Tag: sundress reads

Sundress Reads: Review of I Feel Fine

Sundress Reads black-and-white logo with a sheep sitting on a stool next to the words "Sundress Reads." The sheep is wearing glasses and holding a cup filled with a hot drink in one hoof and holding an open book in the other.
An image of the cover of I Feel Fine by Olivia Muenz shows a black background with patterns of concentric, cream-colored rings, and a cream-colored circle in the center of the cover.

In her debut poetry collection, I Feel Fine (Switchback Books 2023), Olivia Muenz works in a space between lyric poetry and memoir, chronicling an intimate experience and understanding of neurodivergence, disability, and othering from the world. Muenz began her work on this poetry collection following several months of being bedridden. Her writing reflects this experience via the close and contained style of it, with poems being constructed in stark fragments of text that enmesh the reader in a rhythm of thought that tracks throughout the collection. Within these poems, the reader begins to look at the world from the outside-in, contained within the staccato lyricism of Muenz’s lyricism. 

Muenz’s poems play with both blunt affirmations of presence while in the following breath questioning if that presence is real, mirroring the way that disability and neurodivergence can lead to experiences of challenged identity, and societal dismissal. The four sections of this poetry collection illustrate this undulation between identity and othering, titled as “I’m here,” “But not,” “Or am I,” “Let’s see.” The first section of the collection begins each poem with an affirmation of place, before unfolding into fragmented wonderings:

“Here is the world. We are in this together. The body pulls. In 

toward itself and toward all of us. That is all we need. Am I 

doing this right. Where was I again.” (Muenz 5)

The way in which the writing spirals around itself, struggling for affirmation of place and presence even as it tries to convince itself of presence, draws the reader into the gauzy folds of the persona’s mind in these poems. When Muenz addresses a “we” or “you,” it’s possible she could be addressing the reader, wrapping them closer into this contained world; or, she could be addressing the relationship between the self, the body, and the mind, how within the experience of disability and neurodivergence, this relationship can become a tedious and exhausting dance in a world that demands conformity. Muenz writes: “I pump myself one-handed. I use all my weight. I am so / tired. The whole world is a mirage. Where does this thing end” (21). The wondering about endings and boundaries also speaks to the blurring in addressing “we” and “you,” as the reader becomes entangled with the persona of these poems, drawn further in to these meditations on the self and identity.

Punctuation is deconstructed and reimagined in a way that challenges expectations and lends to the fragmentary quality of the collection. With sentences that stop and start unexpectedly, Muenz creates a web of new meanings for otherwise simple phrases. In this way, the feeling of alienation or othering from the normative world is made richer and almost palpable in the poems of this collection:

“But I am the Big Normate. I am fitting in. Fine I am. Up to my 

ears in normal. I am business. As usual. I am nothing. To see here.” (Muenz 27)

Almost mantra-like in this fragment’s insistence on conformity, the fragmentary nature of the sentences challenges the very conformity that we are trying to be convinced of. This creates a sense of frustration that anyone who identifies as neurodivergent or otherly-abled can understand, navigating a world that often demands things they cannot perform, while also invalidating and disappearing their experiences. Indeed, Muenz touches on this frustration with near breath-taking clarity:

“Should I get

It checked out. Should I bring it up again. The no ones aren’t 

listening. I can’t make it. Louder in here. It is hurting all over.” (28)

With simple stark phrasing such as this, Muenz captures the pain and subsequent fatigue of alienation with a crystalline precision, leaving an ache in the reader’s chest, and a deep recognition for those who understand what it means to be othered in a society that demands conformity and productivity.

The final section of the collection pushes back against the othering and tenuous identity contained within the first sections, calling for a claiming of presence and space even amidst the fragmented pain. Indeed, if the collection is read as a conversation between the self, the mind, and the body, this last section reads as a homecoming to all three. Each poem begins with “let’s,” both a suggestion and an imperative to rejoin something, or someone:

“Let’s give it some room. To breathe. It’s soaking up fine. It’s 

taking the coarsest course. Bring me on home. I won’t stop

 at third.” (Muenz 56)

Through struggling to conform to a society that is all but inhabitable for those who do not fit the narrow definition of normal, Muenz ultimately concludes with a renunciation of that very society. She instead turns toward a radical redefinition of identity, and a claiming of new space and presence that affirms the experience of neurodivergence and disability. Muenz’s poems bear witness to the pain, the beauty, and even the mundanity of a life lived within and between these identities. 

I Feel Fine is available at Switchback Books.

A white woman with short blonde hair is standing in front of a brick wall looking at the camera.

Addie Dodge is a student at Colorado College pursuing a B.A. in psychology with a minor in English. She is a writer currently working as an editor for her college’s literary magazine, Cipher, and is also a clinical intern at a domestic violence shelter in Colorado. She fills her free time with hiking in the mountains and lots of reading. 

Sundress Reads: Review of Silent Letter

On a clear, promising morning, the words of Gail Hanlon’s Silent Letter (Cornerstone Press, 2023) can be slipped into like donning affirmations. Hanlon’s exploration of the intricacies of life caters to every possible reader; newcomers will find themselves “fizzling”, human, “s/he”, searching, or forgotten (4, 23). She arranges figurines and postcards of life into poems that stand by themselves. She also explores key aspects of human life in an earthly and suggestive tone, leaving sparkling possibilities for divinity while admiring the wisdom of laughing birds in an underbrush. Interacting with each of Hanlon’s poems, I feel sure and comfortable in my humility. 

