Sundress Publications Announces the Release of Dani Putney’s Dela Torre

Sundress Publications announces the release of Dani Putney’s Dela Torre, an intimate reflection of personal family histories. A search for identity is the current that runs through Dela Torre—both tender and condemning, these poems are conversations with the speaker’s Filipina mother and American father, through which the speaker interrogates and celebrates aspects of their origin. Recalling an American childhood juxtaposed with their mixed-race identity, the speaker searches for recognition in everything from Asian grocery stores to classic art to chromosomes and subatomic particles. Caught between all-American images of Las Vegas, candy shops, and national parks and the mangoes and “Cebu’s finest puff pastry” of the Philippines, the speaker mourns that their “picture of / Asia was painted in / America”—and yet, Dela Torre shows us that remembering the past is an act of love.

Remi Recchia, author of Quicksand/Stargazing, writes that “Dela Torre is at once an intricate, explosive indictment of white colonialism and a yearning for familial understanding. Like Lot’s wife, Dani Putney’s speaker looks back to witness destruction—destruction wrought, in this case, by means of fetishization, racial oppression, and interrogation—but like Orpheus, the speaker looks back and locates the beauty of kimchi, Hello Panda biscuits, and queer desire.” Matt Broaddus, author of Two Bolts, says “Putney reminds us, ‘Our bodies / exist because we make them.’ A vital hope courses through these poems as the body—in all its fantastic configurations—becomes a site for renewed creation and transformation.”

Dela Torre is available to download for free on the Sundress website: http://www.sundresspublications.com/e-chaps

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, May 2021) is their debut full-length poetry collection. Their poems appear in outlets such as Empty Mirror, Ghost City Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Juke Joint Magazine, and trampset, among others, while their personal essays can be found in journals such as Cold Mountain Review and Glassworks Magazine, among others. They received their MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women. While not always (physically) there, they permanently reside in the middle of the Nevada desert.