Here On Earth (NYQ Books 2026) is a raw collection of poetry that explores the hauntingly complex and beautiful experience that is life as we know it. Tony Gloeggler explores a system of themes regarding death, grief, health, aging, love, and familial ties, all of which are the most intricate yet humane ideologies we face at one point or another. The writing forms a vision about the growing pains that we experience throughout our lifetimes, brought on by connection and aging.
To think of what the title Here On Earth meant is a powerful idea on its own; I mean, what do I experience here on this moving planet? How big and expansive, yet so small and connected? After my own pondering, I was instantly pulled into the work and hit with a powerful composition of human experience. This book allowed me to walk through the lens of another’s perspective, to feel their grief and nostalgia, and for a moment, it felt wholly my own. That is the praise I want to emphasize about the collection–that the work is unique in its own perspective but written in a way that conveys connectedness through the aspects of life that are familiar to most. I adored the simplicity of the storytelling that twists itself into the existential ideology of what it means to live.
One poem that embodied the way our lives are so interconnected yet uniquely different is “Still Alright.” The poem starts off with the mention of a friend who has a seemingly traditional family unit, experiencing the paternal phase where his children think they have outgrown the need for his love and advice. This is the part that captured my attention at first, something I have experienced in my lifetime: dodging my mother’s kisses and avoiding her guiding words, rejecting the idea that we still need our parents. It’s not until we grow a tad older that we realize how much we still need the comfort they bring us. This poem really is ingrained with that parental love, but also shows that it can be given and needed in a not-so-traditional example. This is seen in lines like:
sad as he talks about his kids turning into teenagers, the girl who won’t lean over in the front seat to kiss his cheek when he drops
her off at school, afraid her friends can see, his son no longer wanting to play backyard basketball, a game of HORSE, sitting at the dinner table, head down staring at his phone, one word answers seasoned with annoyance.
Following the stanza about his friend Tony, we are introduced to Jesse. Jesse is twenty-six and is autistic; our speaker has a paternal bond with him, doing his best to maintain the kind of consistency Jesse needs. Even though the prior relationship the author had with Jesse’s mother has long been gone, he was still a present parental figure to Jesse throughout his life until recently. In these lines we see why our author is no longer able to visit Jesse and how much of a toll it takes on him emotionally even though Jesse is not his biological son–“but I’m still thinking about Jesse and me, / his mom and her email saying I can’t visit him / anymore because I write about him. Poems / like this.” This causes a similar disconnect as Tony is having with his teenage children. I think it is a beautiful example of how the kind of parental bond is not exclusive to situational circumstances but outlasts the tests of time. Very well-written in the way comparing Tony’s traditional family and his own non-traditional version of fatherhood. “I think of talking to my friend, not / sure he will understand what Jesse means / to me or why I didn’t simply stop writing / about him like his mom asked, how inseparable / is my life’s story from my poems anyway?”
The entire collection is an ode to connectedness, allowing readers to find solace in relatable themes that can sometimes be hard to digest. It explores the unique identity and experiences the author has been through, while also showing the vulnerability of hardship. Reading about the encounters another person faces in their life allows room for introspection, finding similarities and complex distinctions in our lives. A lovely read for all those looking for community in their own grief.
Miranda Spurlock is 21 years old and a cat mom of one, but if you count the feral cats who use their charming manipulation on her (their cute faces), she is a cat mom of 4-8 on any given day. She loves the color pink; she is very fond of fairies and escaping into a book is what she does best. Spurlock prides herself on creativity and has tried almost every hobby there is to try. She is currently a senior at UTK where she is majoring in Business Management and minoring in English.
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, October 25th, 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 October’s Xfit is Hauntings. Give yourself time to search for and interrogate the creatures that have been occupying your world. Feel free to question whether they scare or comfort you, how long they’ve been lingering, and if you want them to stay or to drive them out through writing.
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.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Ghosting the Self: Writing Through What We Avoid,” a free writing workshop led by Jason Masino on Wednesday, October 14th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Register for the event today!
Every writer has subjects they circle but never quite touch. Sometimes it’s a memory, a contradiction, an obsession, or a version of themselves that doesn’t fit the story they’re trying to tell. In this generative workshop, we’ll explore the gaps, omissions, and recurring patterns that shape our work from the margins. Through discussion, close reflection, and writing exercises, participants will identify what they tend to avoid on the page and experiment with new approaches to writing through resistance rather than around it. Writers of all genres and experience levels are welcome.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly Jason Masino via Venmo: @Jason-Masino-5, PayPal: jason.masino@gmail.com, or Cash App: $JasonMasino1987
Jason Masino is a poet and program builder whose work explores identity, belonging, contradiction, and the uneasy process of living with the parts of ourselves we are taught to reject. He holds a BA from the University of California, Davis and an MFA in Creative Writing from Regis University. His work has appeared in publications including Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora and South Florida Poetry Journal. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and also works across higher education, public service, and community engagement.
