Following the release of his debut e-chapbook, So Rain, Christian Yeo Xuan spoke with Nafisa Hussain about the collection’s meditations on love, grief, migration, and belonging. Here, they discussed the title’s poetics of overwhelm and risk, the porous boundaries between familial and chosen love, the entanglement of personal and political pain, and the recurring imagery of birds, rain, light, and trees as ways of approaching masculinity, memory, survival, and longing for community.

Nafisa Hussain: What is the significance of the title So Rain, especially in relation to the final line of “Road Trip Sonnet”? 

Christian Yeo Xuan: On the one vibes-based hand, the title is pretty. On the other less vibes-based hand, it’s a nod to overwhelm (syntactically compressing “so let it rain…”, or “so it rains…”). Rain itself is laden with metaphorical significances but it can also be a vehicle for other metaphorical significances (“a rain of light”, “a rain of knives”, “a rain of Jacob Elordi lookalikes,” etc.). It’s a sensation of being caught in something, there’s a phenomenon that happens to you, that you have little control over. On the other hand (I’m on three hands now but don’t let that bother you), it’s a form of belligerence, a demand for the rain, for what’s behind the cipher of rain. In lyric as in life I try to dive head-first into moments of gnarly density, even if it takes years to parse through them, even if it takes many palimpsests. Those moments feel the most fruitful, they’re where the magic happens. I have a good friend, Jessie, who says that in the long run, intensity is the most important thing in any which direction or vector. Another friend, Nina, recently said that it’s important not to lead a seasonless life, which I wrote down immediately. So, I mean, the title is defiant—it’s a refusal to shell up, it’s a poetics of risk, of swinging at the fences. 

NH: What would you say are the distinctions and similarities between familial and chosen love within this collection? 

CYX: Clichés are terrible, but some clichés are true—love is love, right? I try to elide the distinction between familial and chosen love. In both cases, the stakes are high, you start to feel interconnected, you live and die for another person, and then that ebbs and flows, because it has to, because that’s how it goes. I think if you love someone, and that someone is your family, of any description, geography solves nothing. You’re going to love that person regardless. The same inherent human dramas play themselves out. If there’s any difference, it’s manifestational. You can betray given family the most, inasmuch as you might also drop everything to show up at their doorstep. It’s the most socially legible, right? So, you’re socially allowed to sacrifice, but also to constrain. Compulsed even, in certain societies. Chosen family is a bit more free and freeing, but it can end up occupying the same space. You end up rehearsing the same stakes. 

NH: What is the significance between personal and political pain in pieces like “Snippet #15” and “Snippet #7”? 

CYX: Both snippets try to pull focus on the political by looking at the personal. It’s that old truism that the more specific something is, the more universal. I mean, I could have had poems that paraphrased Omar El Akkad and ended with “Free Palestine”, but instead I tried to localize these poems to this very specific moment in time in the town of Taanayel, in the Beqaa Valley, embedded in the Syrian and Palestinian refugee crises. “Snippet #15” relies on a sleight-of-hand, it tries to set up a familiar narrative frame. It has all these funny details about Tomiyasu and BTS, and then it pulls the rug out from under you. I think it tries to reflect the pain of, like, Syrian refugees who live in tents for ten years and stop going to school. There isn’t a hierarchy of suffering, but it’d be remiss to focus on this East Asian speaker. “Snippet #7” uses the persona poem to enter a poem of witness sideways. I struggled with this poem for a long time, and then the persona unlocked it for me. I think because it’s so absurd, it was the only way I knew to apprehend that level of suffering, of what it means even to witness that. Both these poems use the Yanyi prose-poem as a way of holding horizontal thinking. Ultimately, all pain is political, and an apolitical aesthetics is window-dressing—it’s a total waste of time. We live in a time of genocide. It is frankly a joke to be apolitical. You have to look at the war machine and do something about it. You either love something or you don’t. There’s no point making excuses. 

NH: Birds are mentioned in multiple poems, whether that be ducks, geese, ladybirds, or as a metaphor in “Poem in Which the Father is the Metaphor.” What drew you to this choice? 

CYX: I don’t know, is it my hyper-fixation on peregrine falcons? My love for Vulfpeck? My brother’s childhood encounter with a pelican? Jurong Bird Park? On a more serious note, I think a sense of being caged carries through many of these poems, of carrying a held-in rage born of a lifetime spent suppressing the will. I think birds are this cipher of everything that the speaker does not have—and if you think about the image of the person watching the bird, in that scene, the bird is in flight, while the speaker is not. If I had to guess, it would be that I envied them, the birds. They have no separation between their real life and their daily life. They are not waiting to be free. They just are. 

