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An Interview with Michael Meyerhofer, Author of What To Do If You’re Buried Alive

Following the republishing of his book What To Do If You’re Buried Alive this past month, Michael Meyehofer spoke with Doubleback Books editorial intern Camelia Heins about the choice behind the title along with reasons behind his references to religion, connections to the Midwest, and the use of comedy. 

Camelia Heins: Your title really hooks people in and the title itself is the name of one of your poems. What inspired you to name this collection of works What To Do If You’re Buried Alive? Why did this poem specifically stand out to be the name of the entire collection? 

Michael Meyerhofer: The original version of that poem was about three pages long and was inspired by research I did on actual people throughout the ages who’ve been inadvertently buried alive but lived to tell the tale. Gradually, though, I whittled it down until it ended up as the fairly short poem it is now. Since that one already felt like an allegory for dealing with depression—or, really, any kind of struggle that feels overwhelming and insurmountable, but probably actually isn’t—and a lot of my poems can have a bit of darkness or sardonic humor in them, it seemed like a fitting title poem for the collection.

CH: You section off the book into two sections, “Scars” and “Tattoos.” I think these words are particularly interesting, especially with how tattoos themselves can be seen as scars or as art. What is the significance behind sectioning off the book this way? Can you explain your reasoning behind choosing these two words? 

MM: To be honest, I actually have to credit my late friend and mentor, Jon Tribble, for that! Many years ago, I was at critical mass in terms of having way too many poems that I was trying to fit into manuscripts, and he kindly volunteered to take a look at what I had. It was his idea to arrange the manuscript in two sections, with “Scars” and “Tattoos” used to distinguish between formative events and later, more deliberate choices. I eventually added what became the title poem and tweaked a few small things, but overall, it’s still as he arranged it. Jon was a kind, brilliant man, and like hundreds of poets out there, I owe him a lot!

CH: Many of your poems include some sort of unexpected twist or may catch people off guard. What influences can you attribute this style to? What kind of impact do you intend to make with these twists in your poems? 

MM: I’m sure I’m far from the first person to say this, but I feel like there’s a lot of similarity between poems and Zen koans. I’ve always loved how koans end on a twist that makes sense in a way that’s wild and transcendent but can’t really be articulated—the way they tug our brains in directions we didn’t even know were possible. For most of my writing life, poetry has been an exercise in teaching myself to stop white-knuckling whatever story or meaning I’m trying to get across and just trusting the piece to end itself.

CH: It’s clear your work contains a touch of comedy and satire, seen in poems like “My Mother Sent Me” and “Dear Submitter.” Can you talk about how you use comedy and satire and what kind of effect these elements have on your work? 

MM: There’s something transcendent and almost spiritual about humor—how it can let the air out of the worst tragedy and remind us in an instant that there’s a touch of absurdity in all our struggles and grief. Some of that might also come from growing up in Iowa, a state that’s beautiful but also rather stark and isolating, where deadpan humor is a must for getting through harsh winters surrounded by icy roads and fallow fields.

CH: You make quite a few religious references in your work, mentioning Catholic school, confessions, and more. Are you religious? How does your own religious background, whether positive or negative, influence your work? 

MM: I grew up in a pretty religious small town and attended a Catholic school—I was even an altar boy, and spent many hours in a white robe seated at the impaled feet of a graphically carved Christ! As you might imagine, I was also dreadfully emo, pondering mortality and suffering from a very young age (inspired, I’m sure, by all the time I spent in hospitals because of birth defects and health problems). So I was fascinated by religious stories because they were the first places I went looking for answers. Later, I took every religion and philosophy class I could in college (I’m the annoying guy who could sweep the Bible category in Jeopardy). Ultimately, I came to realize that my religious interpretations weren’t Catholic so much as Zen Buddhist, and to really chafe at the sense of bashful shame and unnecessary guilt that seemed to permeate a lot of those early lessons—but those feelings and religious iconography will always be with me, I’m sure.

CH: As someone with a connection to the Midwest, I found it interesting and personal that you included many connections to the Midwest region and suburban/rural life. The poem “Suburbia” particularly stood out to me. How do you think a non-urban, more suburban/rural background shapes your work? What’s the appeal of focusing on suburban or rural life? 

MM: I’ve lived in cities (of various sizes) for pretty much all my adult life, and I’ve come to see California as my home these last 9 or so years—but if you cracked my skull open, you’d probably still find a lone farmhouse surrounded by fields and tree-covered hills. The beautiful starkness of the Midwest has always seemed to me to be the perfect illustration of what it means to be human—there are people who love us, sure, but ultimately we’re on our own, so you’d better start figuring stuff out.

CH: I love your poem “Strata,” especially the imagery of lying on someone’s grave to understand the universe. I just have to ask, have you ever done that? And whether you did or didn’t, what was your reasoning behind choosing to use an image like this? 

MM: Thank you! Yes, I have done that, actually. I don’t recall where the idea came from, but I’ve more or less always had the sense that if you want to reach any kind of understanding, you have to keep your lens clear and cast off as many inhibitions and taboos as you possibly can. That might be why I’ve always had a great deal of respect for spirituality and curiosity but almost none for ritual and dogma. I think irreverence can be an amazing artistic, spiritual, and intellectual tool, so long as it’s sincere and not just performative.

CH: Outside of your poetry work, I notice you also write fantasy novels. How would you say the idea of fantasy plays a role in your poems, if any? 