When I was a child, my mom used to have me write short stories like I was training for a marathon, running endless miles around the figurative track.
Here is how it went: she would tell me to go write something, I would run off with some paper, and return with a sloppy fable about talking bears, to which she would give some vague praise and prompt me to go write another. I’m still not quite sure if her intent was to help me become a better writer, or to get me to stop pestering her for 15 minute intervals. It was probably both, but it’s something that I remain grateful for. Though that manuscript of Aesop knock-offs is now lost to time.
I’ve been deemed a “writer” for my whole life. It’s the first thing I mention when people ask me to “tell them a little bit about myself.” It’s the crux of my identity, but to be honest, I’ve never been completely assured of its meaning. A writer is not something you can finish becoming, like a runner practicing to win that one race. It’s also not something you can evaluate very easily skill-wise. I can’t track my speed or agility, and I can never really be sure if I am a “good writer.” Sure, I got high accolades from my parents and my teachers, but it was practically their jobs to be encouraging. So, really, how can you ever tell if what you’re putting down is worth anything? This question built an imprisoning sort of headspace that I caged myself into for much of my existence as a writer. I was constantly wondering the value of my work, and if it amounted at all to what the people around me were creating. Everything I made felt too derived, too underdeveloped, too forgettable.
I don’t know when exactly I started letting go of this (frankly, quite ridiculous) mentality, but I can say that my Introduction to Poetry Writing class I took two semesters ago certainly helped swing the door open. I was deeply enamored with this class; the opportunity to write poetry for critique from a group of fellow writers was incredibly valuable to me. I spent months crafting long-form narrative poems, inspired by the fairytale essence of Wilde’s The Star-Child, and brought them to class eager for feedback. But in the middle of that excitement, I felt that familiar fear crawling back: is what I’m writing good enough? Then, one of the other students in my class brought in his own narrative poem, similar in style to mine, and immediately, my brain broke out in questions like hives: Are our poems too similar? Is his better? Does mine amount to his at all?
On the last day of class, I got my answer in a way that humbled me. My professor told us about how he hoped we’d never see writing, or creating art, as a competition, and how it isn’t about being successful. As he was saying this, I almost felt embarrassed, because duh. The best part about writing is putting human experience into words, and somewhere along the line, all my anxiety had led me to have forgotten this; I had forgotten how much I enjoy just the act of writing itself, of running in laps around my mom with my fables. As long as I enjoyed the process, and if I was proud of my result, then really, that’s all that should matter. Not anyone else’s approval or anyone else’s work.
I can’t say that this epiphany has forever changed me. I still freak out over whether my metaphors are too clichéd, and I still sometimes panic over whether my work will be seen as “good” by others. But I’ve learned to stop letting those worries overtake the process, and to allow myself to enjoy what has always been one of my favorite parts of myself. So I’ll continue to write, and whether or not I’m eventually called a “good writer,” I’ll hopefully be proud of what I’ve created, and that will be enough.
Dia Manoj (she/her) is a lover of reading, writing, and coding. She is a junior at The University of Tennessee, double majoring in Computer Science and English with a concentration in Creative Writing. She has developed several software projects, including an iOS app, and loves finding ways to combine her passion for storytelling and technology. She explores this fusion through her self-built writing website, diamanoj.com. Outside of her creative endeavors, she enjoys London fogs, vampires, and pestering her loved ones.
In the Philippines, though not enshrined in the official constitution, you are required to pay your class treasurer—for whatever amount agreed upon—if you speak a sliver of Filipino. Slipping out even the smallest word of a particular thing you forgot to translate was unforgivable, even by accident. I can guarantee, maybe eighty-five percent, that most Filipinos who studied in either public or private schools had this odd and stifling rule of an “English only policy” in classrooms historically adapted from the legacy of American colonial education in the nation. It doesn’t begin in classrooms, of course. Often, I hear young children and my cousins speak perfect English—both in vocabulary and accent—yet fail to understand basic Filipino words. I wish I could say that it was the parents’ fault, but as the history of languages goes, it somehow always points toward colonization and its lingering afterlife in cultural and educational spaces.
When I told people I would be taking Comparative Literature in college, it was not a surprise to them. I sounded American and had no trace of a Filipino accent, I knew how to write creatively and academically in English and won awards for it, and I could converse seamlessly with anyone if need be. Sometimes, my friends and I would talk to each other in fake British and Irish accents, because it was fun and because it was practice. We even spoke English with botched French and Italian accents to see if we could pass as natives. When I decided to major in European Literature instead of Asian or Philippine, I was given nods of approval, leaving my decisions unquestioned.
Perhaps to them, Europe held a certain prestige that they didn’t see in the Philippines, that it could open doors for me to migrate abroad and become a permanent resident there. I wish I could say that it wasn’t for selfish reasons but parts of it were. I saw Europe as wider than where I was, that there was something deeper and richer to dig for. I was attracted to their literature more than I was to the books published in the Philippines. I knew many colleagues and professors who did their Masters and PhDs in the Americas or Europe and believed in the sophistication that foreign institutions could bring. I believed it through the decisions I made in college.
