This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is from These Aren’t My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones (Poetose Press 2025).
You Cannot Serve God and Mammon
Mammon being the things of this world, the things that hold you back from God’s will to become a godly preacher’s wife and produce many zealous, Christian soldiers.
(a girl you like tries to give you her number and you run away, terrified of your own wild animal desire)
You spend three years at the Bible college in your church’s back lot, striving for a more perfect understanding, praying for the strength to resist all temptation.
(you cannot let anyone know you have been dreaming of your mouth on another woman’s soft belly)
In Japan you help a missionary family with their struggling church. The wife tells you God only called her to marry a man, and it is enough.
(she never smiles when she laughs, and her husband confesses on the train to Nagoya he has never been more depressed)
You see how powerless your God is in this country where no one gives a fuck about White American Jesus. The hellfire street sermons can’t get a rise out of stoic passerby.
(secretly you pray the Buddhists are right and that you will be reborn as anything besides a Baptist)
A girl your age comes to church for the free English lessons and leans against your shoulder while playing clips on her flip phone.
(she stops by on her way to the summer festival while you’re stuck inside folding gospel tracts just to show you her pink and yellow yukata)
You go back to the States with a thousand paper cranes she made for you, her fingers folding hard creases in flower prints, gold and silver foils, candy wrappers,
(flattening the tiny birds with her palms, gently pulling their wings with her thumbs and breathing life into their hollow bodies.)
Soon Jones (they/them) is a Korean-American lesbian poet and writer raised in the rural countryside of the American South. They are a Lambda Literary Fellow with an MFA from Oklahoma State University. Their work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Denver Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Moon City Review, and others, and their debut collection, These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, is out now from Poetose Press. When not writing poems or working on cars, you can find Soon going on long walks through nature or stargazing.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
I once had so many questions about this world. Why do mountains and rivers move? Why do the stars in the sky blink their eyes? Why did my mother weep before me? And in the universe beyond our universe, is there another me? To me, this world was like a giant question mark breaking forth from nothing, filling me with wonder and with dread. I longed to know, to understand, to grasp how exactly I had become myself, and what it was that built the bridge between me and this world. The first answer I found, the first definite exclamation mark within all those question marks, was reading. From Fabre’s Book of Insects I learned about nature; from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, about life; and from Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions, I learned how to understand myself. For the child I was, reading was like a prism: the sunlight I couldn’t comprehend, the light that had once stung my eyes, needed only to pass through it to become a rainbow — one I could see without waiting for the rain, a rainbow for me to take apart and to understand. I grew up nourished by reading.
In high school, my questions about the world turned into countless reflections. During those years, I struggled with mental illness, and the world I had spent so long learning to understand collapsed before my eyes in the wake of trauma. It was then that I encountered Lin Yi-han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise. Imitating the book’s protagonist, I found my own way of taking sorrow apart: writing it down. I wrote down the egrets by the lake, the fantasies that came between sleeping and waking, the inspiration that burst up from my reading; I broke myself apart into words, one by one, and gave myself over to words. I am grateful to my high school literature teacher, who, after reading my work, helped submit it to a magazine, where it was published. For me — disheartened as I had become — it was a chance to feel, once again, connected to this cold world.
For university, I moved from Asia to North America, and once again the world refreshed itself before my eyes. One culture shock after another led me to reexamine my identity and my position in the world. But unlike before, I now had words; it was the key to the world that was mine alone. I studied cultural and literary Studies, first at McGill University and then at the University of Alberta, pursuing a great deal of interdisciplinary literary research. During my undergraduate years, I also returned to China for a three-month internship as an editorial assistant. This time, it was no longer literature fishing me out from the long river of life; instead, it was I who went fishing for words in the vast, boundless sea of everyone’s inspiration, and assembling them so that the world could see.
All of these experiences have brought me here, to become an editorial intern at Sundress Publications. I want to see words ever more clearly and to embrace them; to embrace reading and writing, to embrace everyone who, like me or unlike me, has used words to search for a rainbow of their own. I would like to let the keys that different people have forged shine with their own light, so that they might open this world to ever more possibilities.
Ziyi Zhong (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA from McGill University and an MA from the University of Alberta, both in East Asian Studies. With a background spanning Asia and Canada, she is interested in identity, belonging, and the ways literature helps us understand ourselves and one another. For her, reading and writing have long been tools of inquiry and repair, turning difficult experience into meaning, and of connecting with others who are searching, in words, for a light of their own.