MM: I’m a terrific nerd in real life! I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, so for me, there’s not that much difference between a poem, a novel, a short story, etc.—just slightly different attempts at the same thing. There are countless ways that I think fiction has helped my poetry, and vice versa—from imagery and storytelling to maybe a bit more awareness of how something actually sounds to the reader. Both sides also feed into my nerdiness too. When I’m not reading or writing, one of my favorite things is to watch documentaries about science, history, religion, etc. In fact, I love lifting weights (probably another thing tied to my childhood) and will often exercise while playing videos in the background on physics, mythology, and strategic analysis of battlefield tactics used a thousand years ago—it all gets thrown into the blender that is my brain for later use.

What To Do If You’re Buried Alive is available to download for free from Doubleback Books

Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five poetry books, six poetry chapbooks, and two fantasy trilogies. He has won the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Prize, the Whirling Prize, and other honors. He earned his B.A. from the University of Iowa and his M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He grew up in Iowa where he learned the value of reading novels, lifting weights, and not getting his hopes up. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review and lives in Fresno, California. For more information and at least one embarrassing childhood photo, visit www.troublewithhammers.com.

Camelia Heins (she/her) is an undergraduate student studying English & Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Born and raised in Orange County, California, Camelia has been active in her community through service, engagement, and both creative and journalistic writing. She enjoys reading and writing poetry, listening to several of her Spotify playlists, collecting plants, and playing with her cat, Moira.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore, released by Kent State University Press in 2021.

Johnny Tremain

                I.

I did not find out what happened to Johnny Tremain. He was a good-looking boy. Here is what I remember: cobblestones, stolen goblets, a candlelit hallway. At the bottom of the stairs, my mother flooded the kitchen with light from the refrigerator. Why are you crying, she whispered. The light sharpened her hands. I won’t say my head was full of papers.

                II.

In Chapter 2, Johnny Tremain suffers a terrible accident in which liquid silver spills from a cracked crucible and burns his hand, fusing his thumb to his palm, crippling him, I think forever. This is significant because, because Johnny is a good-looking boy. His head is empty, and now his hand is burned.

                III.

In the afternoon, my father carried a box full of papers to the door and down the front steps to the street. My mother cried as she stalked through the empty house. Papers fluttered to the brick sidewalk. Johnny Tremain lived on a street with cobbled stones, in a house with empty hallways. I won’t say I left my book on the rug and watched my father slam shut the car door, rub the grit from his hands.

                IV.

Johnny brings home limes in a chapter I cannot remember. He got them, I don’t know where. Sailors, that’s right, or possibly many tented vendors along the cobblestone streets. If he stole them, I am sure he hid them in the silver goblets. I am sure he hides himself in the hallway, the kitchen, the window filled with grit.

                V.

I won’t say I lied when I said I couldn’t find my homework. It was sitting clean on the white rug, on my bedroom floor, or maybe stuffed in the back of my desk. I won’t say I put it there, half full of nothing. I pressed my forehead against the window and did not watch as Johnny’s pride fell away.

                VI.

I never did learn what happened to Johnny. I received a B on the final test. I won’t say I hid a study guide in an empty napkin disposal can in the bathroom. My desk was empty. My head was full. When I was through, my hands were seared with graphite.

Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Ellene’s poetry, lyric non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore, released by Kent State University Press in 2021.

Ars Poetica

               1989

I tell you this: the night before I was born my mother sent my waning father and two brothers down the street, elms pressing open the brick sidewalks from below, to the capitol building to watch the fireworks. Peace for my mother, and her big bellyful of me. But lights busted through the running-glass windows of our home and something in my mother—was it me, hankering to bang back?—kicked up a longing for explosion. The television made such big sounds small. Our home seemed to spire up to stars that burned in the city sky, me in the way of my mother’s swollen feet as she walked up the stairs to a fire escape slinging out of a third floor window. She stepped out, sweating July iron. The ringing bars grazed her belly as she pulled us up to the gravel roof where my shuffling feet kicked over themselves. Lightbursts made my mother’s face glow not just with copper, beryllium, lampblack, but now with questions, the baby ignited, bringing something hard as rock salt to a house about to explode.

               1993

And then: when I was a child I swam with dolphins in an ocean that fanned itself across the horizon like a woman’s hair spread over a pillow. I have to tell you now that this is not true, though I have seen dolphins, slipping and rolling through distant green waters. The wind pulled dune grass up from its roots. A fish threw itself onto the sand and we rubbed its scales off, offered them as a talisman to the sea, burned the body over the fire and ate until our bellies were as full as the moon’s. Perhaps this is not true either, but it could have been. What I mean to say is that it happened just as the moon dipped behind the dunes, or didn’t, but I do remember the moon.

               1996

This is how it happened: my father stood in the kitchen at midnight. I did not see him until I opened the fridge and light spilled out, sliding over counters, illuminating his hush as he sent me back to bed. I told no one because maybe it wasn’t true, although I wondered who he might have been meeting there in that ocean of strange, beating night. What I mean is that some memories turn tirelessly with the moon, some memories will not drown. When I ran from the waves in my small dreams I did not stop to study the pattern of the sand. Or, if I did, perhaps I only found the imprint of a hundred empty kitchens, handing their transgressions to the night.

Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Ellene’s poetry, lyric non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore, released by Kent State University Press in 2021.

Seven Ghosts

                                Siasconset, Massachusetts

                I.

