to flesh out, and sometimes rewrite, the poem. My poem “the performance,” for example, was one piece that was put away for a year before it occurred to me that it was a poem about reclaiming my sexuality as a woman of color. Suddenly, the “Hottentot Venus” entered the narrative, and it just clicked.

I am connected to all of these poems, but if I had to choose a few that I am most connected to, they would probably be “athena a s princess peach,” “Georgia bleeds,” “Avareh,” and “so i let you be a canvas.” I wrote “athena as princess peach” as a senior in boarding school, and although it does carry a lighthearted tone, it definitely reflects a time of my life when I was first being introduced to the value of agency, as well as questions like who is given power and who is not. “Georgia bleeds” is a piece that I toiled with for a while, but it evolved into a prose poem that encapsulates my upbringing in the South, as well as my Arab heritage, and it will forever be one of my favorites.

NBW: Does the visual component of your poems play a role in how you format them? If so, what aspects of a piece stand out to you the most, or what do you primarily fixate on while you’re writing?

AN: The visual component of my poems are largely impacted by the subject matter. My poem “ghost girls,” for example, has these caesuras scattered throughout the poem, because the speaker is being carried with the wind. In fact, the speaker is the wind itself. These girls cannot be held or felt, and I depict this in the format of this poem. As far as what I tend to fixate on while I’m writing, I am very conscious of the “flow” of the poem. With each line I add, I usually go back and read the whole poem outloud to myself. The flow of a piece is usually the result of a number of things working simultaneously—alliteration, enjambment, percussive sound, visceral imagery, and the selection of the “best” words. There are a few words in particular that I was drawn to in the process of writing the collection: pour, swallow, body, smoke, and tongue, among others.

NBW: In most of the poems, the speaker writes in first-person, yet in a few, like “Dreams Won’t Feed You Forever,” there is a departure from this. What is the desired impact of this perspective shift?

AN: I would say that the majority of these poems are largely autobiographical, and I frequently assume the role of the speaker, but I chose to create some distance in “Dreams Won’t Feed You Forever,” because this is a poem that focuses on my aunt grieving the loss of my grandmother.

NBW: Relationships appear to be constantly evaluated throughout the collection—where do you see the speaker in regards to their relationships with family, culture, and society?

AN: I am a major homebody. I go home to visit my parents in Georgia every chance I get, and this nostalgia seeps into the voice of the speaker in a lot of these poems. I do love my home and where I was raised, but in poems like “Little Houses” and “Georgia bleeds,” I also reflect on the contempt I have for Georgia’s history and its current political climate. The speaker vacillates between these feelings of nostalgia and contempt throughout the collection, and in most poems, the speaker feels both of these things simultaneously.

NBW: In Little Houses, you touch on immigration and colonization directly in some instances, but more subtly in others. What role did these shifts in address play in the writing of this collection?

AN: My father is an immigrant who was born in Cairo, Egypt. He won his visa in a lottery after being disowned by his mother for marrying my mom, who is not Egyptian or Muslim. My father’s background, him going from being the descendant of pharaohs to being disowned and having to be at the mercy of the US immigration system in order to stay here to study, majorly influenced the statement that I wanted my collection to make. My mother, on the other hand, i half Black and half White. In the South during the 1970s, the Ku Klux Klan burned a six foot cross in my grandparents’ yard, threatening them to leave the town or be killed, because they were a biracial couple. They eventually decided to move to Puerto Rico, and as a result, my mother was raised there. All of these places weigh heavily on my collection—Egypt, the South, and Puerto Rico—because they are such a large part of where I come from and who I am.

NBW: There is an abundance of strong imagery in this collection—yet I noticed a specific reoccurrence of fruit-related images. Was this happenstance, or an intentional thread woven throughout these poems?

AN: I do tend to gravitate towards fruit imagery, I think, because the settings of a lot of these poems are very lush, warm places, and I feel like the fruit of a place is a huge symbol of the place itself. When I was a child, my father would always come back from the grocery store withthese large gallons of mango juice, which he would refer to as “the nectar of Egypt,” and I began to associate mangoes with Egypt and also my ancestry and my culture. Aside from the symbolic nature of fruit, there is also so much that fruit can contribute to a poem’s atmosphere—it can drip, it can tear open, it can stain, and so on.

Order your copy of Little Houses today!

A woman with a medium-dark skin with long dark hair, wearing a black long-sleeve shirt and black pants seated in a black chair, one arm is resting on the back of the chair and the other is draped into her lap, in a gray room with a grayish wood floor.

Athena Nassar, author of Little Houses (Sundress Publications, 2023), is an Egyptian-American poet, essayist, and short story writer from Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, The Missouri Review, The McNeese Review, New Orleans Review, Zone 3, The Los Angeles Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, PANK, and elsewhere.

Nicole Bethune Winters is a poet, writer and multi-faceted artist, though her primary love is working with clay. Her first book of poetry, brackish was published by Finishing Line Press, and her work has appeared in Backlash Journal, Wildroof Journal, and Seaborne Magazine. When she isn’t writing or wheel-throwing, Nicole is likely at the beach, on a trail, climbing, or exploring new landscapes with her dog. She currently resides in Southern California, where she works as a full-time artist from her home studio.