As a kid, I had a thirst for knowledge, as well as an incredibly overactive imagination. I would frequently race through books, finding that I finished them in less than a day. The library was my best friend for the longest time. I could read as much as I wanted and would not hear the complaints from my parents about wanting more expensive books that I would race through. Regardless, I was still a huge fan of the Scholastic Book Fair every time I would see it. Even if everything was super unaffordable there for my family, I would always get super excited just looking through all of the different things they were selling.
A very obvious difference between my older brother and I was our attitude towards reading and books. When he would receive a punishment or a timeout, he would be shunned to his room and only given books as entertainment. When I would receive a punishment or a timeout, however, I would have all my books taken away. My books and reading were my main sources of entertainment as a kid. They took me into other worlds, other realities, where I could forget my own existence for a while and step into the words on the page.
My love for reading extended to writing as well. In second grade, I wrote my first short story and submitted it for a contest my elementary school was holding across all the grade levels. In hindsight, I fully understand why I only received a participation ribbon; I had written with Crayola markers on copy paper to tell my story. In addition to that, I drew pictures depicting some scenes of the story. The rough plot was that society had started to collapse because of the zombie apocalypse; however, the protagonist was able to save the world using the power of peanut butter. They realized that if they put peanut butter in the zombies’ mouths, then the zombies would be smacking their mouths too much to bite someone. As I said previously, I had quite the overactive imagination.
Despite this love for reading and writing, it took me several years to fully realize that this was my passion. For the majority of my life, I had planned to be a medical doctor because my goal, ever since I was very little, was to help people. In my kid mind, the best way to do that would be to become a medical doctor. It took a while, but I eventually realized that I do not excel at STEM in the slightest, nor do I have a passion for it. I thought about everything and finally clearly saw that I could help people in so many other professions. After giving it a lot of thought, I realized that I want to become a public librarian.
Coupling my love of reading and writing with all of the experiences I’ve had while I have been a student at Berry College—working at the campus Writing Center, presenting my research on a panel at the 2026 SWCA (Southeastern Writing Center Association) Conference, being the President of the campus queer advocacy club (Listen) for the 2025-26 academic year, being a freshman mentor for the class of 2029, and more—I have learned where my true passions lie. I want to help people find the information they need or find the world they need to escape into. Librarians are more important now than ever, and I want to aid the effort to bring people together to form a real community.
Gabriel L’Heureux (he/they) is an intern at Sundress Publications. He grew up in Illinois, but he has lived in Georgia since age 11 and never left. He is almost done with his BA in Creative Writing with a minor in Women’s & Gender Studies from Berry College. He is applying to graduate schools with the aim to start his MLS program in the fall of 2027. He has a Siamese cat named Mochi, who is a haughty little princess. He is known for writing poetry and short fiction that frequently evokes fear or melancholy—his work thrives in the dark. He reads any and all types of literature, as long as it piques his interest.
With the release of her new poetry collection, sp[RED], Jessica Doe spoke with Sundress Publications Intern Corina Yi to discuss the decolonization of the Smith-Rider-Waite tarot deck, the fluidity of identity across roles and generations, and the refusal to be seen as monstrous, reclaimed through body horror.
Corina Yi: The collection opens with the poem “The Fool” and ends with “King of Cups.” What is the significance of titling the poems after tarot cards?
Jessica Doe: The purpose of this entire collection is to decolonize/Indigenize the Smith-Rider-Waite tarot deck, so it’s less of a “significance” and more of the core of the collection (the titles came ready-made). I learned on this deck as a child. Beginning with The Fool is simply because that is the first card in the major arcana. I chose which suit followed (wands, pentacles, swords, or cups) based largely on a tempering of how the suits “speak” to each other. Of course, the cup suit relates to emotions and a more feminine energy. The King cards, of course, are the “close” of any suit, but I thought it important to end with the emotionally-fueled suit that is inherently “fluid” and ever-moving. The poem for King of Cups also inverts the (false) idea many people have of the Santa Maria “landing” on Turtle Island. In this poem, it sinks (same as it did in reality).
CY: Can you speak on the collection’s relationship to Indigenous heritage, family, and decolonization?
JD: This is a very broad question and, in the end, I can really only speak to my experience as an Indigenous person (and to some degree, but much, much lesser, the shared experiences of my community and tribe). The answer to this could be a lengthy article (or more). To keep it short, I will say that I was raised being taught tarot on the Smith-Rider-Waite deck—as many people were. It was the most readily available and popular deck at the time. Even as a child, the white, heteronormative, colonial, racist, fat-phobic-ness of the deck was clear, even when I didn’t have the overt experience and language for it. The purpose of the collection is to reimagine this specific deck through the only lens I have: that of an Indigenous person. Given the biblical elements of the original deck (along with all the issues I listed above), this called for a lot of deeper dives and inversions/subversions of the original images in order to dismantle them and make them more “usable” to an Indigenous audience. Of course, to the deck’s credit, there are also many esoteric and occult-ish elements as well, which is also explored in the collection.