I love the metaphysical questioning of human place and purpose that permeates the poems in Silent Letter— there is something special about the intellectual humility and deference to so many different sources. The voice in her poems searching for answers about the human condition does not do so vainly or expectantly. Rather, her characters and scenes ask each other questions, play in nature, and leave room for interpretation. Hanlon asks, “why do we choose utterance / if the whole world is in flames … I open the window / thinking of a friend’s question / When are you going to live?” (14). In examples like this from “Not Yet Across,” Hanlon’s work drifts languidly, plainly, and obviously towards the searching and the existential. “Why do we choose utterance” is the simplest of questions, touching on a timeless human tendency to fill voids with language. What are we doing here? Why are we speaking? The musing then considers intention: how we can do these things like talk, when we choose to make talk life. I could ask myself when I am going to live a million times over for a million days. But Hanlon does not stop here, nor does she really attempt to find a solution. In “Eight Minute Essay,” the speaker is described as “looking for an answer in the intricate puzzle faces of blue and yellow pansies as I stand in line for the bus” (17). The question they are trying to answer could be what to do with a mortal life and could be any interpersonal anxiety of the day. Either way, it seems flowers can help – and the simplest answers may be found in nature. It is this careful, artful melding of the complex and the quotidian that makes Hanlon’s poems not only stand, but shine.  

The buried themes and questions of Hanlon’s pieces are exposed through precise and deliberate literary devices, rendering each piece an actor in a beautifully orchestrated conversation. In “A Step Nearer to Them,” phrases repeatedly begin with “that” as a relative pronoun, suggesting a preceding phrase that we do not see. The result is that the poem waits, dangling, perhaps ontologically relational. The speaker celebrates: “that I’m still fizzling, shaken, / sugared, and bright even as I am / failing the I-am-not-a-robot test on a regular basis” (4). The use of such adjectives to prove humanity is almost comic, as they seem to describe something like a soda— but they certainly lend to personality and vibrancy, something perhaps artificially tainted but far from robotic monotony. As well as demonstrating strong diction and phrasal choice, Hanlon employs powerful lyric moments in her poems. The final lines of “End Now or Cancel” slow down and change in rhyme scheme, shifting the focus of the piece to the details and the author’s surprise. Lyric moments come in changes of speaker tense, too. In “Running Brush,” Hanlon convinces the reader that “You want to see / your body in front of you. / You want to see it float” (24). There is power in the directness of speaking to an unnamed recipient, because each reader is pulled to adopt the words themselves. I want to see my body in front of me, and to see it float. In this way, Hanlon writes the questions of my mind and places them in front of me, urging their apprehension. 

The poems of Silent Letter are to be enjoyed by each of us. Even in her epistemic humility, Hanlon universalizes story and theme. She does not suggest sureness but allows all kinds of readers to pull their own truth from the pages and apply it to a sister, a brother, or a friend. In “Small Gold Figure,” the speaker admits that they now “cannot think / of anything significant / to say,” and then asks “How to read— / left to right or right to left? / Sunwise or moonwise?” (31). In her appraisal of humanity’s condition, Hanlon does not leave out the curse of time— perhaps the most primary thing to a human. Reconsidering basic functions like what to say and how to read, and the ways these can become more taxing and confusing with age, Hanlon breaks against the shore of a bigger question: what do we do with what we learn? Here an earlier poem echoes again, as does its eternal plea: “when are you going live?”.  

Gail Hanlon’s Silent Letter is available from Cornerstone Press

Isabelle Whittall is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in combined Philosophy and Political Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She co-hosts the radio show Hail! Discordia! on CITR 101.9fm, and is an Editorial Board Member of UBC’s Journal of Philosophical Enquiries.  

Sundress Reads: Review of Maker of Heaven &

The Sundress Reads logo depicts a black and white line drawing of a cartoon sheep sitting on a stool holding a cup of coffee and a book.
The cover of Maker of Heaven & by Jason Myers depicts an abstract piece of art with the top half of the cover being comprised of brown and cream brush strokes, and the bottom half of the cover being comprised of dark and light blue brush strokes.

In Maker of Heaven & (Belle Point Press 2023), Jason Myers invites readers into a rich accounting of our brutal world. He draws out moments of distilled wonder, seeking to savor what can be made sacred while also delving into the wreckage of our humanity. The poems in this collection are suffused with awe, mundanity, and the stark truths of destruction that accompany it all, creating an almost mythic dialectic that allows holy to live alongside horror, sacred to mingle with strange. At its core, Maker of Heaven & is deeply rooted in the sensual world; the collection asks readers to take in the music, tastes, and textures of the poems in a new form of prayer, weaving a fine fabric of hope, joy, and frank sorrow throughout. 

What is most striking in the collection’s opening is Myers’ ability to braid the mundane with a far more expansive reality of our world. The first poem of the collection, “How To Make a Sound,” describes the experience of waiting for a child to be born in such a blunt way that it becomes almost humorous. Myers writes, “one day, after months of frozen dinners & cheap wine / binged series after binged series / a child arrived” (3). In this way, the poem contracts into a mundane moment, before expanding out into something full of awe:

“So, when I held, for the first time,

our son,

what slipped from my mouth was

part cry, part spill of almost verb, a word

like love, insufficient, immeasurable, & perfect.” (Myers, 4)

Myers’ poems breathe, ebbing and flowing between small, insular moments of savor, sorrow, and even boredom, to then expand out into something bordering on miraculous in how it captures distilled emotion. Particularly sound (and inversely silence) returns as Myers touches on music, language, and where they fail us in accounting for what is beautiful, ugly, and in between in this world. Meyers manages to weave it all together through sound and scene in “Maker of Heaven”:

“on a Thursday evening as you press your tired head to the glass of the bus

moving glacierly down Lexington Avenue past M signs

buskers offering their shattered delight to the harmonica’s incessant need,

a memory of the first time your tongue tasted the sugarsalt of inner thigh

astonishes you with gleeful nostalgia” (43)

The mundane becomes something close to miracle in Maker of Heaven &, drawing the reader into intimate moments of sensual memory that both smart and sing with how bittersweet they are.