From the roof we watch for nothing in particular—waves, perhaps, or bees looming from one collection of blooms to another. The wind shudders the grey shingles until all we can hear is the sky straining to make an impression on us. And then what happens—or, rather—how is it we came to this.

                II.

Rotary: recursion, the dry pump, cobblestones. Over and over I let go of the handlebars, willing myself in circles.

                III.

A streak of grass and bramble finds its way behind cottages on the lee side of the bluff. A potato moth beats windward. A weathervane contends no and no and no.

                IV.

The cranberry bogs on the island’s interior—moors thick with scrub pine, sand paths—almost vibrate in the evening light. This is exactly the vivid dusk I imagined, the vermillion promise that I would keep if I could only / just / remember. It is a blood offering. Sickle-feathered swallows make a great godseye above the standing water, weaving together and apart in their quest for satiety.

                V.

Loom: crave, warp, that which is thrown away. Next to the bus stop, a wrought iron compass rose reaches out in a dozen directions, knitting together worlds that seem determined to drift.

                VI.

In the yard, a young maple tree is just what you say. Root ball easing open, leaves pocked, new growth holding me out to the ocean. I am terrified of all this unfolding.

                VII.

Leeward: point of reference, rosehips and pine, protection. Once I let a kite strip itself out of my hands and watched it grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared inside of me.

Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Ellene’s poetry, lyric non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore, released by Kent State University Press in 2021.

In Paris

I wanted to tell you that in the gallery looping the obscene pyramidal wound of the Louvre there is a café where once I took refuge from either the sun or the rain—both extremes a kind of musculature, an oppression when the season is not right—and where my mother and I fed sparrows the fine‑crumbed bread from our table. They seemed to know us, our discomfort, how the silence that followed each start displaced the easy morning like a drop of water in oil. They were unblinking, heads cocked and waiting for a tale. I read once that birds tilt their heads to orient themselves within the architecture of sound. Perhaps this has been my problem all along; no ready answer to the question of impetus, of plot. All morning we had wandered unpredictable streets, and in the Tuileries I collapsed against a painted carousel horse and finally smiled. I wanted to tell you that I ached, just ached for it to be about this: the picture my mother later taped to the fridge of me there, my circular laughter and amaranth dress—or the late sky over the river, or the light shattering itself around the watery spire of Notre Dame. Paris will always be about my mother and me, though she will rewrite this story over and over. Your art is your art, she will say. It is whatever you need it be. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t understand then what stories hold, or what they foreclose. The tale is hunger at the Louvre or streetlamps casting erratic shadows or my mother crying that I don’t know how to love. Above the table in the gallery café, a flag sighs in fitful declination. It shakes off story after story. The story is never enough.

Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Ellene’s poetry, lyric non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com.

Sundress Reads: Review of World

Ana Luísa Amaral erases borders in World (New Directions 2023), translated from the original Portuguese and published posthumously. Amaral’s scope is vast, ranging from refugees traversing the Mediterranean to ants trekking across blades of grass. She inspects the global and the minute, the wild and civilized, all with cool intellect, attentiveness, and wonder. These poems are especially poignant with the context of her passing from cancer in 2022. As a cancer survivor myself, I consider where my focus should be with each page-turn, how to make the most of my life, and what my understanding of the world really is.

From the first page, Amaral seemingly reads my mind: “Is it good? you will ask” (3), implying a categorical moral compass for my worldview. Good and bad. Right and wrong. The rest of this poem, “About the world,” consists of her reply, primarily inviting me to be observant, to take ownership of my life, and find the answer myself. Lines such as, “Notice my hat, an invented halo,” Pay attention to my eyes, / closed,” and “What does it taste of” (Amaral 3) center around the senses. Amaral further encourages me to look at life without assumption or motive. In doing that, I realize the world is full of grace, seduction, and joy—more than I ever could have imagined.

The first section of World, “Almost eclogues,” plays with macro and micro realms of nature. The tradition of short, pastoral poetry goes back to Ancient Greece and Amaral’s work satisfyingly continues centuries of classical bucolics with a contemporary style. The “Almost eclogues” are akin to persona poems but are more expansive in allusion and meaning, including flash references to Milton, Dickinson, and Bishop in “The peacock,” “The bee,” and “The fish,” respectively. In “The ant: peregrinatio,” the small, familiar insect is a complex female character with emotions. The ant walks far from her home (unlike other ants), as she must provide nourishment for her community. Always on the lookout for danger in her difficult life, she soon finds food in a moment of bliss:

“she arches her body and stands like a statue:

before her lies

pure seduction:

a teeny-tiny seed

that she is now carrying, so bravely

and delicately:

a future meal for her family and friends,

pilgrims, like her,

of the almost-nothing

her people.” (Amaral 9)

Amaral gifts this ant with personal narrative and personality through the use of adjectives and interiority. Additionally, the story grows to a global scale in the last few lines. The diction of “pilgrim” and “her people” invite me to consider who this ant might represent. Is this a woman delivering sustenance for her impoverished family? Where have they traveled from and why are they in a position of near-nothingness? Perhaps reality weighs on her each night when she goes to sleep, scrambling for solutions for the next day. In just a few words, a seemingly simple poem expands to a vast cultural context of mass global migration and the depth every person carries every day.