From the poems, plays, and fiction I write, English came easier. Forms felt looser, synonyms were instinctive, and creative imaginations seemed natural. In Filipino, writing is laborious, maybe even desire-laden. Words feel thicker, almost viscous, and fluid in a way that asks you to hold it solemnly. I am not twice divorced from the language when it’s Filipino I write and speak in. It’s intimate, private, something I return to when English exhausts or fails me. This was why, sometimes, when I was in class studying classical antiquities of Greece or Rome or modernism in Europe, shame and guilt would inevitably creep in. It would slither in the back of my head and ask me, “you know so much about the other side of the world. What about the one you’re currently in?” I reckon some of my friends felt the same feelings because when our thesis writing began, we would be asked: what is the relevance of your study to the Philippines? And we would answer with something else entirely in Polish, French, Irish, Norwegian, Spanish or Italian. Alienation, I learned, was sometimes self-inflicted.
Now, after graduating from college and continuing to hold tension between two languages, I open myself to the world I know and the world I study. English was a way to become-center, to meld with the majority. However, the margins, the minority, and the peripheral from which I come from is just as important, if not more. I admire the difficulty it takes for craft to take shape in Filipino, the sensibility and humor that rarely translates to English, and the porousness and permeability of language to sink, be swallowed, and bend, and still remain as potent as who speaks it. What emerges when you peel back the rinds are fragments of transition and mutability. In Sundress where marginalized voices are celebrated, I am honored to be part of these very fluctuations that metamorphose the sense beneath and beyond the text.
Zie Madayag (she/her) is a writer and academic from Metro Manila. She is a recent graduate of a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature: European Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She has worked and volunteered at non-profit organizations and cultural institutions promoting artistic and literary production. Both critical and creative, her research interests include corporeality and materiality, spatio-temporal entanglements, ecologies, and the rhizomatic potentiality of the periphery.
Looking at Hong Kong, what do you see? A city of neon lights and nightlife, one of the “Four Asian Tigers,” a place with over a century of history marked by colonial rule and war, or the birthplace of so-called Chinese culture and cinema? A jumble of terms has woven a dazzling cage around Hong Kong with language. In Xu Xi’s new book Horizon Hong Kong: Selected Stories (Gaudy Boy, 2026), she invites us to step beyond the confines of language and stereotypes, setting out from Hong Kong’s horizon to discover the real Hong Kong. This horizon does not draw on vast historical, geopolitical, or anthropological contexts; it begins with the world of real individuals, continually shifting according to who is looking, remembering, leaving, returning, or speaking–all to pose one ultimate question: Who are we, and where do we come from?
Published in 2026, Horizon Hong Kong is a collection of 22 short stories by Xu Xi, selected from five of her earlier collections. Echoing Xu Xi’s identity as an Indonesian Chinese raised in Hong Kong and writing in English, the book moves across colonial Hong Kong, the 1997 Handover, post-handover life, migration, and speculative futures, shifting major historical events toward the edges of the frame and letting private memory, family conflict, labor, desire, and loss occupy the center.
Xu Xi’s most persistent intervention is a change of scale: events that appear “historical” in retrospect are experienced by her characters through much smaller, personal dramas. Set against the 1966 Star Ferry protests, “Democracy” follows sixteen-year-old Patricia Chow through a contentious Girl Guides election, letting a schoolgirl vote echo the city’s larger uncertainties about representation and majority rule. In the story, the majority’s choice is emotional, personal, but legitimate, redefining the flat identification of “democracy.” Similarly, “Insignificant Moments in the History of Hong Kong” places the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong beside Lam Yam Kuen’s memories of his family; the fireworks marking the transfer of sovereignty occupy less narrative space than family memory, food, work, and the image of a rabbit on the moon. Interestingly, Patricia teaches 1997 in a seminar named “Significant Moments in the History of Hong Kong,” while Yam Kuen’s story is named “Insignificant Moments.” Together, they question “significant” and “history,” hollow words that appear at the horizon of the world but not at the horizon of individuals. Regimes still argue over how to write that history, but those who lived through it are captured in these “insignificant” moments, where a simple label for a piece of land was transformed into a real experience imbued with human warmth.
Horizon Hong Kong also interprets grand historical events through the eyes of the individual. Seen through nine-year-old Ai-Lin, the story “Chung King Mansion” turns Tsimshatsui and the history of the Vietnam War into a landscape of sailors, languages, family tensions, and half-understood adult sexuality. Ai-Lin is fascinated with an orange-haired sex worker but soon gives up when she encounters that woman without makeup, carrying groceries; she realizes the glamorous “lady” she imagined is no more than a girl herself. The power of her perspective lies in the gap between what she sees and what she understands; history reaches her before she possesses the language to call it history. Xu Xi employs concrete detail, those battleships, sailors’ uniforms, dyed hair, and translations between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, to preserve Hong Kong beyond historical exposition as a sensory memory.