NH: Why does certain nature imagery, such as rain, light, and trees recur across multiple poems? 

CYX: It’s got to be the poets I love—Louise Glück and Jean Valentine use so much nature imagery, and then, of course, Victoria Chang, Aria Aber, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Carl Phillips, so on and so forth. You are what you read, etc. I think there’s also something unruined about natural phenomena, that someone who mostly kicks it in urban spaces is drawn to. Some of the most mesmeric encounters I’ve ever had have been with nature, in expanses of quiet. It’s funny, because I’m very prone to animal imagery in fiction. I don’t know why. I’ll ask the trees. 

NH: Could you discuss your choice to work across a variety of different poetic styles? 

CYX: I read an interview today where Yasmin Zaher said that one of the best ways to create a character’s downfall is to give them an obsession, which bodes well for my tangling with form. To me, form is substance. It gives you an entryway into a poem that gets closer to the heart of the thing. With what Diane Seuss and Terrance Hayes have done with the contemporary sonnet, the pressurized container gives you an opportunity. Sound and rhythm are pleasurable, which I’m sensitive to after spending all my teens listening to hip-hop. Punctuation and breath, particularly between stanzas, are really important to me. Over the last few years, I’ve also come into contact with more visual artists than ever, including my friend aj, who was always busy yapping my ear off about installations and topography. I’ve spent a lot of time perambulating around galleries being weirdly drawn to abstract expressionism and wondering why. But maybe all of this is retroactive; it’s really about the poets I kick it or have kicked it with, all of whom are pushing the boundaries of what poem can do, what poetry is, for the possibility of song to carry the truth, or a truth, of the mystery of lived experience. I’m extraordinarily lucky that some of my favorite poets are my friends. What I know about topography, I owe to Aishvarya. What I know about strangeness is from Will and Imogen. The fictive poem, I learned from Annalisa. What I know of compression, I owe forever to Lis. My biggest inspiration is the crew. What luck. I don’t take that for granted at all. 

NH: Could you expand on the duality between tenderness and tension within brotherhood? 

CYX: Being a boy is a funny thing. I’m at an art residency in La Plata now, near Buenos Aires, and spent the afternoon drinking maté and watching Arsenal round up the EPL title with Dabi, who’s a screenwriter from Honduras. I grew up in boys’ schools until I was sixteen, and my friends and I thought of ourselves as a brotherhood; I think we literally used that term. This sat nicely alongside my three brothers, who are some of my best friends in the world. Unfortunately, I think masculinity is a tricky thing—even if you love each other, your id is playing against trauma, you always have to hedge against the possibility that other men are going to punish you for your soft belly. You even have the tools and language of violence for that; in Singapore, the language of the military trickles down through everything. Back in high school, friendships were so intense, it was like I love you, you’re my brother, we’ll be together forever, it’s us till the end, backs against the wall, this kind of thing. Male loneliness epidemics feared us. The boys I ran with were so angry, but I would see them cry. And smoke in the toilet, and cry. People’s dads were beating them up. They listened to so much Death Cab for Cutie, and played football at the back of the class, and stuffed shit in the ceilings, and hit each other’s dicks to say hi. It was a very specific time, an education in a centrifuge of sorts, the duality continuing into adulthood. I think it was Sophie Mackintosh who said, “what is a boy but a hurtable man?” 

NH: How do the poems navigate the complexity between familial harm and familial love? 

CYX: I don’t want to be all hand-wavey and “two things can be true at once”, but I think I do have to get all hand-wavey and “two things can be true at once.” “Grace” is, I think, the only poem of mine my friend Iris likes; she brings it up all the time apropos of nothing, like, I’ll literally send her something new and she’ll say, “I love the one with the tigers.” That’s an example of a poem where the two operate in parallel at all times. I think the Yanyi prose-poem is great for horizontal thinking because negative space encourages quick jumps. There’s also “Masculinity Studies,” which is my friend Lis’ favorite. The lyric essay allowed me to build on long lines and recurring sonic moves, to fritter back and forth between harm and love, like an otter. It’s easy to rely on stereotypes and Kit Chan’s 天冷就回来 to pontificate about blood being thicker than water, implicating brutality and tenderness and KTV mandopop songs where the instrumentals are way too long, that sort of thing, but I think that might just be an ocean of nonsense, a well-adjusted, stakes-less, middle-class fantasy. You have to look at the penumbra, where reasons end. You have to look at the ebbs and the flows. 