CY: The narratives in this collection are generational, positioning the narrator as sometimes a mother, a daughter, a wife—which speaks to this idea that we are many things all at once, at any given time. For you, how does this translate into your feminist writing praxis?
JD: Well, I’m writing from my own lens as we all do, intentionally or not (which, yes, in part, is that of a mother/daughter/wife), and this also happens to echo the trifecta of achieving what some Eurocentric people often call crone status. Being “many things as once” isn’t, for me, strictly a feminist idea or position. We all are, all the time. Sometimes the speaker is also a male, and it’s also not the same speaker throughout necessarily. The mother/daughter/wife positioning isn’t intended to be “feminist writing” but rather a somewhat common navigation that many of us experience and traverse daily.
CY: Tell me more about your choice of language, syntax, and form, especially in poems such as “2 of Cups” and “9 of Cups,” which appear more structurally experimental.
JD: I often write in hybrid of experimental forms (including a previous collection written in a very restrictive sort of reverse form). The tarot deck itself can be seen as quite structured in some readings (i.e. Celtic Cross) or it can be seemingly feral. I have worked extensively with erasure/blackout poetry (as in 2 of Cups) and previously spent an academic year at Notre Dame working with their archives and the creation of a series of erasure poems. I also have a solid background in concrete poems, such as 9 of cups, and sometimes it just feels like a poem (or any piece of writing) wants to be in a specific visual shape. The two listed here are also both in the cups suit, so perhaps that fluidity and leaning more on the emotional aspect lends itself to a more explorative form.
CY: I’m curious about the recurring image of monsters and body horror throughout this collection, especially in relation to processing violence and grief.
JD: Well, I’m a horror writer (in prose) and tend to lean especially towards body horror in both my writing and preferences. There are probably numerous reasons for that, but I grew up with horror and that’s always been my preferred genre in film (and, as an early reader and then circling back to now, with books). My scholarly background is in eating disorders, and if you look at the history of these disorders, well before they were named, the “monstrous” is quite prevalent (Cronus, for example). Eating disorders are also a colonial import, of course. My story that opens the collection Never Whistle at Night 2: Back for Blood, “Miss Cherokee Princess 1996,” examines this in a prose means. For me, “horror” is not about processing violence or grief, though perhaps that’s a colonial reading of the horror elements I use (particularly Indigenous horror), but rather an act of reclamation and refusal of being named as the grotesque (both as a woman and an Indigenous person). Indigenous people have historically been either the monstrous (other) or the magical saviors in horror with special powers to guide the white hero. However, we have lived horror in a different sense since contact—for us, the monstrous is not often binary, but oftentimes a part of history that has been skewed by outsiders and given a new name and purpose.
CY: What is the significance/function of using “I” and “we” in this collection? How much of the narrator’s first-person perspective is borrowed from your personal perspective? Is it rather supposed to be understood as a collective identity?”
JD: Rather simply, because as a poet I was raised with the works of confessional poets (though of course that term was long ago regretted by its namer/maker). The I/we speaker is what I was most comfortable with for years because we often write similar to what we read. However, I am solidly of the camp that the poet and speaker(s) should always be considered separate unless the poet explicitly states that a work is autobiographical. I have never stated that for any poem in this collection, though of course every writer is fed and informed by their experiences. I do often feel like I should say, because it has long been inferred by others: my father never sexually abused me in any manner (nor did any other father figure type in my life). Poems like Emperor, which is written in first person, tend to make readers think that (and since my father is dead, he would have no means of defending himself). This is just one example of many, but perhaps the most damning. I explore the ugly, I’m drawn to it, and incestual rape is perhaps the most horrific of things that a person can experience (though I do not write of this from my own experience). I say all this to (re)stress the importance of not reading autobiography into any work.
CY: You write: “Yes, but what / about a woman? We are sovereign / bodies, life-making, life-sustaining archipelagos / of history, buoyant keys, riders / of turtle backs and / dethroners of kings.” Can you speak on the insistence of including body politics in feminist poetry?
JD: “Body politic” is a rather new term for what many Indigenous people (especially women who, like me, who come from matrilineal groups) simply thought of as the norm. The I is the we, and to some degree vice versa. Is it “insistent” in my work, or this collection? I don’t particularly think so, it just is.
CY: How does your poetry speak to ongoing conversations about intersectional identities?
JD: I think such discourse is so overabundant and overwhelming that it can probably be tied into any such discussion. The majority of us, I imagine, claim various identities including conflicting identities at any time. That is part of the fallout of colonization, evolution, language, and progress. That being said, there are also quite a few people like me, who claim the same identifies, so my hope is that some readers will find themselves in some of these poems (or, at least, some of their Selves).
