This selection, chosen by guest curator and Sundress intern Victoria Carrubba, is an excerpt from Malnourished: A Memoir of Sisterhood and Hunger by Cinthia Ritchia, released by Raised Voice Press in 2020.
Excerpt: Northwestern Pennsylvania
At night, the sky fell down and smothered me, stars in my mouth and skin. The moon swimming my blood. I could fly at such times. I could lift my thin arms and soar.
This selection, chosen by guest curator and Sundress intern Victoria Carrubba, is an excerpt from Malnourished: A Memoir of Sisterhood and Hunger by Cinthia Ritchia, released by Raised Voice Press in 2020.
Excerpt: Prologue
Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it, how it adds and subtracts, takes something as simple as watching a whale swim along the shore and mixes it up in your mind so that your sister is there beside you, even though she’s been dead for years. Still, this is what you remember: the wind and the smell of the marsh, the silver-blue tint of an Alaska twilight spreading the water, and beyond it all, the small and simple feel of your dead sister’s hand slipping inside of yours.
What else can you possibly do? You tighten your grip. You hold on.
This selection, chosen by guest curator and Sundress intern Katherine DeCoste, is from No Other Rome by Heather Green, released by University of Akron Press in 2021.
The Half-God Appears
You, agnostic,
standing in god-light at the edge of the wood,
sense the pulse,
say: truth, tiny, partial, contingent.
Have you been looking for your maker
but longing to live?
I met the half-god;
his mother was human she had tears in her eyes.
Or, he came from the back world;
he had tears in his eyes.
He suggested “hold on,” a way to die.
*
Suggestion: astonishment.
Suggestion: fruitless waiting.
Encoded in the problem of the 20th century,
from which I emerged,
tiny dots formed the figure on horseback:
not form but the marrow of form.
The half-god is graceless,
but an arrow can’t kill him.
The half-god points
to your false hope of fulfillment.
He emerged from the back world, eyes devoid of tears.
*
The horseback figure obscures the daytime
clouds and the pillar of fire.
He is seen by the unseen and overlooked by God.
The half-god reminds you
that you are still waiting,
empty belly and eyes intent on the leaves.
This half-god could be fought with flowers
and rejoicing, but who can?
This is what he took down
open-mouthed, lance drawn:
cool nights spent in the garden out behind the house,
*
the honeysuckle vines, the garden wall, the house.
Or was it the waiting that tore them down?
The pink pill was the promise,
the capsule broke open, the dots formed the figure:
he emerged from the shadow of the wood
in a lullaby
translated variously as: jealousy, the ground
falling away from the feet, anxiety.
Suggestion: abandon all hope.
Suggestion: “no one said you wouldn’t be changed.”
This selection, chosen by guest curator and Sundress intern Katherine DeCoste, is from No Other Rome by Heather Green, released by University of Akron Press in 2021.
The Transitive Properties of Snow
Tonight it snowed, copious, like
when I had chicken pox, all over
the night sky’s skin and sickening.
Back home, you, inside my skin,
and a party with fake snow! There
I had a kind of freedom: you are
you, and I am me. It wasn’t easy
to live like that, one body gazing out
at another, but I grew up in a warm place.
Then I got cold. I got a fever, and
the fever changed me. Now my
body slips into another, and I am full of love.
Birds of paradise stood in the window,
then the ocean and its moving boats.
My fidelities multiplied, not split,
but doubled and doubled again,
until thousands or more encircled us.
Magic, I said, looking up from the bed
as you stepped out. Now here I am,
way up North, lonely as a snowflake
in a sea of like shapes. There’s a little
sand in my shoes and in my suitcase.
There’s the light; there’s the suitcase.
I finally understand a painting
I’ve seen of snow as paper cut-outs
strung on bare trees, to show the way
the world forgets itself so softly.
The light got under my skin. My hands
wave around the dark and net
through snowflakes. Strings break.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week we’ve chatted with poet and educator Sumita Chakraborty about ecology, Alice Oswald’s work, and poetic inspirations. We hope you enjoy it, and, as always, thank you for tuning in!
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: Why did you choose Oswald? What was your first experience reading their work?
Sumita Chakraborty: I chose Oswald because I’ve been learning from her work for a long time, and the way she thinks about language and poetics (among other thematic obsessions like death and ecology) really resonates with me. Technically, the first time I encountered her work was when I still worked for AGNI, where I was on the editorial staff for 13 years—at the beginning of that stretch of time I was an intern, and her poem “Dunt” (which is now in her fairly recent collection Falling Awake) was initially published in the very first issue of AGNI on which I worked, back in 2006. My real sustained engagement with her work came with her excavation of the Iliad, Memorial, which I read when it first came out and then became even more significant to me after my sister died in 2014. I read it multiple times a day for a few months and then started digging through all of her work.
Sumita Chakraborty Reads “Memorial” by Alice Oswald
AH: How has Oswald’s work inspired your writing?