NH: Which of these poems is held closest to your heart? Are there any in particular that were difficult to express with words? 

CYX: Probably “Ars Poetica (When I keep learning you, something breaks).” When I moved to Paris, I had just finished two years of conscription in the army, and I got into my first ever residential writing workshop. I was really thirsting for community with people who were serious about poetry, and who also I could, like, kick it with. In Paris, I had attended this poetry workshop in the basement of a bar in 11eme, and it was full of these really unserious geezers, save for two friends whom I kept, Nico and Victor. But I got a grant to go to Kenyon, so I went, and there were these incredible poets with The Gift, and it was this gorgeous, alphabet-mafia-run, green oasis in the middle of Gambier, Ohio, and I felt like I was on the cusp of a new thing, and everyone was really funny, and we wrote and workshopped and had drinks, and I wrote “Ars Poetica” there. Then I did a road trip with my friends Aishvarya and Eileen back to New York. I mean, it was perfect. Kenyon changed my life for all kinds of reasons—it gave me my road trip buddies, and Will, Jessie, Imogen, Annalisa, Tangie—it threw a hammer into the heart of my poems and reconstituted whatever it touched. I was never the same again. The other one that’s close to my heart is “i think i call it dreaming, but,” but I’ll leave that story to the birds. 

To answer your other question: “After the After” was difficult to write. The chemistry lab at my high school was this awful place, it felt like where all souls went to die. A couple of times, I went after playing football and everyone was sweaty, it was all cheap deodorant, like the Adidas kind from Queensway, with fruits in the name. I might be misremembering. I used to be terrible at lighting the Bunsen burner; I could never remember whether the hole had to be open or closed, and when we had to light a petri dish or something. I would turn around to chat shit with my friend, and by the time I turned back around, all the ammonium chloride would have disappeared, like an avoidant boyfriend, and I would be like, what? And have to redo the whole thing, including the bit about the Bunsen burner, and going like, what? And that’s what writing “After the After” felt like—I turned back around, and all my memories had disappeared. 

So Rain is available to download online!

Christian Yeo Xuan is a writer based in Singapore by way of Paris and Beirut. His work has been published or is forthcoming in ANMLY, Indiana Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Oxford Poetry, and New Singapore Poetries, among others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize and has placed or been a finalist for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award, Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, and the Bridport Prize. A Fall ’25 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, he has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, Tin House, Berlin Writers’ Workshop, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. He holds a BA in Law from Cambridge. 

Nafisa Hussain (she/her) holds a BSc in Anthropology and Sociology from Brunel University, where she primarily focused her work on race issues in the UK. She has published book reviews in the Hillingdon Herald Newspaper and volunteers for the Books2Africa charity.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Shelby Hansen. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, August 30th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/poetryxfit.

Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!

Shelby Hansen is a creative writer and self-proclaimed fantasy maestro hailing from the northern plains of Texas. She recently graduated from the University of Tennessee’s English program with a focus in Literature and Creative Writing, where she won several awards for her fiction. Her writing often focuses on womanhood, identity, and the reclamation of the self through a speculative lens. This is reflected in her debut novel, which she hopes to publish soon. When she is not writing or teaching today’s youth, she enjoys reading, crocheting, swimming, and spending time with her two cats, Stella and Gemma.

While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Giving Shape: Retrospection & Projection in Personal Essays,” a workshop led by April Sopkin on Wednesday, August 12th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Reigster for the event today!

When we attempt to reiterate personal experience on the page, we often stick too closely to the facts and forget that the passage of time gives shape to the telling. We create “shape” in many ways, including a unique structure, imagery or sensory repetition, or playing with retrospective parallels. More than that, we forget that personal narrative is also about wonderment, and on the page this can look like an imagined projection of the future: hopes, assumptions, fears, expectations. In other words, the parts of the story that—before this point of arriving at the page—only existed within our hearts and minds.

We’ll use four essay excerpts to study how authors have used retrospection and projection in their work, then we’ll practice those same moves through guided prompts. Students will come away with a new or renewed understanding of specific craft mechanics and new angles to approach their own ideas.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly April Sopkin via Venmo @asopkin

April Sopkin writes fiction and personal essays. She was the 2024-25 writer-in-residence at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, and was awarded a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant to support her in-process short story collection. Her work has appeared in Joyland, MIT Technology Review, Carve, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 Tin House Scholar and has won the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, the Patricia Aakhus Award, and the TSR Nonfiction Prize. She writes Something Out of Nothing, a regular newsletter about seeking meaning in a multifaceted life.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.