Memory is also touched through music, drawing on both shared and personal history to bring together a rich and sorrowful accounting of the past. In the poem “On Learning Langston Hughes Wanted His Funeral To End With ‘Do Nothin’ Til You Hear From Me,’” Myers writes that “we all know a sound that knows us, that calls / & claims each moment of our lives / even in death we want a groove” (30). Myers weaves twentieth century soul and jazz music throughout Maker of Heaven &, bearing witness to the violence of racism that continues to rage in America, while at the same time holding the sweet miracle of song, from Robert Johnson and Johnny Hartman to Billie Holiday and Etta James. Music of the past becomes a way to understand the present and the future, in turn transforming the past into a religious text of its own, as Myers poignantly describes in “The Concord of the Strings”:

“But I am burdened

by stories not my own

that tell me what my own stories mean

& a music sticks, & grows, & rages

like trees carrying, through winter’s paucity, 

the violence of spring.” (28)

These lines can’t help but evoke Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” speaking of a violence and oppression that persists today. At the same time, Myers connects this music to his own memories, of records passed down by grandparents and rhythms that have followed him through his life. Myers holds the darkness of history and the intimate pleasure of memory at the same time in this collection, allowing both to exist alongside each other, rather than in spite of each other. 

Amidst the music and movement of this collection, moments of silence, stillness, and observation reveal pure awe in the most minute aspects of life, offering readers hope that there are still sacred things to find in the mundane. In “Eucharist,” Myers writes:

“I want the world in my mouth.

Walnut, avocado, nasturtium.

Icewine, edelweiss, dictionary.

Can you swallow sunset

I’ll try.” (67)

Like a dare or a call to action, Myers implores readers to take in as much of this world as they can, and to hold on tight. Finding the wonder, the horror—finding all of it, holding all of it, and in turn, holding hope. 

Maker of Heaven & is available at Belle Point Press.

Addie Dodge is a student at Colorado College pursuing a B.A. in psychology with a minor in English. She is a writer currently working as an editor for her college’s literary magazine, Cipher, and is also a clinical intern at a domestic violence shelter in Colorado. She fills her freetime with hiking in the mountains and lots of reading. 

Sundress Reads: Review of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility

The Sundress Reads logo depicts a cartoon sheep sitting on a stool holding a mug and a book.
The cover of Anna Laura Reeve's poetry collection Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility depicts a translucent farmhouse set in a field.

In Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press, 2023), Anna Laura Reeve draws readers into a stark landscape of myth-making, at times unflinchingly intimate while at others sweeping and vast. Through her visceral and frank accounting of motherhood and the orbiting discussions of fertility, identity, and mother-children relationships in the modern chaos of our world, Reeve forges a new mythology for mothers that defies all expectations; she acknowledges the rippling, tender underbelly of motherhood, its fears and wonders, its failings and surrenders. A vivid background of the natural world is woven within the poetry collection, providing another plait in this intricate braid of rich imagery and a stark eco-poetics that converses with our changing landscapes. At its heart, this collection feels like a battle cry for women, for mothers, and for holding onto all the wonderful, terrible threads of identity in the midst of perfect obliteration.

The collection opens with “Ars Poetica,” a poem almost confessional in nature, in which Reeve describes waking early in the morning to write before “It must be time / to wake my daughter, make the lunches” (xi). And thus, the split between artist and mother, something Reeve grapples with throughout the collection, begins. Reeve’s poem “Entrapment” speaks poignantly to this again, describing a distaste for the domestic in poetry:

“Reading poetry as a teenager, phrases 

like “my daughter,” “my son,” or “as I fold laundry”

extinguished interest like the smell of shit. The firm thud

of a diaper tossed in the trash

seemed to echo.

“Domestic tranquility” suffocated, like oil

On seawater.” (Reeve 61)

But Reeve challenges such discounting or disavowment of the domestic in her work by weaving her own myths and candor around it, wilding and bearing witness to the vacillating bleakness and brashness of motherhood. 

The first part of her collection opens with “The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale” a contained accounting of the earliest days of motherhood. The poem depicts the immediate aftermath of giving birth with a haunting stillness, power in the silence, and the smallest of details. Instead of a time of unfettered and easy joy, as modern media would often like to portray giving birth, Reeve provides and unflinching account of the pain and fear so often experienced by new mothers, describing how a body that has just given birth is treated “like when you empty your bag into the trash / scooping, shaking” (3) with another line following starkly: “my own body sewn back together with steel / or plastic, still bleeding” (6). Indeed, the domestic world that Reeve illuminates is at times wild in its waves of changing emotions—cresting in moments of despair and frustration and ebbing back in moments of wordless relief. 

As the collection progresses, the contained world of mother and child expands to encompass the Southern Appalachian landscape, with the second section of the collection providing extensive and rich observation of the changing seasons passing over flora and fauna, and the mountains so often returned to in Reeve’s poems. The cyclical changing of the seasons and the vegetation, death and rebirth, parallel Reeve’s exploration of fertility and miscarriage, and the raw hope and devastation that accompanies these cycles. The poem “Trying” spins into an extended metaphor in which reproduction becomes the tending of crops, and a woman’s pelvis becomes the field, another kind of domestic care, laced with a stinging desperation:

“When the farm’s bright February seedlings

Faded pink and purple in the greenhouse, starved

By nutrient-poor potting media, we started over.” (Reeve 28)

Indeed, in this section, the landscape and the body become deeply intertwined, with the conclusion of this section. “For Southern Appalachia” in which Reeve writes, “Blood thickens on the uterine walls for two weeks, then / sheds. The ouroboros belongs to me, and the crow, / cicada, and scoliid wasp” (43). Such lines evoke a melancholy acceptance and even gratitude for the cycle of life and death.