The final question Xu Xi addresses is how Hong Kongers view their history from their own horizon. “The 15th Annual Anniversary” follows Christopher Woo into a reunion with elite schoolmates whose successful lives contrast sharply with his own; the evening celebrates political and social succession, but Christopher’s thoughts return to the years he spent caring for his mother, turning a public anniversary into an account of private obligation, class decline, and grief. As Xu Xi writes, “It was succession, this life of the elite.” (225) Closing the collection, “TST” gives the final word to the ghost of a former bar girl from Tsimshatsu’s Seven Sisters Club, whose violent death was falsely recorded, representing a marginalized life never accepted into public history. As her world disappears, she continues telling the stories of women like herself. Storytelling does not merely supplement history; for some lives, it is the only history available.
Xu Xi’s writing technique also makes this book a richly layered reading experience. She employs a child narrator, second person, an unreliable narrator, and even a dead person, presenting a wide range of perspectives. No single voice can represent Hong Kong, so Xu Xi constantly shifts narrators, genres, registers, and settings. Hong Kong always resembles a horizon, constantly shifting, politically renamed, distanced by migration, and brought back by memory. It is never a fixed homeland nor merely a victim of colonialism or postcolonialism but is composed of many people who are contradictory and cannot even represent one another.
Reading this book as someone who is also from Asia, uses Chinese but works in English, Horizon Hong Kong helped me reconstruct a complete and authentic picture of Hong Kong, allowing me to truly see the people behind its vast history. It also enabled me to find an answer about selfhood amidst the complexities of history, personal memory, and marginalized narratives. This is a book of portraits as inclusive and multifaceted as a prism; in its pages, you can see both Hong Kong and yourself.
“Listen, it’s never too late. Just listen.” (281)
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.
The earliest stories I absorbed were variations of Korean folktales and myths from my parents. We don’t have heirlooms or gold, but we do have stories. There’s a story about a prankish frog who always does the opposite of what his mother tells him to do. When the mother frog falls ill, she asks her son to bury her body by the gloomy riverbank, hoping he will do the opposite by burying her by the sunny mountainside instead. But the son listens to her dying wish and buries her by the riverbank. This always made me teary-eyed, and I vowed not to disobey my parents, though I frequently did. There’s another story I remember about someone airing out all their dirty secrets into an empty forest where they think no one will hear, but really the trees are listening and catching the secrets like chlorophyll. I always laugh at the thought of that. But I suppose I’d be fine if all the trees in the world knew my secrets. I trust trees.
I don’t remember the first book I read, or the first story I wrote as a kid. I wish I could attest to some transformative narrative about my journey as a writer, something that sparked in me one day, but the truth is I was always writing. What I do remember is being weirdly competitive during elementary school book log competitions, and going through so much loose-leaf paper that my parents eventually bought me a mini laptop so I could type my stories. I’m drawn to various forms of storytelling, but especially writing that doesn’t take itself too seriously—the kind that’s playful, theatrical, campy, satirical, absurd, nonsensical. I’m propelled by inventive writing that experiments and isn’t afraid to break rules. I love this quote by Ray Bradbury that alludes to imagination and play as generative tools: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
In high school, I came across Jenny Zhang’s “How It Feels,” which felt transformative and eye-opening for a teenage girl and a young poet who was a lot more dramatic and angsty than she would have liked in hindsight. There’s a line by Zhang that has since stuck with me: “Why are some people’s feelings so repellent and others so madly alluring?” It begs the question of why people care to write. Or why people care to express themselves. I think about this across other forms of art too—some songs and films about suicides or breakups or family divorces or growing up are considered earnest and romantic, while others are cringe, tacky, off-putting. I remember being so embarrassed to express myself or attempt anything, but then again, isn’t that how everyone feels about living? To me, language is living. Language is transformative.
One book I’m currently reading is White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link, a collection of short stories that retell classic fairy tales in contemporary and futuristic settings, with lots of spins on pop culture. I remember finding this book in my friend’s dorm about a year ago and flipping through the first story, which features an ostentatious billionaire who sends his sons on a series of goose chases and cats in lab coats who operate a cannabis farm. I thought it was so brilliant; Kelly Link is a writer who performs play well, and her writing is gritty and otherworldly. Other writers who perform play on the page and inspire me are Carmen Maria Machado, K-Ming Chang, Toni Morrison, and Franny Choi. I’m drawn to the funky stuff that reimagines and reinvents worlds. I love stories about mythical creatures, queer desire, ghosts, lineage, strange neighbors, annoying teenagers, bad breakups, altered states of consciousness, transformation, collective memory, and messy embodiments of women and girlhood.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to work alongside bright, compassionate, and inspiring people at Sundress Publications, a nonprofit press that platforms diverse, imaginative, and cutting-edge voices. Send me a DM on Instagram @corinayii if you’d like to talk about writing, swap book recommendations, or just chat!
