In some small grade, at some small age, in my small hands was placed a manuscript. Handwritten in a child’s unsteady letters on a stack of wide-ruled loose leaf paper, yes, but a manuscript nonetheless. It was a story about a lawyer. Some of the students in my class were collaborating to write it out, and they had neared the end of their work and were looking to move it to the final stage: adding illustrations. And this job had been delegated to me.

I was decently skilled at drawing and was happy to have that noticed, so I gladly took up the task. In order to know what to draw, I first had to read the story. I don’t exactly remember what the words said or how the story went. All I remember is thinking, “Oh, no.” Oh, no, no. Whoever had written this was not a writer. Whoever had written this needed help. And this job would be taken up by me.

I remember pulling out the core elements of the story and reworking it for better flow, rewriting entire sections, and questioning the characters’ motivations. My classmates, of course, didn’t give a damn about all that. After I dutifully drew the requested illustrations, they lost interest in the project entirely. But I’d felt a spark: this was my first real experience with creative writing and I was hooked. Like many writers, I was one of those kids who read books under their desk during class. The local library was my second home. But until working with that lawyer story, I hadn’t realized that I could write stories of my own. After that, I wrote constantly. But it was only now, as I’ve begun to pursue a career in editing, that I’ve realized my love for editing also started from that little stack of loose leaf paper. 

Reader, writer, editor; writer, editor, reader; editor, reader, writer—there’s no saying what label I would prioritize in aligning myself with. It all comes down to the same thing anyway: words, words, words; books, books, books. And books, for me, are inescapable.

While earning my BA in International Studies, I found myself assisting a professor with the research for a book she was writing. And then I found myself writing a chapter for her book. And then I found myself co-authoring an entire book with her. Then, after graduating, rather than finding a job in the field I got my degree in, I ended up working as a bookseller in a bookstore I had grown up visiting. I landed in freelance copyediting after a coworker at the bookstore told me he was moving out of the country and asked if I’d be interested in taking up his position at a press he read for.

Eventually, I stopped lamenting my BA “going to waste” (it didn’t, it hasn’t, and it won’t) and started listening to what was being whispered in my ear: go into books, stay in books, live books.

My editorial practice has come a long way since I was eight years old and asserting complete ownership over someone else’s manuscript. When publishing our book, my co-author and I worked with an incredibly warm team who walked in tandem with us and our vision, and it was this specific experience that made me want to go into editing professionally.

I firmly believe that we humans were put on this earth, first and foremost, to chit-chat—to share our stories and perspectives and opinions, whatever form that may take. As a writer myself, I know how daunting it is to share your work publicly. I want to be the kind of editor who uplifts their author, encouraging them to speak their own story candidly with a strong, unwavering voice. Art is communication; art is community; community is everything. We write to be heard, we read to listen. And I, for one, would love to hear what you have to say.

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Isabeau J. Belisle Dempsey (they/them) is a proud Chicagoan, Belizean, Lesbian, and Capricorn. They hold a BA in International Studies and Spanish and are currently earning an MA in English Literature and Publishing, and they hope to eventually put their obsession with commas to good use as an in-house editor. History book co-author, amateur poet, freelance copyeditor, and generally just along for the ride, you can find Isabeau in your local bookstore surreptitiously fixing the shelves—they were once a bookseller and never quite broke the habit.

I am an awful gift giver. I have never been good at choosing an item to encapsulate my love for someone, never good at the wrapping of it all, and I always ruin the moment that the recipient tears the paper with frantic explanations as to why I thought the thing inside the box was worth giving. It is always a mess. I look at my bookshelf, though, and all I see are gifts. My friends and family all give books as gifts for birthdays and Christmas, offering our used copies for someone else’s. This Christmas, I gave up Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk for my uncle’s copy of Devil House by John Darnielle, and it sits on my shelf next to Katherine Dunn’s Toad, another one of his gifts.

I like gifting books because they provide the frantic explanation for me. I can give my mom a copy of Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and let her read about a family that loses and loves and perseveres, and she can respond with Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch to say that this loss, love, and tenacity is as old as I am, starting at birth and growing stronger over the years. That communication is subtle and sometimes hard to see, but it is intimate and real and makes the gift giving a purpose I have always struggled to find. My shelf is full of gifts, messages from my loved ones.