Situated within the realm of the domestic, Reeve defies conceptions of motherhood and its singular identity in a string of poems within the last section of the collection. The “Mad Mother” makes several appearances in the titles of pieces, all of which speak to a similar theme of resistance against the surrendering of all other identities at the feet of motherhood. “The Mad Mother Discovers a Third Way” and “The Mad Mother Joins the Resistance” speak to societal expectations placed upon mothers: “Good mothers take care of everyone else” (Reeve 68). Reeve deals a snarling and triumphant rebuke against these ideals with the repeated words “Defy it” (68), providing a quasi-mantra to mothers with “your work is the real work. The real work is defiance” (69). What Reeve calls for is a return to the self, exultant and sacred, in the face of societal expectations placed upon the good wife, the good mother. 

In “The Mad Mother Envies a Widow” she avows that “the artist who is a mother splits herself in two” (Reeve 81). Here Reeve calls for a restitching, a returning to the self, something that she seems to be moving toward throughout the collection. Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility is a challenge to that split, an accounting of that split in order to make it whole in a new wild and beautiful way.

Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility is available at Belle Point Press

Addie Dodge is a student at Colorado College pursuing a B.A. in psychology with a minor in English. She is a writer currently working as an editor for her college’s literary magazine, Cipher, and is also a clinical intern at a domestic violence shelter in Colorado. She enjoys reading and hiking in the mountains in her free time. 

Sundress Reads: Review of All Hat, No Cattle

“I tell them I love them because I do. Because I can,” (18) says the narrator of Mariah Rigg’s All Hat, No Cattle (Bull City Press, 2023), about a bunch of green onions she has been keeping alive on the sill above her sink. The use of can sparks a question that runs through this collection: what can we love? In six short essays, this chapbook packs a powerful emotional punch, exploring the complexity of love–romantic, familial, one-sided, long distance. Each relationship is presented in an honest and undramatic way, as no relationship is perfect, not even the narrator’s relationship with her green onions. She must leave some behind to build a new life in a different city, yet the memories are preserved and presented with love. They are not tainted by time or emotion. 

Throughout all six essays, Rigg’s narrator navigates her relationship with C (who is addressed by his initial or in the second person). In “Suspended,” the narrator is in love with C, and C is either blissfully unaware or ignorant of this reality as he casually shares stories about an ex-girlfriend. The narrator tries not to imagine this ex being attacked by a goose as she acknowledges that she “only knew he loved her and not me” (Rigg 3). Their relationship is fraught with guessing on the part of the narrator. Though the essay starts with C’s hand on her knee, the narrator “never knew when or if I had the right to touch him” (Rigg 5). This guessing continues in later essays and the constant push-pull in this relationship makes it painfully relatable. 

Rigg weaves beautifully from external to internal landscapes throughout All Hat, No Cattle. The narrator wishes time would slow, and then, “The breeze stopped, the cottonwood seeds stuck in the air, suspended… The breeze resumed and the seeds fell to the water, rushing away” (5). Readers are given listed descriptions, images that stand out and define the moment for the narrator, such as, “The last petals of June’s roses drop through the window’s glass. I smell the honey of the baklava you bought from the store on the corner, the sharp Parmesan you shred over spinach-swirled eggs. Fleetwood Mac is playing” (Rigg 7). Each essay feels like a frozen moment, a snapshot of this love before it rushes away, first to different cities, then to separate lives.

In the second essay, “Gut-Punching,” the narrator’s relationship with C has become sexual. Rigg makes it clear, however, that their bond goes beyond sex, acting as a source of comfort and familiarity. Rigg writes, “You stand behind me. My head rests on your thighs, the water flowing from you to me, warmed twice over by the heater and your body. It’s dirty, but it can’t be worse than our own piss, which we lay in for months, curled inside our mothers” (6). There is deep intimacy in this moment and yet, distance still lingers. C’s feelings, and at times, the narrator’s, remain a mystery. After sex, the narrator, addressing C, explains, “your face whispering I love you even as your mouth says That was fun. I wish I could blame you, but neither of us has learned how to say what we feel” (Rigg 7). Such withholding is mirrored in Rigg’s writing, as the emotions are not laid out explicitly. The writing does not tell us how the characters feel. Instead, it lets us feel it.

Memories of the narrator’s father are braided through scenes with C in the essays “Linger” and “All Hat, No Cattle.” In the latter, Rigg writes, “Like me, here and in love with C, who’s so much like Dad. Like Dad, going to rehab for coke, then alcohol, only to get addicted to Bikram yoga” (14). There is an added layer of complexity to the familiarity that the narrator experiences with C. In “All Hat, No Cattle,” C drives around his new town, Lubbock, TX, drinking a beer and shouting out to a neighboring car. The narrator remembers drives with her father before he went to rehab. They would yell out the car window and startle pedestrians. Rigg avoids judgment on behalf of the narrator for the behaviors of these characters. They are presented, like the scenery, matter of factly.

The chapbook comes to a close as the relationship with C does. In the final essay, “Blessings,” the narrator is “rootless without C” (17) and therefore holding on to what she can: her green onions, a city that doesn’t suit her, her memories, etc. Here Rigg beautifully depicts our human need to attach to something. Though the onions have given their blessing, the narrator has not yet left Knoxville; she instead feels like she is drowning in the weight of the place. Though we readers aren’t directly told what has happened with C, the onions seem to say it all, “Be free, they tell me. Go forth, somewhere far” (Rigg 18). We can only assume C has done the same: set her free. 

So often the messaging around an ended relationship is to throw it out. Burn the photos. Move on. Paint the ex as a villain. The message of this collection is much more human, much more true. All Hat, No Cattle argues for honoring the relationship, the love, and the person. Rigg writes, “The green onions above my windowsill have become part of me through how they’ve nourished me. And though we will no longer be together, I will be grateful for that” (19). If the question of this collection is what can we love, the answer is whatever we please. Love cannot be taken from us when the relationship is. The nourishment stays. We can be grateful for that. 