Jessica Doe, PhD is an Aniyunwiya inter/multi/anti-disciplinary writer, artist, and scholar and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her work explores space, place, Indigenization, decolonization, poetry, and embodiment across scholarship and creative practice. A former Fulbright Senior Scholar, she is currently writing an Indigenous short horror collection grounded in Indigeneity.
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, drinking tea, cafe hopping, and going on spontaneous adventures. Her Instagram is @corinayii, so feel free to say hi!
Since I was a baby, I’ve had the same bookshelf. It’s a bit of a mess.
I’ve had to stack some books on top of the vertical ones because I can’t fit them in properly, and it takes me a good five minutes to find a book that is not in the first rows of my shelves. Finding a book often entails taking out the entire first row to see what’s in the back, only to put the books back because what I’m looking for isn’t there after all. My books spill out of the shelf itself, climbing like ivy to sit on top of the shelf. More can be found in a metal cart and in the bottom two shelves of a shelf in the living room because, as many books as my shelf can hold, I simply own too many.
So let’s take a tour of my bookshelf, for if the eyes are the windows to the soul, then my bookshelf is the window to my heart.
The best place to start is actually not the shelf itself, I think. It’s hard to show the full thing, but I have a Google Spreadsheet titled “Alex’s Library” that holds an alphabetized list of all the books I own (333, to be exact). Above is a bit of that spreadsheet, but I do admit that I chose a section that had more “Completed” books than “Not Started,” just for the sake of portraying myself mildly positively on the internet.
The sections that I track are the status of the book (completed, in-progress, not started, DNF), the title and author of the book, as well as whether it belongs to a certain series, two genres that I feel best encompass the book, the book format (paperback, hardcover, Book of the Month, collector’s edition, movie tie-in, and manga), and the amount of pages in the book. Additionally, I also note the dates that I started and ended reading a book, my rating out of 5 stars, a link to a review that I’ve posted online, and a section for notes about the book.
This spreadsheet is how I maintain a sense of control over the chaos of my books, and it makes it really easy to share with my friends when we want to buddy read a book. I take a lot of pride in my spreadsheet organization, honestly, so let me know if you’re also a spreadsheet fiend.
The books that are in the front are usually books that I have yet to read so that I can see them clearly and decide more quickly when I want to start a new book. A lot of these books are ones that have been published a bit more recently and thus were recently acquired. You might notice that some of those books have Goodwill stickers on the spine! A lot of my books (except for the Book of the Month editions) are found in Little Free Libraries, thrift stores, or used bookstores. A few books are bought from local bookstores around me and have been gathered throughout the years (I’m chronically late, and that includes reading popular books).
It’s so hard to try to speak about my bookshelf since if I showed you every individual shelf (all two rows) and the books in other places, you’d be here reading for a very long time. So lastly, I’ll just show you my favorites collection.
This top shelf holds a bit of a collection of Casey McQuiston’s books. Red, White & Royal Blue is one of my favorite books ever. It holds a character that I see a lot of myself in and makes me believe that I, too, can one day live openly and happily. All of McQuiston’s books are the epitome of queer joy. Of course, that’s not to say that their characters don’t face challenges, but seeing these characters that are well-characterized enough to feel like real people receive happy endings in their stories makes me feel like real life can have happy moments as well. Some of my books are tabbed and annotated, and those I’ve turned around to show off to the world.
I also have Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, a book that was assigned for me to read in my first year at UCLA. It’s a biting satire of academia, particularly concerning the studies of Eastern cultures in Western settings. It grapples with the power dynamics of various interracial relationships between the main character and her partner, the Chinese poet who turns out to actually be white, as well as the lasting effects of Western colonization on modern cultures of the colonized.
Lastly, for my favorite books, I have three copies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The 1818 text was also required for me to read for a different UCLA English course, and I immediately fell in love with the story. I don’t often cry when reading books, but I sure did while reading this one. The essay I wrote for this book is one of my favorites from my degree, and I was so lucky to meet one of my best friends, Emma, in that class. The colorful spine of Frankenstein was a gift from her when she was visiting Denmark, and I cherish it as a symbol of where our friendship started.
Speaking of my English degree, I would be remiss not to mention the stack of bricks called Norton anthologies that I have. Despite the late nights those books gave me, I can’t bring myself to try to get rid of them. They’re filled with notes from when I first started out as an English major and remind me of where I started. Even when I moved, I took them with me. They’re not particularly my favorite, but I wouldn’t be where I am without them.
