Sundress Publications is excited to announce that Curious Specimens, edited by Wren Hanks and Beth Couture, is now available online as an e-anthology.

Featuring the work of Eric Baus, Mathias Svalina, Emily O’Neill, Sonya Vatomsky, Moss Angel, and MANDEM, among many others, Curious Specimens is an anthology of the strange and wondrous things that make us human.

Editor Wren Hanks sums up how this eerie collection came to be:

“Beth Couture and I sought poetry, prose, and hybrid text / ephemera that explored what it meant to be someone (or something) caught between worlds. Like many queer writers, I’ve long been sympathetic to the monster in the scary story. Writing from the perspective of sea serpents and celestial wolves has allowed me to speak candidly about my trans body and to embrace the messiness of my (ever-shifting) queer identity. I hoped this anthology call might inspire other writers to use persona to interrogate their own relationship to monstrosity and possibly tap into this same kind of catharsis. Thankfully, submitters were both less literal and more creative than I could ever be! Andi and Lance Olsen catalog the effects ‘one’s memories breaking loose’ has on the body. A speaker warns of alternate selves coming for her ‘crystal core’. A Jackalope-Girl gets a late-night tattoo. Comfort comes in the form of Cerebus, crocodile eggs, a pile of bones. As Susan Slaviero writes, it might even be ‘better to be an anomaly,’ someone who defies easy classification.”

Download it today for free here!

Wren Hanks is a trans writer from Texas and the author of Prophet Fever (Hyacinth Girl Press) and Ghost Skin (Porkbelly Press). His recent work appears in Best New Poets 2016, Gigantic Sequins, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. His third chapbook, gar child, is forthcoming in 2017 from Tree Light Books. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

OK, let’s take a
poll:

how many of us
grew up praying for

the end of the world? Is it
so bad to desire

the end of the world?

Transcribing a codex for
the dissolution of self

as I sit on your
face, calling for the

end of the world.

Oh, yes.
I see.

How you retreat from
my love into the safety

of myth.

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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.

INTERVAL

The deciduous holy

The fantastical violence of their myths became more attainable as their systems sophisticated horror. Their data is their story. But they had no projections of themselves, no one to build the fiction of their memories. The moon made jewels but they could not quite archive its light. Tattered lumps of sky kept slipping into the sea. Actually, the feeling of leaving is not transcendence, but breathing in sharp stars, filling the body with spikes of pain. Did they need symbols? This they eventually reached as a question to ponder. The small passwords and the colossal stone simulacra. Over every intention the visor of ambition. They were carefully socialized to be magnanimous, to find the single bird in its cage after the death of its mate and kill it, finding the left behind unbearable. And the lights went out. It was so dim and difficult in the way that used to enrage us—the nighttime blindness was not from exhaustion or poverty, but power. They overcame. All differences are differences in power.

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This selection comes from the collection Ghosts, Models, Visions, available from Bloof Books. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Ginger Ko is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books), Inherit (Sidebrow), Comorbid (Lark Books), and Ghosts, Models, Visions (Bloof Books). Her poetry and essays can be found in American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at http://www.gingerko.com

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.

Last month when I mentioned the #MeToo movement, it was with some ambivalence. While it was inspiring, albeit triggering, to see women and non-binary folks come forward, I couldn’t help but wonder how quickly it would all fizzle out. I wouldn’t have thought that a month later it would be gaining momentum– even as there remains work to be done in the representation of which abusers and victims or survivors matter (spoiler alert: they all do)– and I wouldn’t have thought that poets’ resistance would be receiving extensive media coverage and support. If you haven’t already checked them out, make sure to take a look at Isobel O’Hare’s erasures poems made from the accused’s statements regarding allegations of sexual assaults and this article and interview by Anthony Ramirez. This week I’ve also been sitting with the following:

Poetry

Poetry by Octavio Quintanilla on Connotation Press: “When I try to return to my boyhood, // sometimes I end / with my head // on my mother’s       lap.”

Self-Portrait As God With A Still-Born Inside by Chelsea Dingman: “I want / to keep you longer. Let there be light. There is no bucket, // no rope. This isn’t a nursery rhyme.”

a prose poem by Nicole McCarthy: “I built a fortress in my body out of / words and cement. Incantations / reinforce walls composed of / affirmations.”

Prose

Vete a la Chingada Party by Vickie Vértiz: “And this is what I wanted last year when I was a senior at Williams: that my friends should pick me over Beto, Beto and his new bitch, some whitewashed chick from Calabasas. My friends don’t want that vieja, they want me of course, the hometown girl who did good and now she’s back home.”

Essays

Myth of Motherhood Poetics by Jennifer Givhan: “When I couldn’t have children, when my body wouldn’t cooperate, when the lines wouldn’t transform into a pink cross, or when the pink cross did appear but then the bright red poppies began their painful stain, I made myth.”

Border Theories by Marcos Santiago Gonsalez: “The border is a trauma, living in the body, triggering and affecting, passed on to other bodies. The border, as E— seems to be suggesting, can manifest even here downtown in New York City, so far from the United States–Mexico border, so far from my undocumented father who now lives in rural New Jersey.”