Even more, Amaral’s natural subjects in “Almost eclogues” curiously balance optimism and existential dread as they reflect on existence. In “The peacock: on flying and usefulness,” the awkward flyer’s “fan is a reminder of paradise” (Amaral 25), even though it’s a paradise lost. While it’s a bittersweet moment, the peafowl still falls for his colors and bravado despite the lack of utility in his dramatic feathers. I can’t help but cheer on the peacock, who’s only doing what’s necessary to survive. Amaral further emphasizes this point by bringing a prolific scientific mind into the conversation, noting how

“Darwin knew,

even though he didn’t write poetry,

that beauty is just that:

useless, with no apparent reason

to sustain it.” (25)

This peacock simply wants to mate so as to continue his line, yet Amaral textures the narrative. She doesn’t invent falsehoods to entertain readers, instead guiding our attention to places previously overlooked. Seemingly pessimistic, the peacock recognizes his poor flying ability; on the other hand, he knows of paradise and beauty—both worth fighting for, no matter how imperfect. Amaral, therein, promotes a shift in focus, asking: reader, can you embrace the world, no matter how unexpected?

For the ant, the peacock, and countless other fauna from World, Amaral does not suggest pursuing survival without care for others; the desire to live unites all living beings, no matter how different in appearance or belief. She also considers what is left behind: what has humanity inherited from history? And when each of the nearly eight billion people on Earth dies, what will be left for future generations of all species? A large epistemological pondering is brilliantly made metaphor in “Sunflower.” In this brief poem, Amaral asks,

“if a sunflower alighted

on this piece of paper

and tore it

what would be left,

the sun in the sky—

stock-still—

or the paper

stunned and

dizzy?” (31)

Within nine lines, Amaral advocates for a total embracing of light, to metaphorically stare at the sun and be curious about the unknown. While far, the sun keeps us alive and should not be deemed distant. World reminds us of the preciousness of life, and to embrace interior and private worlds (truths) as equally as the shared planet (interconnectedness). For Amaral, to live is a marvel, a miracle.

World is available at New Directions Publishing

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She won Breakwater Review‘s 2022 Peseroff Prize and earned a 2022-2023 Poetry Fellowship from The Writers’ Room of Boston. Her writing has found homes in Gasher, Solstice Lit, Thrush, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Emerson College, where she now teaches writing and literature. She is a cancer survivor.

Lyric Essentials: Kara Dorris Reads Molly McCully Brown

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Kara Dorris joins us to discuss the work of Molly McCully Brown, video games as a source of inspiration for titles, metaphor, and disability poetics. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?

Kara Dorris: When choosing which poems to read from Brown’s The Virgina State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, I decided to pick the first poem, a proem, titled “Central Virginia Training Center.” This poem does the work of a great first poem by setting up a personal connection and reaching towards the broader, universal truth of disability as a social construction. “New Knowledge for the Dark” takes on the persona of an inmate and explores the abuse, the dehumanizing that has occurred in many psychiatric institutions around the country. In contrast, “Without a Mind” takes on the persona of a worker making their rounds, showing an ingrained ableism, a seemingly integrated presumption that disability is punishment for sin and a waste of a life. Each poem is compelling, revealing yet another injustice, and I can’t recommend this collection enough.

RW: Your collection, HitBox, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2024. What does this collection explore and what was your writing process like?

KD: HitBox feels very different from my previous two collections—it feels angrier, less ready to accept what we are told by so-called authority figures yet hopeful that empathy, inclusiveness, and equality will triumph. As I wrote these poems over the past few years, I didn’t really consider it as a “book” or think to connect the poems consciously. But when it came time to arrange a manuscript, I noticed the violence, I noticed the questioning and the hitting occurring within the poems. I struggled with a unifying theme—beyond punches and feminist anger. Then I came across the term “hit box” used in video games and lightning struck. A hit box is the space around an avatar that registers when a punch lands, or when your avatar scores a hit and the connecting points. This hit box seemed the perfect metaphor for the “hits” the world throws our way, that knock us off our axis. Plus, I am constantly annoyed at the skimpy, over-sexualization of female video game characters, so a cohesive, angry, and hopeful book was born.

Kara Dorris reads “New Knowledge for the Dark” by Molly McCully Brown

RW: When was the first time you read Brown’s work? Why did it stand out to you? How has their writing inspired your own?

KD: This is Brown’s first poetry collection, and I think the title is what really drew me in at first: The Virgina State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Since then, I have also read her essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body. Writing the disabled experience is challenging; oftentimes, disabled writers are considered too narrow or too personal or as trying to elicit pity. Oftentimes when disability is portrayed it focuses on the individual disability or impairment, not the social construction of disability that makes it hard to navigate through this world. Wonderfully, Brown’s collection shows disability as personal, but does not neglect the social stereotypes that create the larger experience of disability. Partly personal/speculative/what if—Brown wonders if she had been born just a few decades earlier, would she have ended up in this place? In this place where women were institutionalized forcibly sterilized, where patients were really inmates without rights or dignity. The poems are also part historical research—Brown embodies the voices that had no voice. Through persona poems—from wards and warders—we understand the helplessness of the inmates and ableist mindsets of those who assumed they knew what is best for the disabled population. I find this poetry collection fits into ideas of crip aesthetics, which shows that disability is socially constructed and celebrates differences; it shows the long history of forced institutionalization, even positioning us into locations such as the Blind Room and the Infirmary, inviting readers to walk through these doorways with the speakers, to never forget our harmful, ableist past. 

Kara Dorris reads “Without a Mind” by Molly McCully Brown

RW: Who else have you been reading lately, and who else has been inspiring you in your own craft?