SC: Countless ways, to be honest! One thing that’s lately been on my mind, especially post-Arrow, is that I think Oswald has a remarkable way of dissolving the imagined boundary between the “experimental” and the “lyric.” I think that boundary is one that we often internalize or are taught to internalize, whereas Oswald reminds me that they are both very much two sides of the same coin—or, probably, basically the same side of something much more complex than a coin. I also love the way she honors and follows language, as well as the way she fluidly balances and re-balances each poem’s investment in ambiguity and concreteness alike. To be honest, I could go on for ages about her work and its importance to me; I wrote about some other things I’m drawn to some years back for LARB, and I do go on for ages there! I completely trampled the initial word limit I was given and I am very appreciative that the editors there let me run with it.
Sumita Chakraborty Reads “Must Never Sleep” by Alice Oswald
AH: There seems to be an intersection between Oswald and you: you both have a tendency to dabble in the discussion of the environment. Where did your interest in this begin?
SC: That’s kind of you to say and to notice! Ecology studies is a huge part of my scholarly life, so I’ve been thinking about it fairly actively at least since I began my PhD in 2012. I think where I especially resonate with Oswald’s approach to it is best captured in a remark she made in, I believe, an interview with Granta. She says that the nature poets that she likes the most are Homer, Ovid, and Shakespeare, specifically “because they include the human and the non-human in the same picture”; of ecosystems, she says, “How can you categorize that?” A similar approach guides my interest in the environment.
AH: What have you been up to lately? Got any news to share (life, writing, small achievements—anything!)?
SC: I’ve got something environment-related, actually! My academic book—which is one of my main preoccupations at the moment, and is called Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene—is newly under an advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press. On the poetry side, I’m playing with some new forms of visual and multimedia poetry that I’m really enjoying, and my second collection is shaping up to be rather obsessed with questions of interiority.
Alice Oswald is a British poet; although she is not as well-known outside of her native country, her work is widely circulated. She is the author of The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile and six other poetry collections. Her poems delve into the topic of nature, history, and environment. She was the first woman to serve as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Read her poem “Flies” at Poetry.
Read a profile about Oswald in The New Yorker.
Find her award-winning collection Falling Awake here.
Sumita Chakraborty is the author of the poetry collection Arrow, which was published by Alice James Books in the U.S. and Carcanet Press in the U.K. in 2020 and has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. Her work in progress includes a scholarly monograph, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she teaches in literary studies and creative writing at the University of Michigan.
Find her on Twitter @notsumatra.
Learn more about Sumita on her website.
Read her poem “Dear, Beloved” at Poetry.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, Hobart, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com
This selection, chosen by guest curator and Sundress intern Katherine DeCoste, is from No Other Rome by Heather Green, released by University of Akron Press in 2021.
A Series of Holes Connected by String
“When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots,
we become part of the unity of our environments.”
—Yayoi Kusama
A net, according to Samuel Johnson:
a series of holes connected by string,
the net of Indra faceted with jewels,
glittering web infinitely reflecting itself
and everything else, history told
by the victors, the story itself
a spoil. Yet the past is not a place.
You can’t go home again, my Dad
so often said. He seemed to know
home as a time; he had been there
in mine. I’ve never yet let go of him
or you because you both were there:
your childhood, mine, epic light-drenched
vacation. The underwater world bright,
coral reefs infinite, and like everything else,
I often made it hard, but the water
reminded me I was no one. Born in the year
of the dog underneath a Sagittarius star,
I’m still a loyal wanderer, but oblivion gets in.
Once I love, it means ruin, but here I scatter
back into the present, bright fatherless regression
of offset mirrors, funny valentines, photographable
gemlike farewell lanterns cast onto the internet,
obliterated into pixels, disseminated
in liquid crystal before our bodies spoil.
I barely remember the islands,
the holes, a world now come to fire and ice.
This selection, chosen by guest curator and Sundress intern Katherine DeCoste, is from No Other Rome by Heather Green, released by University of Akron Press in 2021.
The Angel is an Amalgam
For Ladrea Icaza
In winter he wore a winter beard
He was sky high in the spring
His head grew light he let down the most
Delicate line he said get in the car
& on the ride a thick red book fell
From his mouth like a lullaby
He told how you crossed that chalky line
I didn’t sleep I cried I curled
To the window on the passenger side
& just like that I remembered back
I asked him changer or destroyer?
He just narrowed his eyes and said
Forever in a wave like the pushy sound
A seashell makes then he slowed
His hand down the backs of my legs
And you know me I could not
Believe him but I was made smaller
For a time by desire I was sorry
Lad I’m sorry because all this time
I never said your name
It thundered and when the angel said
Defenestration he pushed a flat
Hand to the side & I fell down fast
I’ve never had a proper bookshelf.
Late in the July between my kindergarten and first-grade years, when my big brother loaned me his favorite book on the face of the earth—Nate the Great Goes Down In the Dumps—I didn’t need a bookshelf. My picture books were content to live (albeit overflowing) in the big wicker basket beside my bed, and anyway, I’d need to return Sam’s copy of Nate the Great when I’d finished. It wasn’t a signed copy or anything, but he’d added some drawings of his own that he might want to revisit down the road. And anyway, it was a loan—NOT a present. Okay?