Corina Yi (she/her) is a student at Pomona College studying English and Creative Writing. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Agave Review, the literary magazine at the Claremont Colleges consortium. She likes collecting postcards, painting, drinking tea, cafe hopping, and going on spontaneous adventures.
This month we had the honor of speaking with Mckendy Fils-Aime about their powerful debut collection sipèstisyon. The collection is an exploration of memory, both personal and cultural. Mckendy’s poems are visceral and immersive, each one plunging you into the deep end whether you’re ready for it or not, but always giving you a moment to return to the surface and breathe; to reflect alongside the poet about the good, the bad, and the unbelievable. These are poems that deserve to be read again and again, and they will reward you each time you do. The collection is available at Yes Yes Books right now; our interview is below.
Ada Wofford: Many of the poems share the same title as the collection and have a superstition serving as the epigram. Can you speak about the superstitions you chose for your epigrams and what they mean to you? Or if that’s too broad, why did you want to share these specific superstitions with readers? I was particularly interested in the first one, “If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory.”
Mckendy Fils-Aime: I started writing superstition poems during a 30/30 in 2017 as an additional challenge to myself. Many of my favorite collections featured a group of poems with a shared naming convention. In the past, I had tried my hand at writing such a series, but failed. The self-imposed challenge in 2017 was another attempt. I picked Haitian superstitions because they felt familiar to me and were a fresh way to explore the topic. I treated the superstitions like open-ended prompts and wrote to the ones I thought were the most interesting to me. When I was putting together sipèstisyon, I picked the superstition poems that were the strongest and complemented the project’s narrative. Like all books, some poems didn’t make the cut. There are a handful of superstition poems that I adore, but left out because they weren’t serving the book.
AW: Building off of that, memory plays a large role in the book. From personal memories, to passed-down memories, to cultural history. The poem “what we sacrificed” plays with the imagery of you and your family around a fire pit, throwing in “the furniture pieces turned javelins / meant for my mother’s skull. / my mother throws in a photo album/of other men…I throw in a wedding ring…I throw in letters / to a future self.” The poem ends, “it’s hard to tell when a flame is working / what is memory & what is kindling.” Can you speak about this idea of memory being both a solace and a burden, something that can soothe but also burn?
MF: Memories can be places of refuge or great sites of pain depending on your point of view, who you’re asking, or even when you’re asking. There are moments in sipèstisyon where the speaker and addressees have different perspectives on traumatic experiences, and that results in conflict. Our brains can be untrustworthy record-keepers, but they’re also our first confidants. Sometimes they’re all we’ve got. In sipèstisyon, there’s an impulse to forget, and with good reason, but that’s not conducive to healing. That also risks throwing away the small joys that can exist alongside terrible periods. Thankfully, the speaker understands this by the end of the book.
AW: In the poem “on superstitions,” you write about a pastor calling “superstitions the devil’s / proverbs.” I take from this the concept of fear. That superstitions are meant to invoke a sense of fear, but culturally they can be fragments of wisdom as well; small phrases or stories to remind us to keep our wits about us (e.g., don’t walk under a ladder). You touch on this in your interview with Shō Poetry Journal, saying, “I didn’t write the superstition poems out of fear or the need for control, but an interest in exploring these sayings that I grew up hearing.” May I ask you to build on that a bit and speak about the role you see superstitions playing in our daily lives, either positive or negative, either as a source of fear or of wisdom? Do they play a role in your life today?
MF: Regardless of their nature, I think all superstitions are a type of cultural artifact. Even the silliest ones have a history attached to them. Superstitions are just another attempt at preserving the beliefs and stories of the past. Are they a form of magical thinking? Sure. Are they an attempt at control? Sure. They’re also proof of what we can carry through time with just our voices and language. The superstitions in sipèstisyon are cultural signifiers and points of nostalgia. They remind me of my youth and act as markers of identity. I love when other Haitians and Caribbeans come up to me after I read a superstition poem and say “Oh yeah, I remember hearing that as a kid” or “Have you heard this one?” Those moments mean a lot to me.
AW: The imagery of a car crash is repeated throughout the collection; you write about nearly getting hit by a car as a kid, and in “the first accident” you write about a car accident from the point of view of a passenger. Can you speak about the significance of this imagery and the theme of experiencing a “near miss” in this collection? And do these near misses relate to the concept of superstitions in any way?
MF: sipèstisyon is about the aftermath of surviving harm. Sometimes harm comes from a visible source like a vehicle or physical violence, and sometimes it’s systemic, which can be invisible. One of the final poems in sipèstisyon is called “ode to the gris-gris bag,” and it explores the moments in my life where I’ve narrowly escaped death. The poem references an ancestral force that is looking out for me. I think often about survival and the unseen, about the unobserved forces, whether spiritual or manmade, that help us stay on earth a little while longer. Maybe superstitions are an attempt at rescue before we even encounter the “near miss.”