Swetha Amit’s short story collection, Sailing Paper Boats & Other Stories (Alien Buddha Press, 2025), is an earnest, poignant collage of stories that explore both the fragility and resilience of human relationships and the natural world in the wake of disaster. Over the course of nine short stories, Amit beautifully captures the fear, loss, longing, and cautious hope one navigates as their notions of home, family, and belonging begin to transform.
Amit grounds readers in the environment of each story through her unvarnished, simple prose and deeply honest tone. Like reading through an old personal diary that you stumbled upon at the thrift store, or a sociologist’s field notes chronicling the lives of the humans they observe, Amit presents the characters as everyday people with their own memories, perspectives, and responses to the changes unfolding around them.
Using a first-person stream-of-consciousness narration, she lays bare the unpleasant and, sometimes, precarious realities of life that happen without warning. She explores issues such as climate-induced displacement, the material and emotional toll of natural disasters on local communities, and the illness and loss of loved ones.
This is brilliantly portrayed in the one-paragraph story, “The Nest”, where the speaker contends with the trauma of losing their house in a forest fire. When the speaker comes across a quail’s nest teeming with new life, they recall: “As the sky turns orange, I feel a pulsating rush of fear in my veins. I look at the tiny home of twigs in front of me. It reminds me of my old home wiped out by the fumes of orange and hues of smoke” (35). For the speaker, even the orange setting sun triggers their memories of the fire and of a home that no longer exists. The shocking abruptness of the flashback, heightened by the contrast between a fragile bird’s nest and a home burned to ashes, illustrates how severely the speaker has been affected by the catastrophe. Amit’s intimate portrayal invites readers to engage with these experiences.
Weather and natural disasters are a constant motif throughout the collection. As I read, I was fascinated by how the climate-related imagery in the stories seemed to reflect the internal landscapes of the characters as they face upheavals in their lives and relationships. See how, in “The Floor Beneath My Feet”, the speaker and her husband grapple with marital tension and infidelity between them when an earthquake hits their home: “The wooden floor beneath us is threatening to crumble at any moment… Our wedding photo, taken four years ago, lies on the floor, surrounded by shards of glass” (16).
Similarly, in “The Wrecked Wharf”, the storm surge crashing through the Capitola Beach wharf mirrors the speaker’s mental state after the sudden passing of his fiancée: “A few days later, a wall of water split the wharf in two….Around that time, you received news about your stage four lung cancer diagnosis. The devastating news shattered my heart and mind” (40). By drawing parallels between the destructive force of natural disasters and the characters’ mental states, Amit emphasizes the emotional weight of coping with relationships that have been permanently altered, allowing the reader to better understand the uncertainty, inner displacement, and other complex feelings that arise during the mourning process. This helps immerse the reader in the narrative, making its most heart-wrenching moments linger beyond the page.
At its core, however, Sailing Paper Boats is a short story collection centered around the theme of resilience. This is most clearly seen in “Sailing Paper Boats”, where the child protagonist, Krishna, and his family are suddenly uprooted from their seaside village due to flooding. As the rising waters submerge his home, instead of falling into despair, he turns to his faith, reminding himself that “Ma always emphasized how true faith in the almighty keeps us afloat” (13). In several stories across the collection, Amit explores how faith and spirituality are powerful resources for overcoming obstacles. Prayer becomes a way for Krishna to maintain his agency and hope, even when confronted with situations beyond his control. Later on, when Krishna’s village is forced to evacuate, he notices that the flimsy paper boat he made is still holding its ground against the flood:
“I took a deep breath. Maybe we’d soon see Pa…. He might find a better job…. The government may give us better homes. Ma and Pa may stop their quarrels. Like the boat, we could also sail smoothly on these rough waters. The storm will eventually subside with time, and sunny days will smile upon us again…” (15)
To Krishna, the miraculously intact paper boat is a symbol of survival. Through these comforting lines and visual imagery of the warm, gentle sun returning in the end, Amit reminds us how we, too, have the strength to recover from catastrophes and drastic life changes.
In Sailing Paper Boats & Other Stories, Amit skillfully turns personal memories of natural disasters into narratives that connect with all readers. I could understand the characters’ unspoken fears and frustrations and see myself in the struggles they encountered, from avoidant arguments with parents, like in “Sands of Time”, to the longing for a time before, when a loved one was still alive, or when life felt more stable, when you were stronger. But much like how nature is resilient, humans are incredibly resilient as well. Reading this collection taught me a valuable lesson: “Paper boats may be fragile, but they sail on”.