Alexandra Bautista (she/her) is an intern at Sundress Publications who hails from sunny California. Armed with an expensive piece of cardstock (her UCLA English degree) and way too much anxiety for one human body to hold, she approaches her lifelong love of reading with a perspective that is both analytical and emotional. Due to her background in tutoring high-school-aged and college-level students in writing, she believes that inside of everyone is a writer waiting to share their inner voice. Hopefully someday that will include her… whenever she gets over her writer’s block, that is. Which, likely, very possibly, maybe, might be never.
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, November 29th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at 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 November’s Poetry Xfit is Experiment. For this month’s Xfit, Think about unexpected ways to work with white space, diction, shape, and language. Consider abandoning your comfort zones and experimenting with different ideas and forms—or lack thereof!
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.
We are excited to announce the launch of a new fundraising campaign centered on a simple idea: writers helping writers. Donors who make a gift of $100 or more to Sundress Publications can receive a poetry manuscript consultation as a thank-you for supporting our work. Learn more here on our website.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “The Poet Journalist: Intro to Docupoetics” a workshop led by Mandy Shunnarah on Wednesday, November 11th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Register today!
Poets are keen observers of the world and are always trying to make sense of what it means to be alive here, now, in this moment. Docupoetics, or documentary poetry, is one way to do that. By letting the latest headlines inspire poems and using journalistic skills––such as interviews, embedded citations, and historical, academic, and archival research––poets bring an urgent voice and a critical eye to the issues of the day. In this workshop, you’ll learn about the history of docupoetics, what poets are drawn to the subgenre and why, and you’ll be guided through a generative writing exercise to pen your own documentary poem.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, Mandy has requested that those who are able and appreciative make donations to Sundress! Or folks who to donate to Gaza, could give to The Sameer Project.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Appalachian-Palestinian writer in Columbus, Ohio. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in 2024, and their second book, We Had Mansions: Poems, was published by Diode Editions in 2025. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.
We are excited to announce the launch of a new fundraising campaign centered on a simple idea: writers helping writers. Donors who make a gift of $100 or more to Sundress Publications can receive a poetry manuscript consultation as a thank-you for supporting our work. Learn more on our website.
Victoria Hood’s Destroy Me, Desecrate My Bones(Girl Noise Press, 2026) is a hybrid collection that shows how a build-up of unsettled yearning can break a person down. In a mix of grotesque, obsessive, and confessional voices, Hood’s writing pulls you deeper into the spiraling decay of being in love. Split into six sections, Destroy Me, Desecrate My Bones begins with trying to cling to love before the subsequent sections turn to consuming, reshaping, and surrendering to the damage. I focus on the first two sections, “To Contain” and “To Devour,” to track the transition from clinging to consuming.
What strikes me about the prose piece “I’m Sorry We’re Getting Married” in “To Contain” is that it is entirely about her, even if it obsessively focuses on their connection. We never hear Harry’s voice, yet by the end she seems to feel her questions have been answered, and she closes with “see you at the wedding in July.” I keep wondering how much time sits between her writing this and seeing him, and whether he ever hears any of it. The piece fixates on “I love you, Harry,” and nearly every time she says it, an insecurity or another thought about why it wouldn’t work follows. Reading it, I found myself asking: if you have to repeat it this many times, do you truly love him, or are you trying to prove to other people the marriage is right for the two of you? Each declaration reads to me like a battle over which matters more: the lover she holds close, or the people watching. Even so, the close, “I think I’ve answered my question,” feels like she’s trying to force an ending rather than letting it happen naturally.
“I want to feel you drip down me” in “To Devour” mixes intimacy and eroticism in the most grotesque way you can imagine. But then it turns from “I want” to “I don’t want,” and the tone shifts from erotic to haunting: the speaker wants to “clean off the world” from their partner “before you enter the house,” insists, “I don’t want you to die,” then wipes them down and licks them clean “before the sacrifice can begin.” It tips from kinky to ritualistic quickly, and the “sweet and sticky” substance in the beginning is called honey but reads as bodily, especially with “before your insides can come out.” Both readings, a kinky couple and a cannibalistic one, end up being about the same thing: being known by someone so completely that you consume them and hear thoughts you can’t normally. The impossibility of getting inside someone’s head is turned literal through the possessive care of stripping off shoes, clothes, and germs to keep their lover safe, but also isolating them from the rest of the world.
The prose in “How are you?” in “To Devour” is where the collection shifts; there is a stark volley between “The Girl” and “The Best Friend.” They think about the other often and reminisce about each other, yet neither says anything. It is the most poignant compared to the previous poems in the collection because it’s so relatable to friends drifting apart when both are going through difficult things at the same time. The line that resonates with this the most is when you hear The Girl’s interiority: “It is hard to do well when you are nervous that your wellness is not as important as someone else’s.” When one friend is doing better, and the other one is struggling, there are social scripts with clear roles to fall into. But when both care deeply despite their separate struggles, they can’t tell who fits which role, and the confusion can create more distance, as it does here. Even at this distance, the grotesque hasn’t left. “Neither of them wants to climb inside each other, they are both scared to bring up the insides” mirrors earlier poems that try to consume the person the speaker cares about. Here, the same imagery becomes emotional intimacy they can’t risk, so the merging of their bodies appears as a fear of being that close.