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.

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. 

Bloodroom is available to purchase on the Sundress website

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.

One of the first books I was deeply affected by was William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reading it in an early year of high school, I was struck by the narrative style and how it showed the universal experience that all we know is shaped by all we’ve already known. This fascination and obsession with perspective only grew from there, since playing a remarkable role in the books I love most. 

Today, the favorites on my bookshelf still lend themselves to this defining characteristic, but they sit alongside many others as well. Political theory books, research books from my undergrad, books I received as gifts, and aspirational books that I haven’t gotten around to yet. For me, books are one of the only things I’ll allow myself to buy whenever I wish. This has created the effect that often, when I want something new to read, I can go to the library that I’ve begun to curate of books I want to read but haven’t yet. 

One of those classics on the shelf is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which was the next memorable book I loved. For similar reasons as Faulker’s book, the fragmented, post-modern narrative resonated with me. One of my all-time favorites on the shelf is Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson’s work tells the story of the Great Migration, but tells a true history through the individual stories of three different migrants. Her extensive research and detailed storytelling have the effect of recounting a major shift in American history through poetic narrative. What provoked me about Wilkerson’s book was also what provoked me about my more contemporary favorites: the use of individual experience to exemplify the effects of living through history and political change.

Currently, I’m obsessed with books and genres that live mostly in reality, with a tinge of magical realism. Sometimes, these are the classics, like Isabel Allende and Julio Cortázar. One of my favorite short stories is “Apocalipsis de Solentiname,” a short story by Cortázar which explores dark magical realism and political unrest. However, László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance achieves something akin to this feeling of magical realism in its own dark but insightful world. Krasznahorkai paints an apocalyptic world. He does so not in a broad setting, but in nuanced details of how his characters feel and see; the apocalypse isn’t something that hits them all at once, but a state of emotion and divinity that they live under. 

I love this apocalyptic writing for the same reason that I love magical realist writing: I understand these worlds with little tinges of fantasy and strangeness as much more akin to the world we live in now than a more “realistic” fiction. These edges that are colored differently, a world that is painted to be almost too vivid, resonates more with the great miraculousness, but also the great catastrophe, of the real world. These tinges of fantasy reflect something sacred in human life, whether you want to call it divinity, emotion, or the human experience.

Leila Tilin (she/her) is an aspiring writer and researcher, and she holds a BA from Pitzer College, where she studied American Studies and Spanish. She has a particular interest in writing and learning about the intersection of religious belief and politics. Tilin finds this convergence to be at times detrimentally dangerous, at others, astoundingly hopeful. She is interested in literature as a means for inquiry into belief systems and as a mode to participate in the creation of meaning in the world.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Rosa Castellano. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, July 26th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/poetryxfit

Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!

The theme for July’s Xfit is “Snippets.” Before this month’s Xfit, try to keep your ears open. Bring along a few snippets of overheard dialogue or conversations to spark ideas for new poems. If things have been quiet in your life, a favorite lyric or literary line will do just as well!

Originally from Tampa, Fl, Rosa Castellano is the co-founder of the Richmond Poetry Festival and one of two Poet Laureates currently working on poetry projects for the city of Richmond VA. Her writing appears in Poetry Northwest, Guernica, Bomb, Write or Die, and Lit Hub among others. Her debut poetry collection, All is the Telling, is available now from Diode editions.

While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “The Dis-Form: Disability and the Embodied Mode,” a workshop led by Abigail Raley on Wednesday, July 8th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can register for the event here.

In “The Poetics of Disobedience,” Alice Notley says, “Like many writers I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don’t work, I know they aren’t it.” Notley is using what she calls the “Dis word” or the “Dis form,” that is, what language is not, what we cannot do, what we must refuse. Notley’s “Dis form” is especially evocative when paired with a long history of expansive, disabled poetics. We are encouraged, through Notley’s “Dis word,” to imagine the inabilities of language and the body, constraints which allow us to imagine beyond our realities. In this workshop, we will take the inabilities of our languages and our bodies and use these as dis-modes to generate new, original work. By emphasizing what the body cannot do, we will attempt to complicate a poetics of embodiment.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Abigail Raley via Venmo: @Abigail-Raley-2

Abigail Raley (she/they) is a writer from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Her work has appeared in The Offing, HAD, Hanging Loose Magazine, The Stone Circle Review, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. They are a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2026 artist resident at Ragdale Residency. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and is pursuing her PhD at Case Western Reserve University. Their debut poetry collection, Wet Specimen, was published with Sundress Publications in 2026.