The Sundress Academy for the Arts will be hosting our January reading featuring poets Darren C. Demaree, Erika Eckart, and Nik Buhler. Come enjoy the new year with beer, pretzels, and great poety from these fine readers at 1PM on January 19th at Hexagon Brewing!
Darren C. Demaree is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently “Emily As Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire”, (June 2019, Harpoon Books). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
“i told my children those junk plums left at the bottom of the grocery bag were not perfect when we put them in the bag but they were on sale and good enough for a family that doesn’t get many plums so now that they are mangled and losing their juice to the bottom of the thin green bag i struggled so mightily to remove from the dispenser” –from [those junk plums]:
Erika Eckart is a mom, writer and high school English teacher, who lives and works just outside Chicago. Her prose poems blur the line between prose and poetry and have appeared in Double Room, Quarter After Eight, Quick Fiction, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Nano Fiction and Quiditty, among others. In 2018, her book of prose poems “the tyranny of heirlooms” was released by Sundress Publications. She is currently writing a novel about a Shire horse based amusement park, a truck stop and a race riot.
Sample: From “The River”
A tumor like melted taffy has soaked into her brain. Little niblets of steel-colored cottage cheese, the hardened ends of old gray play dough. At first her syntax remains, but all the nouns have been replaced by more magical material. Planet and alien replace house and car. “Did you push the red on the map, for the lemon aliens?” We sit and interpret, trying to gather whatever bits of information we already know. Cancer is river. “Can’t they get this river out of me?” she begs.
Nik Buhler is a queer, Appalachian native living in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their work has appeared in Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine and Crab Fat Magazine. When they are not writing new poems and essays with the help of their cat, Nik can be found at Firefly Farms annoying chicken and sheep into loving them back.
“Well, you’re either a boy or a girl.
You can’t be neither.
I am bound
by elastic wrapped ribs.
I disappear my breasts
when I know the world does not believe
in magic or women
who don’t want to be