KD: I think we should all read more disabled poets: Sheila Black, Stephanie Heit, Petra Kuppers, Rusty Morrison, Jillian Wiese, and torrin a. greathouse. All these poets have inspired my writing and the way I write about disability. Growing up no one mentioned disability, even though I was born with a genetic bone disorder. In graduate school, I was never offered a disability studies class or a literature class that interrogated disability representation. For a long time, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe my experiences, to put words to the socially constructed ideas of shame revolving around disability. These poets helped me find these words, and I will always be grateful. 

Read more from this interview at our Patreon

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body— which was published in the United States in June 2020 by Persea Books, and released in the United Kingdom in March of 2021 by Faber & Faber— and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020).

Purchase Places I’ve Taken My Body

Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press, as well as HitBox forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2024). She has also published five chapbooks: Elective Affinities (dancing girl press, 2011), Night Ride Home (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Sonnets from Vada’s Beauty Parlor & Chainsaw Repair (dancing girl press, 2018), Untitled Film Still Museum (CW Books, 2019), and Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, RHINO, Tinderbox, Tupelo Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Harpur Palate, Cutbank, Hayden Ferry Review, and Crazyhorse, among others as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Waxwing, Breath and Shadow, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com

Purchase When the Body is a Guardrail

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in HAD, The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Project Bookshelf: Halsey Hyer

A watercolor drawing of two orange milk crates filled with books. There is a wooden board on top of the crates also shelving books, only filling half of the board with an ornate bookend. The names and titles appearing on the text are from top-right to bottom left: Lorde, de la Paz, Duhamel, Satir, Weir-Soley, The Shell Game, Morrison, Wade, Pendas, Barnett, Harvey, Fleischmann, Oliver, Gongaware, Rankine, Florida, Pennsylvania, Beatty, Burroughs, We Want It All, Wen, Sharif, de Lima, Wang, Sargeson, Lamb, Goldman, Moore. The artist's signature reads: MENDING BENDER

This is a dedication to everyone who has ever helped me move all of my books and move all of my books and move all of my books and move all of my books.

Here is a watercolor depiction of the bookshelf of my heart, featuring names of people and places who’ve helped me curate my own shelves as I explore the worlds of words.

A best friend once said something like this to me: You might as well be married if you mix books; undoing something like that is worse than legal divorce. 

Between my partner and I, our home is host to over a thousand books, sprawling on makeshift milk crate shelves with boards I’ve hoarded for projects I haven’t thought up yet. Yes, our books are all mixed up. Not only are they mixed up, they aren’t even organized, ha!

I’ve heard a rumor that a thousand books make a library, and five hundred makes the essence of a library. I’ve never been happier to co-create an intimacy founded on curation, collection, sharing, and trust. 

Our shelves hold many, though here are the top hits: Audre Lorde, Marcus Rediker, T. Fleischmann, Jackie Wang, Ursula K. Le Guin, David Graeber, Philip K Dick, Kim Phillips-Fein, Virginia Satir, Lucas de Lima, Claudia Rankine, Augusten Burroughs, and—since fourteen, I’ve moved over twenty times. I lost almost everything twice. I retained a few things: my instruments, my books. This is one way of saying I haven’t always had a library. I’ve clung to books ever since I knew they were a tool into worlds otherwise unknown. 

Another way of saying is I have always had my copy of Alan Moore’s Watchmen—speculative science fiction depicting a world where the U.S. won the war in Vietnam and Nixon remains in office. Vigilantism becomes necessary because the government has, in an unsurprising succession of events, failed the public through the murder of The Comedian, a government-sponsored superhero.

I read Watchmen on the clock at the job whose paycheck I used to buy the book in the first place. I worked alone in a sizeable red-and-white department store, and we’d be dead for hours. No one would come to check on me. They’d ping me on the walkie, and I’d feign how dirty the soda machine hookups were as my fingers stuck to the pages of Alan Moore.  

I decided to begin collecting books seven years ago because Toi Derricotte’s The Undertaker’s Daughter and Aaron Smith’s Blue On Blue Ground grabbed me by the shirt and demanded that I have a reason to live and that reason’s name was poetry.

I forget often that my fingers stick to the pages of a book when everything else slips through them. 

A white non-binary person with short spiked brown hair is mid-sentence holding a microphone, arms and legs crossed. They have tattoos on their arms and legs, piercings on their face, many rings on their fingers, and a watch on their right wrist. They’re wearing black lipstick and a black and floral party dress with bedazzled fishnets. They are sitting on an orange barstool with their arms and legs crossed holding a microphone in mid-sentence. There is one empty orange barstool to their right and one to their left. There is a large wall of books behind them and a door to the right of the frame.

Halsey Hyer (they/them) is the author forthcoming full-length hybrid collection, Divorce Garter (Main Street Rag, 2024). Their microchapbook of micropoems, Everything Becomes Bananas (Rinky Dink Press, 2022), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023, and their debut chapbook, [deadname] (Anhinga Press, 2022), won the 2022 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Based in Pittsburgh, PA they’re a collective member of The Big Idea Bookstore and the 2022-2024 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow in Chatham University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Find out more on their website—www.halseyhyer.org.