Reading Hood’s collection, I came away feeling that the search for love and connection never actually ends. It keeps pushing deeper until it can’t be contained, and the book’s sections follow that path from “To Contain” to “To Spill Over.” Her narratives are messy and grotesque, and refuse to be cleaned up neatly. Intimacy arises, fails, and sometimes succeeds, and the book treats all of it as love that needs to be honored because it is difficult and uncomfortable to face. Often the love isn’t even heard by the other person, and the poems suggest that being heard may not be the most important part of feeling connected. Even though Hood writes love as something that cannot be held in, I felt held by her work. It captures the weird, sad girls who cry over everything and never had a place to put those feelings. Now we can set them down in her collection.
Emma Flores is an undergraduate student at Binghamton University studying English. They have a particular interest in researching human behavior and society through storytelling, with a focus on cultural narratives and folklore. In their free time, Emma can be found doing tarot readings, wandering bookstores, or hunting down spiritual shops for the next deck to add to their growing collection.
Yesterday, I started crying at a video of flowers blooming from cracks in the sidewalk. Seeing all those blooms burst through a crack of open light, using tiny opportunities to propel themselves to the surface, past dark, rough stone, becoming a small little miracle, one so small it is probably often ignored by most and never seen for its true beauty. I think that is what made me cry, that there is so much beauty in this world hidden amongst the fast-paced way we live and the negative circumstances that our world has been immersed in. That there is living, growing hope in our world. I cried because it was so sad that beauty gets buried under loud headlines and buzzing phones, that we walk so quickly trying to get to the next stop that we forget to look down and see flowers reaching for the sky, for life. Then I started to laugh because I was so grateful to be a person who could feel this much over weeds growing through concrete, that I was fortunate enough to be a person who paused long enough to take in the wonder of small miracles. So, with a tear-stained face and a tickle of laughter in my throat, I allowed myself to feel, because that is a lovely, vivacious thing in itself.
I thought this was a good introduction to me because it is often a part of myself I find hard to really explain. That I feel so big that my emotions become a wave of passion in themself, and for a long time I had wished that away. Feeling so strongly and intimately was and is really difficult to manage; I wanted to be free of my racing mind, but as I get older I realize it is a blessing to see meaning and hope in such small things. To think and ponder and hope and dream, to cry and laugh, to love and hurt are all a giant gift. I am blessed that my bleeding heart emphasizes my admiration for many things; it allows me to see the magic in cat meows, warm tea, the way tree branches create patterns against the blue sky, bumper stickers that a person looked at and related to so much that they stuck it on the back of their car, and books that make you feel at home. Having a vast ocean of feelings that allows me to slow down enough to appreciate all that is wondrous makes me feel like I have my own form of enchantment. So, if you ever catch me in a mini skirt staring at the sidewalk crying, just know I’m okay and right where I want to be.
Now don’t confuse me for some strictly melancholic and metaphorical woman simply because of my feeble attempt at being profound. At my core, I am nostalgia-stricken, hyperfeminine, and a touch off-putting to some. I love fairies, the cute and sparkly ones, and the ones that would trick you into running away to Faireworld to dance your feet off. Unicorns? Obsessed. Mermaids? Enthralled. I am also extremely into clothes and the color pink. I also think a list of items that you can never have enough of includes lip gloss, purses, stuffed animals, and BOOKS. I think to conclude this messy introduction, if I was creating myself in a potion these are the ingredients I would mix into the cauldron: Pondering, books about magic, cats and other small creatures, attempting as many hobbies as possible, hot pink glitter, Halloween, whimsy, sweet treats, fairies, an extreme love for 80s movies with hand-made puppets that look like goblins, a deep admiration for art, and a yearning for adventure no matter how small.
Miranda Spurlock is 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. She really 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.
In their poetry collection WANT (ink & ivy, 2026), nat raum maps a queer, nonbinary identity through borrowed childhood evidence: bras that don’t fit right, pink men’s button-ups, and loopy cheerleader handwriting. They translate the stubborn self-denial of “token straight friend” just as fluently as the gender-envious longing of “hot sugar,” tracing the aching gap between an inner world and how it is perceived. Just as their epigraph foreshadows–“Hindsight is 20/20”–the self raum uncovers isn’t found through introspection, but read off of external symbols worn along the way.