AW: In the opening poem you compare memory to a museum, later you ask if “naming is a culture’s way of colonizing a body,” and in another you write, “solitude is a kind of death when a home / is remade into a mausoleum.” All of these images relate to the concepts of intention and context. This is something the art world has been dealing with since Duchamp placed a urinal in a gallery (and probably long before that, but he’s the most famous example); the idea that how one frames something (or someone, for that matter) dictates how the rest of us are supposed to see it/understand it (i.e., it’s art if it’s in a gallery, or in terms of museums: “it’s not grave robbing if you’re an archeologist”). In your poem, what was once a home is now remade into a mausoleum through its context, through how it relates to how that space is being inhabited. How do these concepts (intention and recontextualization) play into your collection’s other themes of identity and selfhood?
MF: Early in my writing journey, I discovered the world of poetry slam and spoken word. I learned and still learn so many things from that space. One of my first lessons was the importance of framing. In slam, how an idea is presented to an audience can be the difference between whether or not a poem succeeds. Framing applies to so many other mediums, whether we’re talking about writing, other forms of oration, or visual art. Even in therapy, when we reframe, we’re altering our perspective of an event or experience in hopes of uncovering some insight to better heal. I couldn’t write about trauma, relationship, selfhood, and identity by looking at events from the same angle. I see each reframe as a new chapter in the narrative of sipèstisyon. To reach the collection’s conclusion and the speaker’s views of himself, I had to change my vantage point, and that required intentionality.
AW: From dissecting the Pokémon movie to musing on WrestleMania, the book explores not just nostalgia, but specifically millennial nostalgia; can you speak about the significance of incorporating your nostalgia for pop culture and how these pop, one might even say “lowbrow” (though of course I’m not saying it!) influences like Pokémon and Wrestling can function within a form like poetry?
MF: In sipèstisyon, the poems that reference pop culture help situate the book in time. I wrote them because I wanted to reflect on past experiences as an adult. But equally as important, I wrote them because I’m a big nerd. I’m a millennial, so Pokémon and WWF are key parts of my childhood. To this day, I’m still a huge fan of anime and video games. Leaning into pop culture and nostalgia is one of the ways I have fun with my writing and share my personality and interests with the audience. It’s an additional connection point between me and the reader. Poets can be so serious, myself included, and I think writing about nostalgia or our current nerdy/niche interests can be healthy and balancing. I also want to say that the exciting thing about writing and reading poems is that they can be inspired by so many different things. I’ve read poems in the shape of nutrition labels that are dope. As long as they’re not offensive and executed well, I’m here for the pop culture poems.
AW: What are you looking forward to as a writer-in-residence at Sundress?
MF: I’m really looking forward to the dedicated time to write. Life is pretty busy right now, so I know I’ll appreciate the change of scenery. I have a few projects that I’m working on that I really want to focus on during that week. I’m also interested in seeing how being on a farm will influence my poems.
AW: And lastly, is there anything I didn’t touch on that you would like to talk about? Any new projects we should look out for?
MF: I’m working on a few different manuscripts right now, but nothing is close to completion. I’ve been working on my second poetry manuscript, a collection of poems about a shapeshifter in Haitian folklore called a lougawou. I’m also in the early stages of a chapbook that explores identity and labor. I’m hoping to have a working draft of the former by the spring.
Mckendy Fils-Aimé is a New England-based Haitian American poet, organizer, and teaching artist. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, CantoMundo, and Periplus. His debut poetry collection, sipèstisyon, was published by YesYes Books in 2026.
Ada Wofford (they/them) holds MAs in both English and Library Studies. In addition to working at a rare book shop, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, the editor of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in The Blue Nib, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Autostraddle, Capable Magazine, Sundress Reads, and more. Their chapbook, I Remember Learning How to Dive, was published in 2020, part of which earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Forty Bouts in the Wilderness (MoonPath Press, 2025) by Katy E Ellis is a poetic memoir that plays with the multiple meanings of “bouts” and “wilderness.” It’s about becoming homeless due to one’s spiritual beliefs and finding one’s place when family becomes equivalent to alienation. The book is split into three major parts, giving readers multiple reflections on what family can mean for the family outcast and how powerful grief can lead to reinvention, and a new acceptance.
The first part is forty tercets describing the speaker’s family unexpectedly “calling her from the dust” for her father’s emergency hospitalization in the ICU. Every day is “like the first day of kindergarten” to her, being surrounded by siblings who act as if they never shunned her for years. Visually, the tercets stand upright with immediate tension, as if bringing us into the claustrophobic medical setting with her.
In footnotes, Ellis provides context to the unmooring disassociation she feels with her attendance, including anecdotes of how she questioned her family’s Christianity and its purpose, leading to her religious rejection and isolation from her family. As she binds these episodes with stunning metaphors of nature and fantasy, the imagery brings to the fore beautiful, unsettling grief. One of my favorite sets of lines concludes “Bouts 19~21”’s ninth footnote; during a period of personal distress, “[her] mother and sisters stood in a nearby pasture, bleating mournfully across the strong budding vines of pink-red climbing roses that enveloped the low, fieldstone wall I’d built between us.”