Soon after I’d torn through Nate (and safely returned it to my brother’s library under threat of noogies), I picked up Because of Winn Dixie, Charlotte’s Web, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Anniversary Boxed Set. Around the same time, my dolls went hungry. They moved out of their dollhouse, which my mother had built (and wallpapered) herself for my fourth birthday. My dolls cleared out their furniture, their clothes, their pets, and skipped town. So my books moved into my pink-roofed, five-bedroom dollhouse. The smaller books fit well into the bathroom and the nursery; the larger ones were stacked in the living room, the master bedroom. The oddly-proportioned ones were cast off into the doll house’s attic, angled and leaning into the pitch of the roof.
My first car, the car my father used to usher my mother to the hospital the day I was born, was a white Jeep Cherokee Sport. It had this knit heather-grey interior—and seat pockets on the back of both the driver’s and passenger’s seats. I’d moved on to slightly-heftier books by the time I learned to drive; Speak, The Catcher in the Rye, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Bluest Eye. I brought books with me everywhere. I planned ahead, loaded my Jeep’s seat pockets with books I meant to read soon, books I’d read again, and took them with me wherever I went. When I blew the engine on the Jeep—on the expressway three miles from home—the back-of-seat pockets were blown out and sagging from the years they’d spent stuffed full of my library. I cleared out the car so my uncle could sell its shell down at his salvage yard, and I pulled books out of the pockets in stacks. Empty, the pockets held the shape of the books: re-formed to hold hardcovers instead of gum wrappers and ice scrapers, as the car’s designers had intended.
My college dorm room came equipped with a bed, a small dresser, and a desk—as a loan—NOT a present. Okay? My writing professors sent me to buy dozens of collections and anthologies and craft books and implored me to keep them forever. Still, without a proper bookshelf, and with a backpack (and, for that matter, a back) that boasted only a finite load-bearing capacity, I was left to stacking. I stacked my books on the floor: On either side of my dresser. Along the foot of my bed. As a makeshift side table to the right of my desk. Each semester, I got more books, and my stacks got more precarious. A friend once compared my stacks of books to those stacks people make with rocks alongside rivers—except my stacks were not especially harmful to wildlife.
Now, I own a house that bears a striking resemblance to my childhood home (and very little resemblance to my pink-roofed dollhouse), but I still don’t have a bookshelf. Don’t get me wrong—large portions of hutches, console tables, nightstands, empty corners of rooms—serve as homes for my books. They’re the cornerstone of my house’s interior design; they’re spread all around, scaling the fireplace, holding up candles and framed photos, a couple dozen in every room.
I like it this way. I like living amidst a poorly-filed library that I can access at every moment, in any room or on any surface or corner. I like that I can accidentally pick up a collection or novel and read the whole thing, just because it was there. Books are full of beautiful things that are meant to be happened upon, held onto, carried with us. It makes sense to me, not having a real bookshelf, because it means that books are everywhere, too great and necessary to ever really put away.
Kathryn Davis is a writer and editor from Michigan. She graduated in 2018 from Grand Valley State University, where she studied Creative Writing with an emphasis in Fiction, and served as editor-in-chief of the university’s literary journal, fishladder. You can find her work in Potomac Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere—or follow her on Twitter @kathrvndavis.
As part of Sundress’s ongoing commitment to service, we recognize that COVID-19 has caused hardship by cancelling readings, launches, tours, and other needed promotional efforts. To combat this, Sundress Publications continues to accept submissions for consideration for inclusion in our review series, Sundress Reads. We’re looking to write featured reviews for any books published or to be published from July 2021 to June 2022. We at Sundress hope to champion writers whose work highlights human struggle and challenges misconceptions.
Authors or publishers of books published within this date range are invited to submit books, chapbooks, or anthologies in any genre for consideration by our reviewers who are standing by. Submissions will be considered on a rolling basis.
For immediate consideration, please forward an electronic copy of the book (PDFs preferred), author bio, photo of the cover, and a link to the publisher’s website to sundresspublications@gmail.com with “Sundress Reads: Title” as the subject line. In addition, we request that one print copy be mailed to Sundress Academy for the Arts, ATTN: Sundress Reads, 195 Tobby Hollow Lane, Knoxville, TN 37931.
Submissions to Sundress Reads will remain eligible for selection for one year. Hard copies will become a permanent part of the Sundress Academy for the Arts library and will be made available to SAFTA residents and staff as well as by request to affiliate journals for further reviews.
This selection, chosen by guest curator and Sundress intern Katherine DeCoste, is from No Other Rome by Heather Green, released by University of Akron Press in 2021.
Aristotle is a Skeleton
The skeleton called out for sets of bones
to fill the hole, but then you reached your arm in,
your fingers stretched down to the unknown,
the loam, the moon-shy dark. You called, Abstraction!
as your fingers shaped into the word for five
but didn’t pull your hand back from the black
of the abyss until the digits, still alive,
became just 5. You cried, It’s too abstract!
when your arm snapped back: at the end of the limb
stood |5| which looked so vast but in fact was only
that which is not not five. At first you’d say
the skeleton had been the villain, blaming him,
but for the lure of the leap, the loss, though lonely.
In time, the hole transformed you all the way.