In “what’s in a name,” the narrator shortens their birth name by two syllables at ten years old, “back when i still liked rules,” a small rebellious moment that functions in hindsight as a first flicker of the future self that they had not known yet. The poem loosely takes the shape of a ghazal, with couplets ending with the same end-word “name,” and in a way, it also closes traditionally the way a ghazal does, with a takhallus, the poet signing their name at the end. The form is usually thematically for love and longing for one’s beloved, and raum’s version repurposes it to court the future, or “want”ed self instead: the correct name that finally fits right for them, “nat,” is what the speaker finishes the poem with.
“cheerleader handwriting” is structured differently, as a full verse paragraph. The enjambment of the line “the ways i was taught how to / woman” splits the infinitive from the word “woman” which is used as a verb here; the separation almost symbolizing the literal gap they felt from the performative acts of womanhood they break from, “splitting the walls of the binary.” raum’s handwriting, again, acts as another piece of evidence, “an inherent act of queerness,” that joins the list of markers scattered through all the poems. “men’s section” uses the same paragraph format to catalog more small, norm-breaking acts: of buying a pink men’s button-up and wearing hidden boxer shorts under uniforms, their significance confirmed by the line “what a joy to know i have always been walking in this direction.”
raum not only borrows objects to mark the self, but they also make use of allusions that range from Shakespeare to quote-tweets, treating each reference with the same weight. “what’s in a name” opens with the line “i would not be a rose, sweet by any name,” inverting Juliet’s “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Where Juliet is claiming that names do not hold significance, raum’s speaker insists that they do, and the entire poem continues as a search for the right one. “token straight friend” echoes the opening of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”) with the line “i saw the best minds of my generation decide they were gay as fuck.” This can almost be read as aligning being “gay” with being “mad” and is reflected in how the speaker continues to deny their own queerness throughout the poem, insisting that they are “straighter than a plastic ruler.” “cheerleader handwriting” is built off of a tweet: “being trans is weird why am i an adult man with cheerleader handwriting.” Shakespeare, Ginsberg, and a random stranger on the internet all get cited with the same authority, and none are treated as more legitimate than the others. It is also the same method that raum applies to objects; the self does not just wear borrowed clothes, it speaks in borrowed lines, in an attempt to understand itself.
This pattern of borrowing, however, does show its cracks, even from the beginning of the collection. In “hot sugar,” raum reveals that amidst the “cavalcade of learning gender by rapt observation,” it was not truly gender itself that they were envious of, but rather “the sureness with which it was performed.” And in the final line, they reject the entire pattern of borrowing and adjusting to the binary, instead turning to “choose divine emptiness.” This idea later returns in the concluding poem, “tomboy,” when the speaker is “steeped in the sweet of this nothing.” This line lands powerfully for the closing of the collection, because it isn’t new, but a sentiment that the speaker has been circling the whole time. After a series of collecting pieces of past evidence, the last poem doesn’t aim to add them all up, but instead puts them down.
For readers who have done this same secondhand accounting, sifting through external objects and words, to find a definition for their internal being, WANT offers a sort of company. But it also points to another direction, a way out, toward a “divine” nothingness, a refusal to fit within any single gender, binary, or category at all.
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 this month’s installment of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, Franchesca Nicole Lazaro speaks with Lily Rex about their poetry chapbook Little Planes (2024). Little Planes was released as a limited run of 200 handbound copies, some of which are still available for purchase directly from the author. In our current age of digital, digital, digital, Lily Rex’s DIY ethos directed towards physical media produced by human hands is a welcome breath of fresh air, if not a small revolutionary act. Little Planes is a short but powerful collection about “influential musicians who have died in plane crashes, such as Patsy Cline, Otis Redding, and Aaliyah.”
Franchesca Nicole Lazaro: Little Planes is rooted in a very specific kind of American grief: the musician who dies young in a small plane crash. What drew you to this particular lens for exploring loss and legacy?
Lily Rex: The concept for Little Planes started over a decade ago, with the refrain in the title poem. It came to me while I was listening to some Patsy Cline and studying at undergrad. American culture places premiums on youth and celebrity, quickly granting mythic status to people who are perceived as gifted by God, the universe, or another higher power of choice. In my study of American literature and history, I became interested in how this is at odds with the high value our culture also places on work ethic and individualism. There are really two concepts of the American Dream—one where we earn what we want, and another where we are simply born worthy, destined to receive.
FNL: The collection pays close attention to the non-famous people who died alongside stars, such as roadies, bodyguards, and makeup artists. What does it mean to you to center those figures?
LR: One of the questions I set out to answer with these poems was, “Why should we not romanticize our own lives, elevating certain stories to mythic status?” And my answer to that is: we should. The quality of a story is not in its glitz and glamor for me, but how it is told. I have an obsession about challenging my audience to consider the mundane in a different light, which I think is a hallmark both of country music’s influence on my process and my background in journalism. I can be observant to a fault. If you’ve ever happened to drop your fork or hug your waitress at a Waffle House while I was there, it’s in my journal for that day. To center people who work behind the scenes or with a degree of anonymity hopefully means that my readers will reflect on their own work in the world, expand their definition of art, and see the blurred line that I see between art and labor.