We are with her as she untangles the complexity of her memories with the urgent reality of her father’s comatose state, followed by his faltering health and memory whenever he wakes from his “grisly hibernation.” Her father is the parent who she found the most comfort in before and during her ostracization, and she openly laments his fractured mind:
“What if my father opens his eyes, sees
me as stranger among his children’s ranks?
Brother-sister tides push me out to sea.
A child lost, found, or—? His face a blank.
I fear I won’t survive another sleep
and wade the shadows where forget flows deep.”
Within the footnotes, Ellis also weaves in her family’s history of miscarriages. Another unwanted loss of family that was shared but then hushed, parallel to her experiences as the black sheep. The speaker miscarries twice, a daughter and a son, and her pain for the loss haunts her throughout the chapbook. Miscarriages are brushed aside by her family, and, again, she is comfortable not conforming to their mentality of rarely mourning the dead children. She practices private rituals for hers. In the seventeenth footnote for “Bouts 28~30,” the moon guides her soul to “the pearl’s blue center, where a child resides,” her love for her lost son embraced, kept precious and eternal.
Part two, “Pilgrim’s Pace,” recalls the speaker’s globe-trotting with her husband to cities of divine respite through Europe and Asia. It is done to help validate herself and to heal from her painful miscarriages. Her free-flowing journey of spiritual exploration and healing contrasts with memories of her stricter Christian upbringing, and her quiet disappointments with her family’s stagnant and willful dismissal of her life-changing experiences. In “Dear Istanbul,” Ellis writes:
“Yesterday, my grandparents offered me weak coffee, cookies and Bible verses… They forgot they found my presence more harrowing than my absence, that my voice no longer harmonizes with the plodding organ pipes that pound Easter hymn-notes like wooden stakes into my heart of doubts.”
What’s powerful about this part to me is that the speaker wrestles with the idea of forgiveness. Forgiveness to whom? For what? Her younger mind once thought she was the one who needed her family’s forgiveness. But through her travels, she gradually witnesses other practices for letting go, for worship, for death, and she reconsiders. In the cityscape of Fatima (“Worthy of Belief”), she makes peace with her wounded spirit, realizing that grace can shape into many forms “like a time-lapse film of a seed come to light / when spirals burst open and sunflowers appear. / She knows my prayers before I do.” It’s a heartwarming section of self-acceptance that feels poignant after her somber childhood recollections.
It is during her travels in part two that she mentions she and her husband had been trying for a child again, and she rejoices in finding a new sense of home in part three, “[Re]turnings.” After she and her husband’s globe-trotting and healing, a period compared to floating in space, they return to North America. First, for mourning, due to her beloved uncle’s passing, her father’s decline, and her lost son.
And she celebrates her five-year-old daughter throughout the grief. Whether it has been her daughter’s playful obsession with gemstones or her careful nursing of a hurt robin, she has been an innocent joy in the speaker’s life, her motherhood helping her “earth into place.” To her daughter (“When You Grow Up and Read This”), she fondly writes:
Feel your breath lift green glass beads faceted amethyst each ring of silver on the long chain where I hung a lighthouse, a Tahitian pearl or a compass— each morning choosing a talisman more than lucky enough.
Forty Bouts in the Wilderness has stayed with me long after reading. Ellis’ touching wordplay for truly belonging makes this book unforgettable to me.
Heather Takenaga is a poet and writer born and raised in Riverside, CA. She is currently writing short stories and poetry. When she is not volunteering, she is drooling for cat cuddles, moonlit walks, and a reading vacation.
In sipèstisyon (YesYes Books, 2026), Mckendy Fils-Aimé’s debut poetry collection, language is lacerated by the breath of memory. Titled sipèstisyon, the Kreyol word for superstition, the collection speaks through and against the smothering regime of English by assembling a sonic Kreyol terrain. The oral form of superstitions is invoked to elevate the acoustics of resistance and revival. Truth-telling, herein, does not merely vibrate the ache of trauma and violence but appears as an affective experience suspending us within the temporal orientation Fils-Aimé’s speaker migrates us toward. Vanishing lines are brought closer and vocabularies overflow.
Though memory is often attributed to interiority and the past, Fils-Aimé writes it as a lived condition, as history. It is the marrow from which all contemplations, anguish, and wounds surface and coincide. The first poem, “sipèstisyon” comes to warn us of the fragility of memory: “If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory” (6) all the while it is made into an entity, an object of interest that can be plundered, with the speaker asking, “if memory is a museum // what happens if it’s ransacked?” (6). It is here where Fils-Aimé’s collection dilates: in the collapse of memory’s infrastructure. We are thrust into the nonlinearity of remembering—its illegibility, obscurity, and entropic tendencies. How, then, must we speak of ruin after it has happened? How do we absorb the shame, not so much as an exercise of erasure, but of personal absolvement? The speaker answers within a position he has occupied, in the register of the interstitial aftermath.