Sundress Publications is Open for Full-Length Prose Manuscripts

Sundress Publications is open for submissions of full-length prose manuscripts in all genres. All authors are welcome to submit manuscripts during our reading period, which runs from December 1, 2023 – February 29, 2024. Sundress is particularly interested in prose collections that value genre hybridization, especially speculative memoir; strange or fractured narratives; flash fiction; experimental work; or work with strong attention to lyricism and language. These collections may be short stories, novellas, essays, memoir, or a mixture thereof.

We are looking for manuscripts of 125-165 double-spaced pages of prose; front matter is not included toward the page count. Individual stories may have been previously published in anthologies, chapbooks, print journals, online journals, etc., but cannot have appeared in any full-length collection, including self-published collections. Manuscripts translated from another language will not be accepted. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but we ask that authors notify us immediately if their work has been accepted elsewhere.

From December 1st to 14th, submissions to this open reading period are free for the first submission for any and all writers. Beginning December 15th, the reading fee is $15 per manuscript, though the fee will be waived for all writers of color and entrants who purchase or pre-order any Sundress title. Authors may submit as many manuscripts as they would like, provided that each is accompanied by a separate reading fee or purchase/pre-order. Entrants can place book orders or pay submission fees in our store.

All manuscripts will be read by members of our editorial and reader board, and we will choose one manuscript for publication in 2024. We strive to further our commitment to inclusion and seek to encounter as many unique and important voices as possible. We are actively seeking collections from writers of color, trans and nonbinary writers, writers with disabilities, and others whose voices are under-represented in literary publishing. Selected manuscripts will be offered a standard publication contract, which includes 25 copies of the published book as well as any additional copies at cost.

To submit, send us a 20-35 page sample of the manuscript (DOC, DOCX, or PDF); the sample should include the author’s name and an acknowledgements page. The sample may include one story/essay or a number of shorter pieces. After our initial selection process, semi-finalists will be asked to send the full manuscript in the spring.

Submit your manuscript samples to us here.

Please note that we are unable to accept manuscripts from authors who reside outside of the USA or Canada as we are unable to adequately support books in international markets.

Any questions or concerns, as well as withdrawal notifications, can be sent sundresscontest@gmail.com.

An Interview with José Angel Araguz, Author of Ruin & Want

Before the debut of his lyrical memoir, Ruin & Want, José Angel Araguz spoke with Sundress Publications’ editorial intern Izzy Astuto about artistic expression and the traumatic events that shaped him.

Izzy Astuto: How did you decide to first introduce L through the eyes of the narrator at the time girlfriend?

José Angel Araguz: This decision came via feedback from poet and dear friend Rivka Clifton, who noted that the project needed an entry point into what was at stake. Seeing it now that the project is completed, it was a great suggestion.

I see it as a moment of crisis similar to the sense of crisis in the rest of the project, a moment where different roles and kinds of masking I performed in my relationships clashed. In this moment of friction, all I had were questions I couldn’t take the time to answer because of the damage control I had to play, with my at the time girlfriend, with the image I had of myself that I fought to maintain.

IA: Can you speak more about how you chose the specific experiences throughout to create this narrative?

JAA: This book started as my creative dissertation during my time earning a Ph.D. in creative writing and comparative literature from the University of Cincinnati. My focus was on Latinx/e poetics and hybrid forms, which had me indulging my fascination for writing forms. This timing would have the first draft of the book circa 2017. I had tried often to write about these experiences, the relationship with L in particular, but often found myself fraught with indecision and inarticulation. Some part of me wouldn’t allow myself to say it clearly—there was a sense of shame, guilt, responsibility, etc. that kept me starting over only to end up thwarted again.

As a lapsed Catholic, I believe I just wanted to self-flagellate (which makes for terrible reading, haha). When I began working on what would become the first draft, I was struck by the idea of fragmentation and juxtaposition as formal means to bring together various narratives. From there, I worked out that while the relationship with L would be the focus, it could also be used as a lens to engage with the ways the harm from being involved with L had played out in me. So, instead of shame and self-flagellation, the goal became naming what happened and acknowledging it as a part of my history, a part of myself, for better or worse.

One of the other sources of thwarting was the fear that by writing about it I would vilify L in an unfair way. Lines were crossed, yes, and naming them is enough; vilifying someone, especially in creative nonfiction, however, implies that there is a hero to that villain. What I felt/feel having survived that relationship and its effects is complicated, for sure, but I don’t feel like a hero. I feel like a ruin, so many scraps of identity, none of them cohering.

Only now, 23 years later, do I feel I am doing the work to bring these pieces together. By doing the work to name what happened I had to get over myself. An example of that is in the use of the word survivor, that for the longest time I wouldn’t let myself see myself as that. I also wouldn’t let myself call what L did to me predatory. Yet, after being an educator for a number of years and engaging in that space where learning happens, I couldn’t ignore the thought that arose that L was in the same position I was and made the choices she made.

I can’t imagine crossing the same lines with any of my students, can’t imagine betraying the trust of being looked at for help and resources and building, and twisting it into something selfish and harmful.

Reflecting and dwelling on the complexities of thoughts like this forced me to see how the story of L wasn’t just the story of L, but also the story of my youth being stunted; was also the story of my family as authority figures that helped me survive but also harmed me through their homophobia; was also the story of my confused, misguided young self that went through early relationships in college and after that was marked by efforts to dismantle toxic masculinity within me while also trying to live up to toxic masculinity’s idea of what makes a man; was also the story of a white woman doing harm to a brown boy, the racial and power imbalance something that follows me to this day; was also the story of dismantling not just toxic masculinity in its social forms but also in their academic and literary forms, how someone like e.e. cummings is beloved yet when you read deep into his work and biography you learn he was cringe; was also the story of a man having an eating disorder, something that gets discredited due to the same toxic heteronormative gender binary people use to discredit men who have experienced sexual abuse.