FNL: The title poem is written explicitly as a country song, complete with a refrain. What does the choice to open the collection in that form allow you to do that other poetic modes might not?
LR: Opening a poetry collection with a song is more of a soapbox moment for me than a stylistic tool. Though I have a much larger volume of work in poetry and prose, my first genre was songwriting. I started taking guitar lessons and wrote my first song when I was ten, heavily inspired by The Judds. I live in both the world of songwriting, which is more of a pop art, and the world of poetry, which is more niche and sometimes annoyingly pretentious. It brings me joy to stir the pot in the debate about what makes songs and poetry distinct from one another, both to convince self-proclaimed poetry haters that they actually do enjoy poetry through the argument that some songs are poems, and to advocate for the literary merit and historical significance of storytelling through song in academic settings. The beauty of self-publishing is I can do whatever I want.
FNL: The collection moves between Nashville, the Indiana Dunes, rural Mississippi, and the Bahamas. How does geography shape the way these elegies work?
LR: Grief knows no borders, but I believe that places contain multitudes, including grief, just like people do. I aim for the places I write about to feel like characters in and of themselves, to make people curious about the history of whatever ground they stand on, and urge them to consider the entire range of emotions and events that have given that place its personality and its power.
FNL: “Taylor Swift’s Private Jet” builds its argument through repetition and tall tales. What does that poem’s structure allow you to do that a more straightforward elegy wouldn’t?
LR: My approach to elegy is to make something new of memory, not just to rhyme and lament. Assigning a strict form to grief just doesn’t make sense to me. Grief is not manageable, linear, or neat. Why write about it as such? In an unsurprising turn, my favorite elegies are songs, such as Bob Dylan’s “The Death of Emmett Till” or the Indigo Girls’ “Virginia Woolf.” I would argue, and perhaps the poem argues, that that which we decide to repeat has power and gains more power every time it is retold.
FNL: Several poems imagine conversations with or about the inner lives of the deceased. How do you think about the ethics of speaking for or alongside the dead?
LR: I don’t believe in speaking for the dead (unless I knew them very well), but I do believe in speaking about the dead. How else can we preserve history? In this collection, I have focused on documented history, my reverence for the art in question and at times let the artists speak for themselves through their work, such as “Conversation Between Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Texas Flood,” which is a found poem that makes use of phrases from SRV’s own songs.
FNL: The collection closes with the image of dead musicians reincarnated as cardinals in ordinary places like truck stops, backyard swings. What guided your decision to end there, and what drew you specifically to the cardinal as that closing image?
LR: I made a list of artists I wanted to write about when I started this project, and I wanted to present them chronologically. Some of them were old favorites of mine, like Patsy, but some were artists I wanted to learn more about. I found my way into some of the poems through my longstanding connection with the music. With some others, I found my entry point through immersing myself in new music or researching the artists’ lives. Aaliyah was slated to be the focus of the last poem because hers was the most recent death I wanted to write about.
I struggled to find an entry point in her music, in part because I was disturbed by the fact that she was reportedly given sedatives and carried onto the plane because she had been nervous to board. I started and failed to finish a few poems about her, torn between celebrating her art and addressing the violence and predatory truth of her story.
Her name is rarely printed without being attached to her most notorious abuser. A practice that every part of me, but especially the journalist in me, finds really repugnant. I decided that I wouldn’t add to that massive body of work where she is defined by what happened to her. I truly was sitting on my front porch, thinking about the common folklore of cardinals being visitors from another realm. I didn’t know that image would lead me to her when I started writing it, but my observation of the cardinals led me to think of her and took me to a place where I thought of her as vibrant, unburdened, and alive.
FNL: Is there anything else you’d like to speak to, or any upcoming releases, projects, or events you’d like to share?
LR: I plan to take Little Planes on the road eventually in the form of a hybrid show where I will alternate reading poems and covering songs by the artists I’ve researched. I have more plane crash poems, and wouldn’t rule out expanding it into a full-length collection someday. Right now, however, I’m finishing up a full-length collection of poems inspired by restaurant work and overlooked places/people.
Lily Rex (they/she) is a queer, working-class writer and musician. Their poetry, informed by fascinations with rivers, history, politics, and labor, has been featured by Bareknuckle Press, SALT Weekly, and Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten records. Their first chapbook Rivers Have Friends Too (2021) sold out of its initial run in its first month, and their second chapbook Little Planes (2024) is available now. Rex is an Indiana transplant living in Nashville, Tennessee.