All Hat, No Cattle is available at Bull City Press

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.

Sundress Reads: Review of Fever

Sundress Reads black-and-white logo with a sheep sitting on a stool next to the words "Sundress Reads." The sheep is wearing glasses and holding a cup filled with a hot drink in one hoof and holding an open book in the other.
The woods here are tinted in a turquoise color. The tree barks have specks of green on them. There is two red spikes peeking out from the left side and the bottom right corner. "Fever" is in the middle and below that is the author's name "Shilo Niziolek."

Part bisexual awakening, part chronic illness memoir, Fever by Shilo Niziolek delivers a brutal, heartfelt recounting of the mostly-inner life of a queer woman whose body continuously betrays her. Told in untitled, fragmented vignettes, the book spans decades, reflecting on Niziolek’s past abusive relationship, addictions, her current partner, and her chronic health conditions.

Before the narrative begins, Niziolek greets readers with the definitions of two medical terms, one being “vulvar vestibulitis: a neuro-inflammatory condition in the vestibule, or opening of the vagina, in which inflammation starts from any number of a long list of reasons. This inflammation can cause severe pain during intercourse.” Upon seeing the definition, I was immediately excited to read this book. As a woman who also suffers from chronic vulvar pain, I was eager to hear another person’s experience of the challenges that appear when sex hurts. To my knowledge, the last non-medical publication about vulvodynia (an umbrella term for chronic vulvovaginal pain) is a book called The Camera My Mother Gave Me, written by Susanna Kaysen, who is better known for writing Girl, Interrupted. By simply writing this book, Niziolek contributes to a much-needed dialogue for a community of women that is much larger than one might think, with 16% of women in the U.S. suffering from vulvodynia at some point in their lives.

In a stream-of-consciousness style, Niziolek writes, “I wonder what it’s like to have a sexual body, not just a sexual being trapped inside an unsexual body (14). I felt seen when I read this, both jealous and grateful that this writer found such a succinct way to describe what many women go through when their bodies start saying no, when their minds still want to say yes.

After having vulvodynia for so many years, Niziolek rarely desires physical touch from her partner, which is a common occurrence for women who experience chronic vulvar pain. (Imagine that every time you eat a donut, you get punched in the face—you’re probably going to stop craving donuts at some point.) Thus, instead of moments of in-real-life sexual desire, this book is filled with desirous dreams. It’s almost like a dream journal—but forget the famous Henry James quote, “Tell a dream, lose a reader.” Niziolek poetically dissects her dreams and relates them to her real life, assigning them meaning and pulling in the reader.  

Early on, she questions her dreams and their potency, writing “What kind of woman have I grown to be, who only dreams about bodies on bodies?” (25). After journeying through her dream realms on the page, it seems she arrives at an answer, referring to her dreams as her “double-life, cheating on my waking life with this terrifying and exciting and vibrant and cruel other life” (162). For Niziolek, dreaming is not just playing in the imaginary, but a survival tactic—a brief escape from a bodily existence rooted in illness. The dreams are placed among other non-linear vignettes of her life, both real and imagined; the fragmented style serves as a reflection of the divide between her mind and her body.

At Niziolek’s MFA graduation ceremony, a professor acknowledges her writing, saying, “writing cannot restore the female body, broken into parts, the body in decline, but…writing can regain the body, the words on the page become their own body” (19). Like her dreams, the very act of writing this book is another coping mechanism: a space where she can question her sexuality and attend to every desire that pops up, even the most fleeting. In this way, the words on the page come alive, allowing Niziolek to carry out a version of her life in which she is not chronically ill. Like her dreams, she can love whomever she wants, however she wants, on these pages.

Chronic illness—especially invisible illnesses—can be isolating and lonely. In these pages, Niziolek builds a support system—and not just for herself. This is a must read for any person living with chronic pain, and especially for those living with chronic vulvar pain. It’s a great chance to step away from the medicalization of our bodies and to turn inward, meditating on how this condition affects our innermost being and finding ways to live and love around it.

Fever is available at Querencia Press.

Heather Domenicis (she/her) is an Upper Manhattan based writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from The New School and her words appear or are forthcoming in Hobart, JAKE, [sub]liminal, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Born in a jail, she is writing a memoir about all that comes with that. You can follow her on Instagram @13heatherlynn1.

Sundress Reads: Review of Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family Review

Stephanie Sauer’s Almonds are Members of the Peach Family (Noemi Press, 2019) is a masterful multimedia project that weaves together prose and craftsmanship, bringing light to buried historical narratives. While this is her second traditional prose book, Sauer also has multiple art books that demonstrate her experience with a wide variety of mediums, such as quilting, archiving other’s works, and stitching, specifically of clothing. Her writing is skillful, untangling her family’s history, but it merely accompanies the quilt she crafts throughout the book, the true star of the show. This quilt serves as a work of healing as she begins to reconcile the history all around her. 

From the first paragraph, Sauer establishes the idea of quilting as suture, a word typically used for stitches used to hold a wound together. Her first chapter, “Patchwork” opens with pictures of the messy back stitching of something Sauer has sewed. Counterposing these images, Sauer moves readers to Rio, one of the many places the author has lived through her travels. She describes the city as hungry, its sharp mouths constantly searching for bones and blood. She writes, “I bump into one on the way to buy groceries and it slices my arm. I hold the cut with my opposing hand and an incision form from the inside of my skin, letting air in but no blood out” (Sauer 4). Sauer uses suture here to refer to her attempts to find healing via crafting. 

