Month: November 2017

WEEKLY WRITING ROUND-UP: NOVEMBER 30, 2017

With “Best of 2017” lists around the corner–and many already published–a number of people have rightfully been noting the absences that appear time and time again. Book lists without poetry, poetry lists without Black or Latinx authors, and, of course, the forgetting of the small and micro presses are far too common. We can’t all read everything nor do we have to–my own roundups are often heavier in poetry and essays than fiction–but I’d like to open this week’s post with an invitation to reflect upon where we get our reading materials and how we can expand further.

I spent the time off last week curling up and thinking with a number of pieces, including:

Poetry

Things I Will Probably Never Say To My Imagined Child by Momina Mela: “Be an empty / parking lot at night. Whole into dumb a nothing, my blue-glass / smithereen.”

One Poem by Layli Long Soldier: “The Dakota people were starving. / The Dakota people starved. / In the preceding sentence, the word “starved” does not need italics for emphasis.”

Orphic by Jonathan Duckworth: “& wherever Orpheus’s head is, he will / pause mid-song, to smile & lick his lips / with their sweet residue of antifreeze”

CATALOG OF INFIRM COCOONS by Rodney Gomez: “I lose the mechanism /             of belief / as a priest drapes /             a thundercloud over your mouth”

Poetry by Chelsea Bodnar: “Who needs a word / besides the certainty that when a thing is bad you burn it down, your body or the world.”

Fiction

Missed Turn by Christopher Iacono: “At the cemetery, he removed his baseball cap and held it in front of his waist. He didn’t pray. He gazed at the book and apple engraved on Amelia Walker’s gravestone while the sun was burning his balding crown.”

Essays

Alt Lit and Rape Culture – This Will l Now Sing Deftly by Kia Groom: “Look, write about your cock. I don’t care. I’m sure it’s really great, and you probably have a lot to say about it. Shine on, you crazy diamond. But when those dick-poems migrate into the realm of the muse, when they become not just poems about your body, but poems about my body too—or about the nebulous body of the feminine “you,” with whom I am forced to identify—then, then I have a problem.”

Stephanie Kaylor in based in upstate New York and is currently a MA student in Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at European Graduate School. She holds a MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University at Albany and is Managing Editor for Five:2:One Magazine and Reviews Editor for Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Personal Science by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Homo narrans (transplant)

Now that mine has gone bad I am glad for the new heart that departed
from one body, was held in hands and lowered into the walls of my
sunless cradle never meant to feel air then sealed with a scar I worry
some about the scar, if the sutures are sloppy, if the surgeon will fall asleep
but to protect the new heart from a lymphatic counterattack the surgeon
wraps the heart in a papier-mâché of dollar bills to be washed away by the
currents of blood over the years until just the red heart remains happy to
be alive until I am happy to be awake and alive and so so rich

This selection comes from the collection Personal Science, available from Tupelo Press. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

In addition to Personal Science (Tupelo Press), Lillian-Yvonne Bertram  is the author of a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), the chapbook cutthroat glamours (Phantom Books), But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise (Red Hen Press), chosen by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award, and Grand Dessein, an artist book available from Container. Lillian-Yvonne teaches in the MFA program at UMASS Boston.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and three chapbooks, most recently MINE (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming 2017). Their work has appeared in such places as cream city review, Cloud Rodeo, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an assistant editor for Cider Press Review, and the monster maker behind What Is Reality Plushies. Find them at mxmack.com.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Personal Science by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Music for monsters: a curtal sonnet
Though possessing no skill
I grew a horn from my head. Say
despite himself every beloved boy
goldens properly. I reach for his
soft metal to make it a rock star
but in me he grew who’s that,
praxis & frisson. The meridian
automatic in my clench, my thrills.
It may well be real. Suddenly
from my every layer
horns grew themselves.

This selection comes from the collection Personal Science, available from Tupelo Press. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

In addition to Personal Science (Tupelo Press), Lillian-Yvonne Bertram  is the author of a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), the chapbook cutthroat glamours (Phantom Books), But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise (Red Hen Press), chosen by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award, and Grand Dessein, an artist book available from Container. Lillian-Yvonne teaches in the MFA program at UMASS Boston.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and three chapbooks, most recently MINE (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming 2017). Their work has appeared in such places as cream city review, Cloud Rodeo, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an assistant editor for Cider Press Review, and the monster maker behind What Is Reality Plushies. Find them at mxmack.com.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Personal Science by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

The gunslinger neuron
Everyone should get in touch with their inner fate

of snow afflicted by a bad case of the doldrums.