Franchesca Nicole Lazaro is an emerging editor with interests in developmental editing and book production. Her editorial practice focuses on literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction exploring history, technology, media studies, feminism, and literature. She has worked as an Editorial Intern and Reader at Brink Literary Project and joined Sundress Publications as an intern in January 2026. Based in Seattle, Washington, she is passionate about amplifying perspectives from women, asexual voices, and religious backgrounds.
During a time when there is a distressing rise in conservative misogyny, Shivani Gupta’s debut chapbook my mother is a mixed metaphor (Rockwood Press, 2026) stands as a beautiful tribute to philogyny and motherhood. Through intimate metaphors and mindful details, Gupta scribes a narrative of a daughter growing into independence and her unabashed admiration for the woman who has loved her first: her mother.
The speaker clarifies that she is a daughter of an Indian family, following patriarchal traits with the expectations of a mother serving as a provider of comfort, a forgiving caregiver, and the rock for the family’s children. Another common characteristic of Indian motherhood throughout the chapbook is sharing food as a love language, one of my favorite examples expressed as “my mother’s love shows on my waist—climbs into / my rib cage, forms a protective layer around what i / tell her is my infallible heart.” (27)
In the chapbook’s titular poem, “mother as mixed metaphor,” these concepts are exquisitely depicted within the first four lines:
“my mother is a recliner with a massager, heating & abundant side-pockets for snacks
overstuffed peanut butter & jelly sandwich edges cut, well rounded, palatable to all ages” (7)
While the speaker often addresses her mother specifically, Gupta omits using “my mother” in her poems’ titles, acknowledging that there are certain histories which are inherited from generations before her.
In an Indian family, it’s not uncommon for mothers to watch as fathers “stand atop / spiraled staircases, ready for tripping / fortune waits for them / to give up before they arrive” (19). While the speaker’s own father “came back around / a chronic kind of sadness / his new normal” (25), it occurred after a childhood where “guilt breathed / into college son didn’t choose,” and “daughter… forever wears shirts oversized / comfort never fit right” (20).
By contrast, a mother’s thoughtfulness and compassion are dressed as quiet strengths comparable to forces of nature (“…almond eyes, wide, twisted and stormy,” “she is the life they mean when they say larger than life” (7)). How a mother “is juicy warm skies / torched at witching hour / gives light to another’s home.” (34) And then Gupta playfully zooms in to everyday treasures, where the speaker recalls her mother’s patience, how she “dialed the wrong number / often, but you were always listening” (26), or notes her mother’s tendency to hoard a mix-match collage, from ketchup packets, teatime biscuits, to birthday cards signed by the family. The speaker refers to herself as a “mirror” (16) of her mother, admiring and adoring their shared resilience, quirks, and origins.
Yet while she celebrates her mother and respects motherhood, noting that she is close to the age her mother gave birth to her—“freshly 30… with her almost 60” (28)—the speaker asserts that child-raising isn’t for her. Plainly, without metaphor, she states, “i will never hold something in me / that is younger, no version of us / to pass down” (10) and that “maternal instincts aren’t genetic” (13).
Despite her mother’s gentle pushing to give birth to grandchildren after the speaker’s marriage, the daughter remains firm in her decision to be childless. She is a tree “still branched / propelled into the future / with nieces and nephews,” (15), loving them and her choice as another legacy of hope for the women in their family, one she knows her mother—the one who always ate last at the dinner table—did not have a chance to experience in full. Respectfully, the speaker recognizes:
“i want to trust in my mother’s love cocoon a closure, her lack of want wrapped into a morning & a bite of sun-blessed yolk—spilling, spilling, stop. (18)”
An adult daughter accepting her mother’s ways as “not stars, / but we are star adjacent,” (33) is a precious time of maturity that not all people can experience. Instead of causing conflict between them, the lack of personal want her mother has worries the daughter, who advocates for her mother to keep growing as a person without obligations to family, believing her mother will someday “shed mother layers / where the sea returns to ocean— / she will be born / again” (34).
I was deeply moved by the deceptive simplicity of the final poem, “mother as twenty questions,” a combination of sincere curiosity and existential inquiries. Zooming in and out of scope, the daughter encourages her mother to consider who she was before she had children, who she wishes to become, what she hopes to see. It’s a sweet window of perspective for her mother to consider, leaving the chapbook’s ending as part of an open-ended, ongoing conversation between them. I’m wondering how many selfless caregivers in this world may have needed to hear or ask themselves those same questions as well.
my mother is a mixed metaphor is Gupta’s delightful exploration into what women can be in life. I am grateful to read a chapbook where growing up isn’t always about the traumas or tragedies experienced; it can also be a jubilation of women’s choices and our forebearers, especially our mothers. Though I don’t share the same personal opinions regarding maternal instincts, I felt lighter as I read this wonderful ode to cisgender women. Whether they break the traditional family mold or not, women are capable of anything in Gupta’s poems.
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.