She returns to the concept again on page 103, acknowledging that she can not be the first woman to make this connection. Sauer always makes sure to credit those who came before, saying, “Education, I find, has less to do with knowing things and more to do with the crafting and recrafting of oneself” (Sauer 104). She references Dr. Gladys-Marie Fy’s Preface to Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Ante-Bellum South, which documents how slave women would quilt their diaries due to being denied traditional educations.

As a whole, Almonds are Members of the Peach Family pulls historical vignettes through time. Sauer carefully intertwines the story of her grandparents with her own life. Their lives mostly exist in Nevada County, California, where readers are introduced to the version of her grandmother, or Billimae, that Sauer is most familiar with—the caretaker: “She ladles the brine into a bowl and serves it with oyster crackers. She spreads the heart with a butter knife on toast and tells the child to eat, to help herself to more” (Sauer 8). Sauer’s writing peels back these small, tender moments for readers to reveal their quiet intimacy. 

The descriptions are transparently honest, transitioning from the above heart-wrenching moment of connection between a younger Sauer and her grandmother, to her grandmother’s description of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband. The transition is jarring, laying out her Grandpa’s veteran status and referencing a friend once saying, “‘Where is my purple heart? My father got one in Vietnam, but what about the rest of us who still have to fight the war he brought back home?’” (Sauer 9). The audience isn’t spared her grandparents’ suffering, and by the end of the section readers are primed to see Sauer coping by way of the sound of her sewing machine. 

The collection expands as it continues, becoming less interdisciplinary and more plain prose as Sauer tells Billimae’s tale. Here, the writing is truly given a chance to breathe comfortably, showcasing every side of Billimae, even the uglier ones. “It is family shorthand to call Grandma crazy. The screaming, the secrets, the lies, the sneaking of sweet things into hidden places all over the house, into her mouth. The cussing at and blaming of Grandpa for everything,” Sauer explains (59). The family villainizes this woman in her old age, some waving away any mention of domestic abuse towards her as fabricated. Sauer writes, “Now, Grandma is crazy because calling her this is easier on us. Pinning it on the woman excuses our own complicity in the normalizing of her pain” (59). She criticizes this simplification of everything her grandmother is, recognizing the depth in her past that has shaped her into who she is now. 

Sauer is constantly reckoning with her history and family lineage, crafting and writing in an attempt to find some kind of answer. Between stories, readers watch her turn “pulp into pages… stitch linen thread between their creases and bind them to one another” (Sauer 71). Her language around the act is gorgeous, finding imagery in the household chores she idolizes through her words, reclaiming work that patriarchal society deems less than. For example, “I haul up bones from the river and sit, listen to the screaming left in them. I hold up each bone to the light, wipe it clean of debris, realign it back into its skeletal form” (Sauer 146). While her word choice turns morbid at points, it only adds to the passion behind her work and her desire to make something of it all.

Things do not end for Sauer here. After uncovering the bones from the graveyard, one can never truly be the same. Seams weaken over time, and eventually they’ll need to be reinforced: “I wake up late (6:50am), read for a few hours. I make coffee, toast a slice of bread, scrub the sink with borax, shoo away ants, re-hang the quilt, write in my slip, alternate between pushing back and suturing a heartache” (Sauer 149). In the face of it all, though, what Sauer has to do, and what we all have to do, is keep on living. 

Almonds are Members of the Peach Family is available from Noemi Press

Izzy Astuto (he/they) is a writer majoring in Creative Writing at Emerson College, with a specific interest in screenwriting. When not in Boston for college, they live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His work has previously been published by Hearth and Coffin, Sage Cigarettes, and Renesme Literary, amongst others. He currently works as an intern for Sundress Publications, and a reader for journals such as hand picked poetry, PRISM international, and Alien Magazine. You can find more of their work on their website, at https://izzyastuto.weebly.com/. Their Instagram is izzyastuto2.0 and Twitter is adivine_tragedy. 

Sundress Reads: Review of Drive

Based on its title, I had assumed Elaine Sexton’s collection, Drive (Grid Books, 2022), would take me on a journey, but I hadn’t quite expected the way its individual poems would move me through time and space—tangible and intangible, emotional and physical landscapes. Take, for example, the opening poem, which appears with no title:

The most beautiful thing about my car is the 

beach, and the most beautiful thing about the 

beach is watercolor, and the most beautiful 

thing about water is the word, and the most 

beautiful thing about the word is pigment, 

and the most beautiful thing about pigment 

is the soil, and the most beautiful thing about 

soil is the earth, and the most beautiful thing 

about the earth is the sea, and the most beau-

tiful thing about the sea is the drive. (Sexton 11)

This poem starts with the car and the beach and ends with the sea and the drive. The cyclical movement calls to mind the feeling of going out for a trip, taking in the scenery before returning home to where you started. “A Thing or Two,” starts with a leaf and ends with the tree. “Predator / Bait,” starts with a splash and ends with a splash. These poems travel but don’t forget where they came from. The speaker travels as well, from Boston to Rome, from the sea to the sky, from the past to the future. 

Sexton’s poems feel like driving with the windows down on a spring day. The language, crisp and gentle, takes its time. Coupled with the poems’ short lines, some just a word or two, these poems slowed me down. They are not destination focused; they invited me to enjoy the ride. 

As a person who travels full time and spends many days behind the wheel, I felt a camaraderie with the speaker of these poems. Reading them felt like trading stories with a new friend at a rest stop. I too have traveled through the “dead zones / in America / where no one lives / and satellites turn a deaf ear … in one of those red states / shaped like a box” (Sexton 69). I know the ups and downs of a road trip, “the soaring, the breakdown, jumpstarts, the brand new, and old reliable” (Sexton 20). These images invite in all those who are drawn to the road, those who might be caught “Downshifting for the view” (Sexton 23), those who roll down their windows, as Sexton does, to let “The dead / ends of my hair / dragged through the air, / pull their roots / alive” (26). And when Sexton writes, “she is free not to be / where she’s expected to go” (17), my heart flips with recognition. 