Tara Rahman (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA in English Language and Literature from Smith College and an MSc in Global Development from SOAS, University of London. She is also a recent graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course in Oxford, UK. With a strong interest in culture, identity, and global history, her personal writing often focuses on intersectionality and the untold stories and experiences of marginalized communities.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is from These Aren’t My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones (Poetose Press 2025).
Half/Slice
I’ve tried to tear the Southern twang from my throat, but my American tongue is heavy meat
that can no longer fold around the words of my mother’s country.
Like Solomon’s babe, I beg to be claimed. Neither the East
nor the West will speak for me: “Call any land your home
but ours.”
Soon Jones (they/them) is a Korean-American lesbian poet and writer raised in the rural countryside of the American South. They are a Lambda Literary Fellow with an MFA from Oklahoma State University. Their work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Denver Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Moon City Review, and others, and their debut collection, These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, is out now from Poetose Press. When not writing poems or working on cars, you can find Soon going on long walks through nature or stargazing.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is from These Aren’t My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones (Poetose Press 2025).
Kentucky Daydreams
my father first met my mother down an earthen path on the edges of songtan we moved states every few years after her death, running wherever he thought he could build a church and prosper, propelled by his new wife, white, yes, with a white son of her own and the only one who didn’t match was me
but it’s those brisk kentucky nights i think of when i tell stories from my childhood, of hide-and-seek with the neighbor kids the luminescence of fireflies smeared across our foreheads, our cheeks, where i watched meteor showers alone on the roof and slept in the hammock outside when the fighting downstairs was too loud for dreaming
the fields beside our house were spun into hay every autumn, and behind us the deep wood full of caves where I could hide
and be my mother’s child again imagining that the roots of the cedars spread all the way to her grave in wawbeek and that the water from the creeks i waded in would find their way to the oceans turn to steam cradle us both in the clouds and fall again on the mountains of korea
Soon Jones (they/them) is a Korean-American lesbian poet and writer raised in the rural countryside of the American South. They are a Lambda Literary Fellow with an MFA from Oklahoma State University. Their work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Denver Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Moon City Review, and others, and their debut collection, These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, is out now from Poetose Press. When not writing poems or working on cars, you can find Soon going on long walks through nature or stargazing.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is from local remedies by Chiagoziem Jideofor (Host Publications 2026).
this poem
this poem assumes you’ll live a long life. this poem assumes you’ll lose babies, sustain a level of detachment, wield a mouth, a potent mouth.
this poem assumes you aren’t like others—just here, idling and waiting. this poem assumes people like you are taken out of the line, quizzed repeatedly.
this poem assumes the thousand beads around your waist are not of prayers, but droplets from home, water turning green in a bottle. this poem assumes your regrets are of never eating enough.
this poem assumes you aren’t in danger. this poem assumes you have more wisdom than to pick sides.
this poem assumes your loneliness comes from a room, all that burning and pining this poem assumes you are a believer until you are pushed by stronger hands.
this poem assumes your success is an uptown apartment that barely allows twenty steps.
this poem assumes you only need friends who would point you out in a crowd, none of that disdainful look at your locs, just love and pristine energy.
this poem assumes there are arms hugging the fright out of you. this poem assumes home is anywhere that lets you keep your name.
Chiagoziem Jideofor (she/her) is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, berlin lit, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s adda, the minnesota review, Shō Poetry Journal, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a PhD student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is from local remedies by Chiagoziem Jideofor (Host Publications 2026).
lesser crops
we’ve been told of old walls still standing, of forms we assumed, as rebels, dreamers
like it’s some sin waking from dreams, slowly at first, then aching.
in shame, there are things best kept to self, secrets locked in our bones all these years,
the shape and texture of that on which we’ve fed —meanings behind our parables of sustenance.
there is a yam crop served only to kings, tended to with bent knees and rounded hoes,
rocking a ceremonial headgear and with a hero’s face. yet it ran scarce
at the very point of need, leaving space for the woman’s crop, like cassava, a thing less revered.
war being one of the world’s great ironies, instances where quicker math becomes the norm,
like cassava and its long list of frying and mashing and endurance, —a lesser crop raising the stakes,
stepping up, like a benevolent daughter salvaging the burnt parts of a blessing,
learning to make what’s scarce wholly palatable, to create munch from abominable protein.
such daughter, a pride in how she invents and cautions us, to eat what we eat and not divorce sanity,
breakfast of reveries dipped in fermented sauce, steamed cassava leaves for dinner,
while the remaining bits are kept for after it’s rained hard steel. collective pride in how we all watch the sky,
learn when to kiss fully on the lips, when to cite the hunger at home.