Reader, I would not live in a powderless tree: If I could

I would align myself with the powerscape.

At times I practice being sad in the mirror.

I practice a blister. My murder face.

Of what I remind myself I am not sure.

Some calypso in the distance.

Beakers of candid morning.

A snow cannot be a lie.

This selection comes from the collection Personal Science, available from Tupelo Press. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

In addition to Personal Science (Tupelo Press), Lillian-Yvonne Bertram  is the author of a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), the chapbook cutthroat glamours (Phantom Books), But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise (Red Hen Press), chosen by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award, and Grand Dessein, an artist book available from Container. Lillian-Yvonne teaches in the MFA program at UMASS Boston.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and three chapbooks, most recently MINE (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming 2017). Their work has appeared in such places as cream city review, Cloud Rodeo, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an assistant editor for Cider Press Review, and the monster maker behind What Is Reality Plushies. Find them at mxmack.com.

SAFTA Presents the December Installment of the Reading Series

SAFTA

Sundress Academy for the Arts December Reading Series

The Sundress Reading Series is excited to welcome Ivelisse Rodriguez, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, and Tom C. Hunley for the December installment of our reading series! The event will take place on Sunday, December 3rd, 2-4 p.m. at Hexagon Brewing Co.

Ivelisse 2

Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Rodriguez grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in English from Columbia University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her short story collection, Love War Stories, is forthcoming from The Feminist Press in summer 2018. Her fiction chapbook The Belindas was published in 2017. She has also published fiction in All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, Obsidian, Label Me Latina/o, Kweli, the Boston Review, the Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), and other publications. She is the founder and editor of an interview series, published in Centro Voices, the e-magazine of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers in order to highlight the current status and the continuity of a Puerto Rican literary tradition from the continental US that spans over a century. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She is currently working on the novel ‘The Last Salsa Singer’ about 70s era salsa musicians in Puerto Rico.


Caitlin Hamilton Summie, photo by Colin Summie
Caitlin Hamilton Summie earned an MFA with Distinction from Colorado State University, and her short stories have been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Wisconsin Review, Puerto del Sol, Mud Season Review, Hypertext Magazine, South85 Journal, Long Story, Short, and more. Her first book, a short story collection called TO LAY TO REST OUR GHOSTS, was published in August by Fomite to excellent reviews nationwide. Most recently her poetry was published in The Literary Nest. She spent many years in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado before settling with her family in Knoxville, Tennessee. She co-owns the book marketing firm, Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, founded in 2003. Find her online at caitlinhamiltonsummie.com.

TomHunley

Tom C. Hunley is a professor in the MFA/BA Creative Writing programs at Western Kentucky University, the director of Steel Toe Books, and the lead singer/guitarist for Night of the Living Dead Poets Society. His sixth full-length poetry collection, Here Lies, is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. He has also authored six chapbooks and two scholarly books. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Alexandria Peary, of Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). Over 400 of his poems have appeared in journals such as 5 AM, Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review,Exquisite Corpse, Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, New York Quarterly, North American Review, River Styx, Smartish Pace, Southern Indiana Review, The Pinch, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Writer, and Zone 3. Garrison Keillor has read several of Tom’s poems on The Writer’s Almanac.

The Sundress Reading Series is free and open to the public!

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Personal Science by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Homo narrans (turkey)

A rabbit is lying on the ground beneath a bush, grooming itself. I look again
& next to the rabbit lies a fox. The two appear to be talking. The fox looks over
its shoulder at me, as if to say, or it does say, look, I’m not going to do anything.

Behind us comes a large turkey & as we walk away from the turkey, the turkey
begins to hurry up. The turkey’s pace frightens me. All attempts to shoo the
turkey away are failing, & now the turkey makes like the turkey wants to bite. I
try to push the turkey away again, this time harder, but I worry about hurting
the turkey & I find I cannot harm an animal I do not understand.

Now it seems us or the turkey. I do not know who throws the first stone. I
give him my stone to throw but under the condition he does not throw
it directly at the turkey’s head. I turn my back and walk out of the grove.
What happens next I cannot say.