Despite the romantic descriptions of a good drive, Drive is not all light and breezy. Early on, Sexton introduces the prominent theme of death. The second poem, “This,” ends with: “Everything is about / gravity, the grave / pulling / for us. Each day / it starts with a bark / calling our name” (Sexton 15). While awareness of a looming mortality lingers throughout the early section, I explicitly felt the impact of an early loss in the poem “Ignition.” Sexton writes, 

I remember my hand

on the car’s smooth blue

lining, the Rambler’s

door as it opened

to the damp grass

of the lawn

to the new house.

I was three

close to four

years old, my father,

newly dead

and my mother

just learning

to drive.” ( 27) 

Here, driving is not about freedom or escape. Driving is about survival. Similarly, the poem, “Drive” explains, “We are old, / old enough, / to equate mobility / with independence” (Sexton 19). I began to understand more intimately the deeper role driving has played in the speaker’s life.

Just as a car eventually begins to break down with use, so do our human bodies. In “Self-Portrait: Between the Car and the Sea,” Sexton writes, “the engine strains in first gear the way on foot my body climbing the last few steps does … How long will these parts last?” (23). The speaker grapples with her own mortality, her own body slowing down with age. This grappling, though, is not morose or despondent. The speaker matter-of-factly tracks these changes. In the poem, “Run,” the speaker begins to pick up the pace on a walk “until a clicking / reminds me that fuel / which is matter / which is mind / which is idea / is not endless / and only as fertile / as the working / brain / allows— / the brain we take / for granted / which could fail / at any time” (21). Though many of these poems address mortality, they seem to argue for presence and appreciation for what is. There is a sense that we are meant to grasp the moment we are in, rather than worry about the future.

I mention above that these poems feel like a spring day, and they do in that they are refreshing in their honesty. They gave me room to breathe. They are not, however, necessarily all happy or full of new hope. One of my favorite poems in the collection, “Self as Hypotaxis,” points to this nuance: “I am happier than I was / when spring equaled death, / so many wakes, so many silences, / equal and un-equal. Spring / sometimes operates / in opposition / to her contract with the earth, and / is not always the birth / of something good” (Sexton 80). These poems are full of life, but they are also full of death. They do not shy away from the truth of our human experience.


Drive is available from Grid Books

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.

Sundress Reads: Review of Everybody’s Favorite Hoe & Then Some

The book cover for Everybody's Favorite Hoe & Then Some. The background includes pink sunset clouds in the top right corner. In the bottom left corner sits a picture of a full moon. Layered over top is an astronaut. a pigeon, a stack of numbered JENGA blocks, and a retro-style razor. On top of the clouds floats two condom packets, one red, and one dark navy. An illustrated pomegranate sits in the top left corner.

“I think I am ready for a rim job” (Vine 1)—the opening line slams into readers. Jade Vine (it/its) pulls no punches in Everybody’s Favorite Hoe & Then Some (Ginger Bug Press, 2023). On the surface, both the title of the collection and the introductory stanzas can be viewed as salacious and intentionally inappropriate. Western societal norms have historically framed sex, especially queer love and sensuality, as taboo, dirty, and heretical. Vine, a queer, transgender/agender anarchist, aims to disrupt the status quo and embrace love, sex, and fluidity through its writings.

Everybody’s Favorite Hoe & Then Some goes beyond presenting the notions of kinky intimacies. It examines the human condition in the way of comfortability and real, tangible tenderness. In the same opening poem, “hmu for anal play regular play plain old loving,” the speaker reflects on the pure love and happiness of their relationship. The relationship, the bond, is deeper than sexual pursuits. It’s about closeness and the expectation of simple intimacy between people in love.  

Sex, in this context, is a vessel for love. No matter how sex-positive Generation Z presents itself, the undercurrents of judgment and shame still flow through our conversations. This generation is still petrified of thoughts of sex. We cower away from them until they nestle behind our ribcage as a festering hurt. The way sex is communicated in our lives leaves room for humiliation. But, as Vine asserts, there is nothing perverse about love, as long as it is expressed safely and consensually. 

Vine isn’t afraid of rawness. Vine loves unabashedly and without shame. It writes with a cadence stemming from unfiltered consciousness. The traditional narrative structure is abandoned for an effusive way of expression. The collection is reminiscent of a FaceTime call with a close friend rather than a poet miles away from the audience. Reading this book means stepping inside of Vine’s mind and, instead of intruding, you are welcomed into its innermost thoughts. 

Everybody’s Favorite Hoe & Then Some is not just a stream of randomized thoughts or the mechanisms of a sex-obsessed author. There’s relatability in its quick pace, which mimics racing thoughts and the gathering of sensibilities. The book conveys a passion that most people are afraid to articulate, yet exists inside of all of us: romantic, sexual, or, an artistic and fraying blend of both. Vine leaves the audience to decide. 

In “everybody is my love interest and i’m interested,” the reader is forced into a sense of isolation. The speaker can only yearn from afar, yielding their emotions to another person across the room. They imagine an entire life together, carve out a space in the universe for them and this other person to exist freely and entirely. Vine writes:

“i let the oranges full with their disgusting pulp fall where they fall

  i catch persimmons & ur glance in the break time 

when you look away i admire ur shadow’s form so burly and so fragile

  it could break if i stepped on it”  (Vine 1-4).

It has become their thoughts. They’re reminded of their time of longing, of vying for the attention of someone so close they felt galaxies away. It’s lust. It’s love. It’s the freedom that comes with imagination. They live out their entire life with this person in a matter of seconds. 