Really, in a way, the 2017 draft was the outpouring of material, and the time since then to publication has been organizing, editing, and discovering the story from the ruins, so to speak.

IA: When did the almost syncopated format of this book come to be?

JAA: Syncopated—what a great word! That feels right. As you can tell from above, the living/writing of this book was messy! From the start I wanted this to be a distinct reading experience, one marked by fragmentation and juxtaposition. I wanted the reading experience to be like walking across an old wood floor, each passage a step inviting creaks and give. That’s what it felt like writing it, like I was up at a time no one else was and didn’t want to disturb anyone or draw attention to myself.

At one point in the memoir, I talk about trying to write of L and looking over my shoulder anxiously. Part of how this effect was created was formally through the lack of essay titles and the brevity of passages. I also approached this effect conceptually. A number of early drafts had me printing out the manuscript in a “shrunken” form (four pages per page) and cutting those pages up so that the manuscript looked like a deck of tarot cards. I then shuffled and reshuffled, literally, inviting chance to help guide the mix of narratives.

IA: Can you talk about chapter five, the abandoned manuscript, and why you came back to it for this book? Why was it abandoned?

JAA: Hadn’t thought about it as abandoned but that’s a good word for it. As if my list earlier, re:the stories that connected to the story of L, wasn’t expansive enough, from the start I intuited that these devil riffs I had in my files were related. I had started working on the devil riffs in 2011 after reading Luc Ferry’s A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living. In it, he referenced the idea of “diabolos” or “the who who divides.” I remember writing that down in my notebook and thinking about it every once in a while, riffing on ideas of division and duality in free writes. The more I wrote, the more I felt that I wasn’t writing about religion directly, instead taking the devil on as a lens, how we humanize the devil and project onto them everything from our misdeeds to an idealized swagger and power.

So, the breakthrough of using one narrative as a lens with which to approach other narratives was practiced with the devil first. When I began working on what would be the first draft of this book, the devil riffs naturally came to mind as an element to put in play, at the time as foil, at other times as confidant. It was around this time, too, that the moment happened where the word devil was confused for double—a natural moment in conversation that made it into the world of the book. Every draft of this book had these devil riffs (I keep calling them riffs as they never felt like poems but more that they borrow from philosophy and aphorism) scattered throughout.

They always stood out to folks who read the manuscript, the reactions a mix of confusion and amusement. The idea of bringing them all together under one title came late in the process, and was born after reading an article about books that don’t exist. As I read it, it occurred to me that the devil riffs were their own book within a book, so I tried a draft with it. Once I saw them all together, I was inspired to add some further riffing, turning out what you see in the final version.

This move allowed the role of the devil to be clear while also engaging with the ambiguity in the way that I envisioned. This book within a book allowed for a different voice from the main speaker of the manuscript. This shift also allowed the devil voice to address a “you” which is both me and the reader of the book, which is eerie (I hope). Suddenly the devil is not just the usual projections and excuses (the devil made me do it) but also devil as conscience, devil as speaking in a more assertive register than the speaker elsewhere.

Note, too, that the devil says things that L turns out to have said, and also riffs against some of the speaker’s own words. Here, again, the idea of the double. The play of “Devil or nothing” was one of the final things to be written. I suppose that the manuscript is abandoned in order to enact the “nothing” half of it.

IA: Were there any parts of this that felt uniquely difficult to write about?

JAA: All of it, haha! I mean, what I’ve shared so far about the process of writing this book I hope shows the lengths I was willing to go both in terms of writing craft but also personal growth as well. I knew I had my work cut out for me when my dissertation committee (all white cis-het males) responded to the book by calling it “sexy.” Soon as I heard that response, I realized that I had written it all wrong. My goal hadn’t been to write some Henry Miller-esque text that exalted in toxic heteronormativity, and yet, that was what I had written. Through my formal education, it was all I knew how to write. It was yet another lesson of trusting myself to write from my authentic self rather than some perceived, white idea of literariness.

This has always been the struggle, to write the thing in the way only I can write it. Academia and creative writing are very white spaces. I mean, I’ve shared that my focus for the Ph.D. were Latinx/e poetics and hybrid forms, but I ended up fielding questions about T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the translations of Richard Howard—none of which were on my reading lists or were written about in my exams. I specifically dived into my studies to ground myself in Latinx/e traditions and yet here I was having to talk about the frkn Wasteland and Whitman. That’s what I mean by calling these spaces white. It’s an influence so pervasive that marginalized writers have to actively dismantle and seek out other traditions. The other aspect that felt distinctly difficult to write about was my queerness as it relates to my family.

Only now that the project is done am I able to see the implications of what I named in this project, specifically the homophobia inherit not just in my family but in Latinx/e culture in general. It’s something I teach about—how Latinidad is an imperfect concept and needs to be regarded as living and in need of critique as well as efforts toward restorative justice for its inherent anti-Blackness and homophobia—but in the same way that I wouldn’t let myself see myself as a survivor, I haven’t been able to see myself as affected by it. Only recently have I allowed myself to own my queerness, and with the positive of acceptance necessarily comes the acknowledgment of what kept me from accepting myself.