Chiagoziem Jideofor (she/her) is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, berlin lit, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s adda, the minnesota review, Shō Poetry Journal, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a PhD student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is from local remedies by Chiagoziem Jideofor (Host Publications 2026).
wild
there should be a heavy influence of music here, yell out loud when you catch the vibe
i get off the bus with my head high settled curls on my head mark me as the shit
i threaten my roommates with prank calls our surreal love stinks up the whole apartment
we laugh over a bowl of rice daily bread our lord provides in empty calories
i shower and sing with Beethoven behind, i renege on my claim to not gorge on these exotic things
i am stuck home and dealing the bastards upstairs are playing cards and yelling gringo at intervals
after a long day, my mouth releases contracted Os too tired of faking it, i only dive after unsaid words
there are some soiled laundries to do thousands of expletives for people asking me to speak louder
i rinse and dry my tongue, a nightly routine a clean tongue communes directly with the heart
i say a frightening prayer and name my hell she masquerades as a small town swallowing soldiers
i fall asleep only to see my neighbors in a dream shooting—attacking this peace i can afford
there is no rest here we’ve come shaped by the hardship at home
when i say beat me and then release me fear the wild that has found home in me
Chiagoziem Jideofor (she/her) is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, berlin lit, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s adda, the minnesota review, Shō Poetry Journal, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a PhD student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is from local remedies by Chiagoziem Jideofor (Host Publications 2026).
the warlike
(i)
mother has always been a bull of a woman. never smiles. she made friends but wasn’t keen on keeping them.
on evenings, she would sit out on the front porch, gather her favorite impressions into a pile.
as if to test a sitting brew, the neighbors would pass, offer greetings, small talk—the hiking price of kerosene, the recent ban on importation.
like she cared to look less busy; swatting at invisible flies, huffing and puffing like a pressure cooker. she earned her stripes this way.
(ii)
when asked, i say mother carved me, —a side stool—from her concrete ideas of others,
that i retained the twitch in my left eye, borrowed scowl it took the others years to notice.
how i became this adept at interpreting burden— the deadpan ones, the ones with a mind to run you over.
Chiagoziem Jideofor (she/her) is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, berlin lit, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s adda, the minnesota review, Shō Poetry Journal, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a PhD student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
Upon the release of their debut poetry collection Bloodroom, author Kay E. Bancroft spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Ruoyu Wang on the form and visual structure choices in their collection, the complex ideas around lineage and breaking cyclical trauma, and the significance of naming.
Ruoyu Wang: Can you speak to the way “m___r” is represented on the page and its significance to the collection?
Kay E. Bancroft: This term recurs a lot in the collection, and I ultimately decided to redact the middle of it and follow this visual structure for two reasons: 1. I wanted readers to “fill-in-the blank” for themselves, to give them the agency to insert a term that feels correct to the situation of the speaker or of themself as the reader. One intended word here is “mother,” one of the main relationships and traumas explored in the collection, but as I wrote I also realized that “monster” and a slew of other terms could fit within this structure. 2. I didn’t want to give a full title to subjects in the collection that don’t feel entirely there, that have a level of absence.
RW: How do ideas around knowledge, identification, and naming develop as you grow into yourself?
KEB: Growing into yourself is such a difficult and delicate process in life, and I’m not sure we entirely ever finish doing it. We’re constantly growing and evolving, learning more and retaining the knowledge of complex and beautiful situations. With more life experience comes the ability to identify and name not only things about yourself, but also to notice and name the roles of others around you and the relationships you hold with one another.
RW: In pieces like “white Blooded” and “Google Search Keywords for Sensitivity,” how does your use of form and punctuation inform the poem’s content, or vice versa?
KEB: These poems both have unique origins but ended up living in similar formal universes because they both needed the same thing: an untethering from something.
When writing “Google Search Keywords for Sensitivity” I was reading Camonghne Felix’s collection Build Yourself a Boat, and was thinking a lot about vulnerability, queerness, and understanding the meaning of being parentified at a young age, so when I saw this form, it felt like kismet. The technical elements of a Google search provided a structure to ask a lot of questions, to pause, to create space and breath within the poem as it would look in the mechanics of a search engine. It also allowed the speaker a bit of distance in these urgent inquiries, these seekings for a name.