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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. You can follow her on twitter @sm_kaylor

I SANG MIND BECAUSE
I COULD NOT SING BODY
When our automatons
still belonged to us,
we gave them
the idle cruelty
of our attention,
we tripped and shoved
them while they
to-and-froed
in their tasks.
Sometimes we would
throw a clear liquid on them,
a temporary inconvenience
of water. Sometimes
we would throw
a clear liquid on them,
a corrosive meant to maim.
We watched them stutter
as they persisted
at programs
that had nothing
to do with us.
We broke
every contract.
Age hardens hands
into little wedges,
shatters their light
over tools that
needed grasping.
I remember
that on the assembly line
I looked up
and glimpsed the quiet
bodies of doves
perched side-by-side,
roosting in the rafters
for the night. Only
one’s body contains
information. Who
will remember
one’s mind? It wasn’t
until a finger nudged
me ON that I
unbent from the waist
and awoke to
the eternal strangeness
of another body
at rest, mouth
wide open in
the dark and eyes
closed to the night.

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This selection comes from the collection Ghosts, Models, Visions, available from Bloof Books. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Ginger Ko is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books), Inherit (Sidebrow), Comorbid (Lark Books), and Ghosts, Models, Visions (Bloof Books). Her poetry and essays can be found in American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at http://www.gingerko.com

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 ROTTED WATER OF MY URBANITY
I can’t make
anything from me,
anything not
already dead. I look
to my family
but none of them
are like me. They
have led up to me.
What do we do
when they no longer
need the mannequin
casings for their
clever matrices?
I asked a keeper
and they became
so angry that they
led me to the edge
of the dolphin tank,
pointed at the warders
who must masturbate
the males, massaging
pink extensions
as the dolphins float
belly up against
the poolside. When
your own body
is meaningless, when
you sit at home
on soft furniture
because your
automaton sits
at work every hour
of the day, suddenly
you begin to love
all the bodies.

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This selection comes from the collection Ghosts, Models, Visions, available from Bloof Books. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Ginger Ko is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books), Inherit (Sidebrow), Comorbid (Lark Books), and Ghosts, Models, Visions (Bloof Books). Her poetry and essays can be found in American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at http://www.gingerko.com

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.

 

THEY HAVE STOPPED MOVING
They have gathered
the information
of the world
and they cannot
predict continuance
from the data. Will
my representative
build other
representatives
of color? Will
my automaton
return the world
to itself? How
do I decide
whether it is
important that I
run my fingernail
down my thigh,
to watch the little
trail of white
before my brownness
fills back in? I
am grateful
to be born
so far along.
I am buying
myself a future,
a material outlook.
I stick my arm
in what must be
the outlet of
encountering them,
and the current
runs through me,
rasping my nerves.
It is not so bad.
Kittens in our care
used to fling
themselves against
the walls of our
houses. Perhaps they
will engage in
communion,
for the sake of
intimacy’s high value.

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This selection comes from the collection Ghosts, Models, Visions, available from Bloof Books. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Ginger Ko is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books), Inherit (Sidebrow), Comorbid (Lark Books), and Ghosts, Models, Visions (Bloof Books). Her poetry and essays can be found in American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at http://www.gingerko.com

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.

 

HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE SICKNESS

From the great
whole ocean, how
can I recapture
the small life
of creatures?
Something like
verdure, the thick
nap of willingness,
the hoarse water.
A knife without
a hand would just
tumble harmlessly
in the sea. Are you
an American creation?
Are you comfortable
that the ground has
eventually come
to glass, are you
comfortable with
the underground
appeared before you?
I birthed babies
that were more
and more bare
until at last I
could swaddle them
in the skins of others.
I hid the fear
piss and the fear
shit and the whites
of my babies’ eyes
were the cleanest
I had ever seen.
What is your idea
of a good time?

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This selection comes from the collection Ghosts, Models, Visions, available from Bloof Books. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Ginger Ko is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books), Inherit (Sidebrow), Comorbid (Lark Books), and Ghosts, Models, Visions (Bloof Books). Her poetry and essays can be found in American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at http://www.gingerko.com

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.

SEA-WITCH ANXIETY SPIT SQUARE TRIANGLE TRIANGLE

In Sea-Witch everyone is tired. The monsters here sigh deeply & shrug their monster shoulders. We have heard tales that once we built monuments & discovered amazing things. That we once created beautiful, impossible works of art but these things have become damaged & lost across the centuries. Now living is done barely, & each day is spent attempting to get to the next. There is no sense of future, the past is painful to think of. We think of the long time they have ahead of them & despair. Where is our culture, we moan. Where are the monsters we used to be, who could build, grow & thrive? They are lost to us. We have not lost our love for each other, but it is always under threat as we have been hurt so often that we can no longer find the source. Today is a day, & soon it will end & be followed by another. We celebrate nothing. We organize nothing. We are nothing. What will become of us. May she lay us waste, we pray. May our ashes & bones fertilize the soil for lives better than ours. Lives that might be abundant with what we lack. With promise. With capability.

[image description: page 81 of the book SEA-WITCH v.2 Girldirt Angelfog by Moss Angel the Undying. Black text is on a white page. The piece is in one section below the title. On the bottom half of the page, a large photograph is in a black handdrawn frame. The image is of a white leg tattooed in black ink with the word “thriving” in lowercase letters around a shape of black scribbles. Below, a word in red ink that is tattooed over with black scribbles.]

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This selection comes from the collection SEA-WITCH v.2: GIRLDIRT ANGELFOG, available from 2fast2house. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Moss Angel is a crossgenre writer and book artist based in Portland, OR. She is author of five books, most recently Sea-Witch v.1: May She Lay Us Waste and Sea-Witch v.2: Girldirt Angelfog, both out from 2fast2house. You can support her work by subscribing to her patreon or buying her books.

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.