“mwen pa pale kreyòl” (which translates to “I don’t speak Creole”) agitates his own shame of linguistic in-betweenness when, in telling a story in Kreyòl to someone, the speaker is criticized for the nasally sound he’s making, “laughing at the kreyòl i create / from the cinder blocks & cement // of english” (9). Here, his usage of Kreyòl appears to be awkward, clumsy, with the person listening condemning him that he has made a mockery of their architecture by building it with American machinery (9). The speaker laments this remark and at the same time accentuates the linguistic hybridity he settles between: “owning two skyscrapers // of dialect pressed against the skyline of speech. // i dream of two thin tongues, one in each of my nostrils / & how to sever the one closest to you / at the root” (9). The lexicons of Kreyòl are diluted through the sedimented structure of English, the body of words stiffening in its utterance; and seemingly, at once, the speaker has in front of him a hallway of locked doors with not enough keys to open them (9).
Fils-Aimé vertebrates the somewhat gelatinous nature of memory through language. In the following poem “my father apologizes for giving me a western name,” we are placed at the mouth of the speaker. He wonders if “naming is a culture’s way of colonizing a body, / if my tongue is just another island impaled / by French & American flags” (10). “soup joumou” finds itself in the speaker’s mother’s tongue as well, “shriveling like a snail / in the salt / of my English / i wanted to swim / against the current / of whitewash” (11). What I found striking is how the locus of the mouth is seemingly where Haitian heritage is reinforced as a migrant, reconstituting what it means to institutionalize the very voice they use as something that can both be disciplinal and transgressive. There is this, likewise, an excess and abscess of two languages; and oscillating between them is an embodied but disorienting experience. When the cadence of Kreyòl bleeds into English’s rhythm, the dissonance experienced from being an immigrant becomes less conceptual and more operational. Suddenly, visibility is determined on which is more audible.
Though Fils-Aimé lingers in the tension of what I observe as “unbelonging,” we see in the poem “bilingual” that reconciliation of being fragmented. He writes:
too bad we can’t push the rewind button on a lost language, can’t rewrite an alphabet on the chalk-brushed blackboard of erasure. best we can do is fill in the fissures of our vernacular & smooth out the chipping.
listen, pay your teachers no mind when they say we speak broken French. they’ve never had to reassemble the remnants of their mother tongues after mourning (48).
Here, the speaker reconfigures fracture into fascination—“we open the china drawer / of our mouths, there’s copper / more than anything else” (48). These lines ultimately resonated with me because I understand this continuous, cascading residue that colonialism leaves within a language, this enduring afterlife of language compounded into a container that co-opts it. But Kreyòl is not complicit in becoming a spectacle of the English language. As it fills its own fissures and remedies its own precarities, the isolated fragments, at once, choreograph its autonomy. What Fils-Aimé does here is essentially translating that echo of a lost language into resonance, apprehending the vanishing voice not by strangling it (like what America does to non-English vernaculars), but by suturing it within the already existing polyphony coalescing in the myths, folklores, and superstitions he already understands.
Language gives memory texture, friction, fibrous moments. In “Invocation for the God of Laughter,” language is exhalation, “a boisterous song // from the quiet orchestra of our lungs…. / O language excavated / from the moments when language is lost” (57). This is perhaps one of my favorite poems out of the collection as it nears its closing. I am fond of this idea—of this interstice—where language cannot be flattened into a smooth surface; that there is this disruption in voice: song, laughter, the very act of breathing. Actions that operate on the very basis of sound and community and are therefore non-isolatable. It is from here I find the power in sipèstisyon. Superstition becomes saturated with chortles, guffaws, rapturous ruckus, bellows, wheezes, giggles (57-58), aural elements which cannot be colonized into syllables. Though what they do is splinter and multiply across the sky.
We return to the mouth by the last “sipèstisyon.” At this point, superstition has become almost like an inquiry into the possibility of fruition, of the future, of foundation. It reminded me of Natalie Diaz’s “Postcolonial Love Poem” where her speaker has “learned Drink in a country of drought” because Fils-Aimé’s speaker is a “seedless orchard—a drought in a grove / called potential. but I’m as resilient as a fig, / as defiant as a field of echinacea” (66). Both speaking about the aftermath of colonial violence, there is this fluidity that is bred from trembling at the perimeter of loss and reclamation. Fils-Aimé ends his collection with arms unfurling, “to stuff / fistfuls of sunlight into my mouth. / watch me nourish & be nourishment. / watch me become my own harvest.” (66). It ends in a truth we all know too well: there is resonance that remains after undoing power. Language noises out its own emancipation and immersion. And it breaches syntactic containment, seeping, leaking, and unraveling memory with it.
Zie Madayag (she/her) is a writer and academic from Metro Manila. She is a recent graduate of a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature: European Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She has worked and volunteered at non-profit organizations and cultural institutions promoting artistic and literary production. Both critical and creative, her research interests include corporeality and materiality, spatio-temporal entanglements, ecologies, and the rhizomatic potentiality of the periphery.