This selection comes from the collection Personal Science, available from Tupelo Press. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

In addition to Personal Science (Tupelo Press), Lillian-Yvonne Bertram  is the author of a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), the chapbook cutthroat glamours (Phantom Books), But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise (Red Hen Press), chosen by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award, and Grand Dessein, an artist book available from Container. Lillian-Yvonne teaches in the MFA program at UMASS Boston.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and three chapbooks, most recently MINE (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming 2017). Their work has appeared in such places as cream city review, Cloud Rodeo, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an assistant editor for Cider Press Review, and the monster maker behind What Is Reality Plushies. Find them at mxmack.com.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Easy Body by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

Did you know that beauty comes the death of the
world, a herald of the end? The sky that glows, in colors
both explosive and womanly, is in rapture. The warm
waters rich with death from across the hierarchy that we
swim in will flood our cities soon.

A rose fell victim to the devil’s flattery and asked to be
made useful and was turned into a cabbage.

My beauty is a weapon.

And besides, the devil is a fuckboy supreme,

patriarchy’s very own icy dicked independent contractor.

This selection comes from the collection The Easy Body, available from Timeless, Infinite Light. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist who works within and between language and the visual. Raised east of the Los Angeles River, they live in San Francisco.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and three chapbooks, most recently MINE (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming 2017). Their work has appeared in such places as cream city review, Cloud Rodeo, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an assistant editor for Cider Press Review, and the monster maker behind What Is Reality Plushies. Find them at mxmack.com.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Easy Body by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

Some things I need you to know before we proceed:

The dictator of the small country fashionable leftists
seem to know enough about to try to explain to me was
assassinated by a poet. In this country, the most noble
thing to be, besides a volcano or a lake, is a poet.

There is a lake in this country with freshwater sharks.

As a child, I was afraid to swim in this lake for fear of being
turned into a shark maiden, this country’s version of a
selkie. This continues to this day.

It’s widely accepted by my family living in this country,
that, due to my willful spinsterhood, upon my death, I will
turn into a cegua, and haunt the mulberry plantations,
lonely roads, bars, the Mercado Oriental, wherever
wayward husbands may be found. New form being a lusty
maiden with the head of a filly, I will be tasked with
luring men to some death by, probably boring, definitely
heteronormative, sex.

My family is from a town that, besides being recognized
as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for a tradition of
people telling the most longwinded stories while utilizing
polyvocality and masks, lays on a windy plain on an
isthmus within an isthmus, between a lake and an ocean.

This selection comes from the collection The Easy Body, available from Timeless, Infinite Light. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist who works within and between language and the visual. Raised east of the Los Angeles River, they live in San Francisco.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and three chapbooks, most recently MINE (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming 2017). Their work has appeared in such places as cream city review, Cloud Rodeo, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an assistant editor for Cider Press Review, and the monster maker behind What Is Reality Plushies. Find them at mxmack.com.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Easy Body by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

I began visiting myself—unaware, that I had company,
so, feeling ill at ease, yet—watching myself panic.
Barely missed gestures interpreted that I was unwanted,
disbelieved, and/or a threat. Caught glances before they
dissolved into more focused contact. All food became
reduced to violent texture, violent smell, violent color.
The sensuality of jam demanded as ransom to a barely
tolerated ghost. Feel your throat gradually tighten, until it
becomes like the eye of a needle. At night, you brush your
many tails as the spirit possessing you bounces and plays
with a ball inside your chest. In bathwater, you dissolve.
Light plays on surfaces while it sings. All things have
songs, not all songs are joyful.

The night is thick with demons.

This selection comes from the collection The Easy Body, available from Timeless, Infinite Light. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist who works within and between language and the visual. Raised east of the Los Angeles River, they live in San Francisco.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and three chapbooks, most recently MINE (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming 2017). Their work has appeared in such places as cream city review, Cloud Rodeo, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an assistant editor for Cider Press Review, and the monster maker behind What Is Reality Plushies. Find them at mxmack.com.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Easy Body by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

Got tired of being a house on fire,
so I became a poet.

Got tired of being a plastic bag,
so I became a poet.

Got tired of being a flower in the wind,
so I became a poet.

Got tired of being a faceless daughter,
so I became a poet.

Got tired of of being a rotting altar,
so I became a poet.

Got tired of being an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara,
so I became a poet.

Got tired of being the Santa Ana wind’s girlfriend,
so I became a poet.

Got tired of hearing white people read,
so I became a poet.

And anyway,
everyone knows that poets

are the first up
against the wall.

This selection comes from the collection The Easy Body, available from Timeless, Infinite Light. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist who works within and between language and the visual. Raised east of the Los Angeles River, they live in San Francisco.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and three chapbooks, most recently MINE (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming 2017). Their work has appeared in such places as cream city review, Cloud Rodeo, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an assistant editor for Cider Press Review, and the monster maker behind What Is Reality Plushies. Find them at mxmack.com.