IA: Can you speak more on the juxtaposition of sex and violence in this book?

JAA: What’s that Tolstoy quote? “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s not enough to say I grew up in a dysfunctional family as every family dysfunctions differently.

I grew up with the United States version of toxic masculinity fed to me through TV and school, but I also inherited machismo through my family. I was raised by two strong women, my mom and my tia, who through their love and hard work helped keep me alive, and yet, even without the presence of a man in the house, machismo crept through the sexualized, gendered teasing I’d receive and the gendered expectations of what a man should be. That’s the insidious nature of patriarchal violence; we pass it on unintentionally if we’re not careful.

There’s also the violence of systemic oppression, of growing up below the poverty line, of living with the fear of border patrol and INS. I knew I didn’t want to perpetuate toxic stereotypes of the male gaze but more the violence and harm people cause each other through ignorance and despite good intentions (along with bad intentions). There’s also the violence of an eating disorder, a condition of self-harm tinged and/or urged on, in some part, by sexual desire, the need to be attractive.

I name all this to say that some of what I’m interrogating here is the ways in which sex and violence imply each other. That it’s not a simple thing. The first night L touched me physically didn’t have to happen; and when it did happen, there was the intimacy of sex as well as the intrusion of violence, of crossed lines. I guess I’m saying the book is messy because life is which is something I don’t want to have to say, mainly because it’s what scholars say to excuse and justify Eliot’s Wasteland.

IA: Considering the narrator’s struggles with family and identity, how did you approach queerness and forming communities in Ruin & Want?

JAA: I’m noting that there’s a theme in my responses, that of unpacking and de-obfuscating what the story/stories of this manuscript were. As I spoke of earlier, my queerness wasn’t part of the original mix, not really. I did try to include some vague gestures toward queerness early on, but it fell flat. Not until I was able to acknowledge within myself that I am queer was I able to own the experiences and the relevant narratives. A lot of the block for myself—both in my life and on the page—was formed by violence. I spoke earlier of the homophobia in my family and the Latinx/e community, but there were also harmful interactions with supposed friends, would- be partners. Lots of blurred lines and toxic denial and judgment.

When Sundress Publications picked up the manuscript, that acceptance led to a whole other chunk of the book coming into being. Literally, SP’s acceptance gave me permission to accept myself. There were countless times when I almost shelved this manuscript for good. I would have these thoughts in my head: Does the world need another man writing about his sex life Does the world need a man taking up space talking about his survival of sexual abuse when there are more dire, more legitimate cases of abuse that need to be discussed?

The publishing world as well as academia give you plenty of opportunity for self-erasure. If not careful, you can edit yourself and your manuscript out of existence. It was only after I took the time to realize what the story was that I was telling—that it was a queer narrative, that I was a survivor—and let myself see myself in those terms, and see my family, and see L—only because of all that work was I able to keep going and see this manuscript through.

The acceptance by Sundress sparked a deeper revision. It also let me know community was out there. I want to give a shout-out as well to Elizabeth J. Colen who gave an encouraging response to the manuscript early on. Meant the world to me. Another thing about community: so much of the road to writing to the end of this book has been realizing not just that I’ve been queer this whole time, but that I’ve been creating community along the way. I have another poet and dear friend, Temple Loveli, who recently encouraged me not to discredit my queerness.

For the longest time I thought in terms of not wanting to take up space, that even if I was queer, I didn’t belong, that there were others more deserving of that space than me. See again how we can erase ourselves long before anyone can try to erase us? I hadn’t thought of my family erasing me in this way, that whenever they were homophobic I just took it as cultural, the way of the world, but that my unease in those moments was a sign of being erased, of something being wrong, which there was socially, but also that there was something wrong happening personally to me.

IA: Why did you name the last section “epilogue,” rather than an eighth chapter?

JAA: I wanted to mark a shift in tone and perspective, that the narrative whirlwind was dying down and some sense of closure for the reader (if not the speaker) was in sight. Also, I feel like the I in this section is more assertive, doing the work to make clear connections across narratives, less of letting the reader do the work.

IA: How did you decide to end the book with another poet’s words? In this case, with Yeats?

JAA: I have Samantha Edmonds (Associate Prose Editor at Sundress Publications) to thank for that ending. In some of the later drafts, the epilogue section was a little too on the nose, a lot of underscoring my intentions in the book rather than letting them ring and resonate. When she pointed out the image in the Yeats reference as a possible ending, it felt right.

There’s also that quote about all of us being in the gutter only some of us are looking at the stars—there’s some of that in that last line. Also the feeling that the reading experience of this book is a “blur” of memory and narrative that leaves us looking at the “stars.” That starts as things romanticized but also, as the devil tells us in the book, they are things that are “dead inside” as well. That mix of darkness and light, hope and nihilism, pues, that’s where I live.

Ruin & Want is available to order on the Sundress website.

José Angel Araguz, PhD is the author most recently of Rotura (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). His poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, The Acentos Review, and Oxidant | Engine, among other places. He serves as an Assistant Professor at Suffolk University, where he is the Editor-in-Chief of Salamander, and is also a faculty member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. He blogs and reviews books at The Friday Influence

Izzy Astuto (he/they) is a writer currently majoring in Creative Writing at Emerson College. When not in Boston for college, they live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His work has previously been published by Hearth and Coffin, Sage Cigarettes, and Renesme Literary, amongst others. When not writing, he can often be found watching movies and crocheting.