“white Blooded” was the reverse—the content came first, and as the speaker is moving through the reckoning of cutting familial ties and creating something new, there was a need for division. Not only was the verbiage dense on the page but it was dense to digest, and I realized the speaker required physical space to move through this heavy processing. The pronouns needed to be separated to visibly cut the speaker from their biological connections, to find what they needed.
RW: Interspersed throughout the collection is a series of “[lexicon] defined” poems. How do they connect to each other?
KEB: Each of these poems is an erasure of a dictionary listing for terms that feel inherently connected to the ideas of familial relationships and complex parent/child relationships, specifically debt, heritage, legacy, obligation, and privilege.
RW: Can you speak to the recurring images of not only body parts such as hands and skin, but also messier parts, such as entrails in “Derivation” and splayed muscle in “LBD”?
KEB: There’s such tenderness and intimacy that arises with images of hands and skin – holding hands, intertwining fingers, soft caresses, bruising hair off a cheek. Not only are they physically soft and delicate, they’re also often used as symbols of vulnerability and femininity, which are frequently poked at throughout the collection. I see them pushing the question are they symbolizing softness or strength? which lends itself to the horror element of the book. In “Derivation” specifically, hands and entrails are paired as a gruesome duo, and I see this as a moment where two kinds of softness in the body intersect in a more visceral way.
RW: How do your poems work to navigate the present in regard to the past?
KEB: The poems in Bloodroom explore a searching, a reflection, and a questioning that is uniquely identified by the context of the events, relationships, family history, etc. that occurred before the collection begins, with the speaker hoping to answer “how do these traumas, these monikers, these relationships define me and how can I break the cycle.” They look back to see what’s transpired to inform the speaker’s future, the next steps they can take to name that which feels unnamable at the beginning.
RW: Tell me about the questions of lineage and inheritance that are in this collection.
KEB: As people we’re all trying to figure out how what’s come before us has affected us, and how we might affect others as we move through the world. The speaker of these poems is trying to decipher their own lineage and understand how trauma has carried through generations, what they’ve inherited from their ancestors, and how they can break certain cycles of behavior to protect not only themself, but future generations potentially perpetuated by them and their chosen family.
RW: In “Burning Haibun for a Half-Life,” you write, “I came up emptier than I began.” How does this idea of fullness versus emptiness develop as you age?
KEB: I’m not entirely sure if it’s a development as we age, but maybe more of an understanding as we move through different seasons and situations in life. There are certain times where we seek answers and despite gaining information, things make less sense, and we are forced to radically accept what just is. It’s a moment where we have to embrace where we are in the current moment. There are others where we get to know everything we’re hoping to and have total clarity. Fullness versus emptiness is situational.
RW: Can you speak about the use of photographs and archival material in this collection, and how they punctuate the different sections?
KEB: When I started writing Bloodroom, I was beginning my MFA at Randolph College at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I had borrowed a box of photographs, audio recordings, and letters that were sent between my grandmother and grandfather while he was working overseas. I wanted to start cataloging and digitizing the materials so they didn’t get lost to time, and as I did, I found the military ID application form that ended up becoming a major part of the collection dubbed the ‘Applicant’ series. It felt like such a malleable document, a place to play and work via the prints quite literally left by someone who meant a lot in my own life, an open yet structured page playground. I started experimenting with this particular artifact and it became integral to the collection, serving as a guidepost throughout as the speaker delves into different identifiers, relationships, etc.
The photographs included in the collection are also from my family archive, one of my grandmother, and many of myself as a child. These punctuate the collection less regularly, but still allow for a small window into the different media we use to explore our personal and familial histories.
Kay E. Bancroft (they/them) is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Cincinnati, OH. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College and a BA from the University of Cincinnati. Their writing has been published in Poet Lore, Pleiades Journal, RHINO Poetry, and more. Their debut poetry collection, Bloodroom, (Sundress Publications, 2026), was a finalist for the 2025 Alice James Book Award. You can find them on most social platforms @keb.poet and on their website at kayebancroftpoet.com, experimenting with hybrid visual poetics, facilitating literary workshops and discussions, and obsessing over popular horror films.
Ruoyu Wang (they/them) is a writer from Seattle. Their poems appear in Sine Theta Magazine, COUNTERCLOCK, and The Shore, and have been recognized by YoungArts, The Adroit Journal, and Narrative Magazine, among others. Currently, they serve as the Founding Director of the SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship and study Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. They love linguistics, postcards, live music, and jasmine milk tea.