Moreover, Vine collects snippets of humanity in its poems. Love is all-consuming. It sears you from the inside out, leaving not even a husk behind. Vine encapsulates longing, loss, and a sense of desperation in its work. The overwhelming desire to belong to someone. As an equal. As a lover.  

“oh god, i accidentally cut my pussy trying to shave it” introduces a new kind of melancholy. There’s solitude from inside the speaker’s body. Vine writes: 

“my lashes don’t curl up the way my toes do

  every boy i have brought home smelled like cigarettes & borrowed time

  all my beautiful dresses are borrowed from my more beautiful mother” (Vine 7-9).

No doubt this is a genderqueer/trans allegory, which I acknowledge I am ill-equipped to effectively comment on. How they interact with the world and themselves is revealed through longer lines, replacing the rushing motions of their mind.

Everybody’s Favorite Hoe & Then Some follows a speaker through the dizzying tale of lust and love, and what it feels like to be completely entranced and bewitched. Vine’s poetry is brazen in its queerness and kinkiness. Love should not be hidden behind hushed whispers and critical glances. Queer love should be celebrated in the public eye.

Everybody’s Favorite Hoe & Then Some is available for pre-order from Ginger Bug Press

K Slade (she/her) is a Black gothic and speculative fiction writer pursuing a BS in Digital Journalism and a Japanese minor at Appalachian State University. She currently serves as Visual Managing Editor for The Appalachian, her collegiate newspaper, and specializes in multimedia journalism. Horror media deeply inspired her love for the craft and in the future, K wants to write a script for a horror game. After undergrad, she hopes to move to New York and pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. 

Sundress Reads: Review of Glass Essays

Sundress Reads black-and-white logo with a sheep sitting on a stool next to the words "Sundress Reads." The sheep is wearing glasses and holding a cup filled with a hot drink in one hoof and holding an open book in the other.
Cover of J.A. Bernstein's Glass Essays. Stormy blue, black, and white watercolors with a grown up spinning a child in a dress around by the arms. The title is at the top in clear block letters and the author's name is at the bottom.

J.A. Bernstein’s Glass Essays (Variant Lit, 2023) centers on a man’s experience in the liminal spaces between soldier-hood and parenthood.

This short essay collection opens with a brief two-page vignette recounting a time when the speaker’s wife bough overpriced watercress at a farmer’s market. The speaker then recalls the Oxford English Dictionary page for watercress, writing, “what a study in contrasts: water and cress; soothing and pain, as it were” (Bernstein 1). Thus begins a meandering thirty pages. Flashing between sweet moments of fatherhood and uncomfortable memories of life or death conflicts, the collection is its own study of moments of soothing and moments of pain.

In the essay “In the Lake, Before Dark,” a Jewish-American foreign volunteer in the Israeli Army describes the world around him in which he is deeply uncomfortable, in which fellow soldiers share explicit videos of women performing sex acts and brag about how many “Arabs” they’ve “gotten” (read: shot or killed) over McDonald’s burgers. In the same essay, fifteen years later, the speaker sits at his kitchen table while his toddler daughter eats breakfast. When her spoon hits the floor, the “discordant clanging” reminds him of the very American-aid-supplied .50-caliber rifles he himself used to fire (Bernstein 4). The reader is transported to the world of armed conflict with the speaker. Just two lines later, separated by a roman numeral, we are with the speaker and his toddler wading naked into a lake somewhere in Wisconsin, his wife looking upon them lovingly. These echoes of war contrasted with what would otherwise be normal, happy parenting moments resound throughout the entire collection.

As the speaker continues meditating on mortality, a new collective trauma unfolds on the page: the COVID-19 pandemic. In the essay “Bug,” which takes place early in the pandemic, he reflects on the fleetingness of childhood memories with his oldest daughter, now three. “‘I’ll always remember you,’ she says. ‘And I’ll always remember this, too,'” he says back (Bernstein 20). Again, speaker finds that performing fatherhood is a welcome distraction to the tragedies he’s hearing on the news. As a reader, I find this essay extra eerie; I know that the pandemic in Italy he only hears of on the news will soon become a reality in his own family’s life too. Thinking of the news, he says, “I remember how desolate the world is, and uncertain and afraid, and I fixate now on [my daughter’s] eyes: the way they almost glow there, so quiet and amused, so contented with the world, and alive” (Bernstein 20). Here, the speaker juxtaposes parenthood, the impending pandemic, and the passing of time so fluidly that it reads with ease. There are no lead pens here, rather a light airiness to the writing in stark contrast to the heavy subjects dissected and examined.

Meditations on the passage of time recur throughout these essays, in part thanks to their structure and placement. Time goes back and forth, ranging from 1984 to 2021. Not every essay is denoted with time, though. In this way, Bernstein potentially lets readers get lost, or perhaps, makes them work harder while reading.

The collection opens with an epigraph from its namesake, Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay:

            It is dawn.
            They are leaving Dover for France.
            My father on the far left is the tallest airman,

            with his collar up,
            one eyebrow at an angle.
            The shadowless light makes him look immortal,

            for all the world like someone who will not weep again.

Here, Carson describes her father as only an airman who is immortal, someone who will never cry. But the speaker in these essays is not immortal, noting that time and time again. He is certainly not someone who holds in his feelings; he pours his emotions onto the pages in this collection. Bernstein’s vulnerability on the page pushes back against Carson’s idea of a hardened soldier, as he shows us that there are other kinds of soldiers too: softer ones who feel conflicted about their violent actions, love for their families, and anxieties about the past, present, and future.

Glass Essays is available for purchase at Variant Literature.

Heather Domenicis (she/her) is an Upper Manhattan based writer and editor moonlighting at a tech startup. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from The New School and her words appear in Hobart, JAKE, and [sub]liminal. Born in a jail, she is writing a memoir about all that comes with that. You can follow her on Instagram @13heatherlynn1.