My shelf is also home to books that allow me to escape. My favorite brain candy is a thriller, and my friends and I pass around the same copies until they are cracked and creased beyond recognition. I recently received Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast, gifted by a friend who loves to devour a thriller fueled by bad choices. In exchange, I gave her The Guest by Emma Cline. We live several states apart and have lost the luxury of a shared social circle, our daily lives defined by the new friends and environment that college provides, so the books we share fills the gaps. These stories of messes and mistakes become our gossip, our shared experiences shifting from school cafeteria to hardbacks shipped with notes in the margins. 

The bookshelf in my college apartment is missing a lot of my favorites. It is small and hardback books have to sit at an angle to fit. However, it holds messages from the people I love. With every book I receive and cram into these two shelves, I learn something new about my friends and family, and with every book I gift, I share part of myself.

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Meg Pinkston is a maker of crafts, stories, and foods from East Tennessee, her creations all heavily influenced by her Appalachian roots. She is a sophomore at the University of Tennessee pursuing a degree in English with a minor in Political Science. In her free time, Meg can be found scuba diving and writing essays exploring the complexities of the American South.

If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Press, 2024), Judy Kronenfeld’s sixth poetry collection, aims high—exploring love and loss, loneliness and vulnerability, and what it means to be alive. In a beautiful, transcendent poetic voice, Kronenfeld’s speaker both embraces and struggles against our all-too-human fragility. Nevertheless, from within this work emerges a call to live your life today.

Much of this collection was composed during the Covid-19 lockdowns. The first half reflects this and is pervaded by a deep sense of isolation magnified by the speaker’s illness. “Together,” a short poem detailing the speaker’s days spent recovering surgery, communicates an understated alienation:

“You share my room 
three nights in the surgical ward,
sleeping awkwardly
on a foldout chair, as I doze
in my opiate-quieted bed—
the soothing arm’s reach
between us all the sweetness
we can know.” (Kronenfeld 35)

“Together” encapsulates of the omnipresent theme of isolation: at arm’s length from others, unable to reach across the gap. Although Covid-19 is only mentioned by name a few times, its specter haunts this collection.

Just as she does in “Together,” Kronenfeld roots the affective in the body throughout this collection, breaking down barriers between soma and psyche. We are not just together; we are as gauze and skin. In “Anticipation” Kronenfeld writes:

“In the dawn chill, in the too-quiet
late afternoon, separation waits.
I will rush from our bed or my desk
to find you first—working the crossword
at the breakfast table, or pulling dandelions
in the yard as the light fails. I will wrap myself
to you close as gauze to heal the inescapable
rift—make us two birds fellable
with one stone.” (55)

The embodiment of the affective in If Only There Were Stations of the Air is a tacit endorsement of our status as living, animal beings. Try as we might, we cannot ignore that we are alive and dying as all other animals are. Presented side-by-side, these poems become a dialectic of isolation and togetherness: the unbearable opiate-sleep of solitude, the vulnerability of togetherness. Through this tension, Kronenfeld reveals the vulnerability and woundedness at the heart of the human experience.

At times, Kronenfeld embraces this fragility as an important part of being human, as something we must accept so that we can accept living. If we are lucky to alive, then maybe we are lucky to be vulnerable. In “8th and 9th Decade,” Kronenfeld writes, “pieces of cotton wool to stuff in her nostril. / She might think: so this is how / our lives begin to come undone. But / what she thinks is: Oh my God we’re so lucky (49).” While discussing the fragility that comes with age, Kronenfeld finds reason for hope: we are lucky to experience this. We are lucky to be alive, to not have died young, to grow old with others by our side.

Kronenfeld is not always so positive, of course. In “Theft”, Kronenfeld’s speaker mourns that vulnerability (this time, to physical pain) so often pushes us apart “Now we sleep, / avoiding pain, / at outposts / of our spacious bed— / each wrapped in ancient / loneliness (47).” Living is not always easy, and our fragility so often is heralded by pain.

Kronenfeld grapples with something very fundamental in this collection: how are we to keep living? How do we go on, knowing there will be pain with every joy? These questions have me returning, over and over, to this section from the first poem in this collection, “Flowers growing in timelapse to music:”

“All the blind plants busy
as an orchestra playing
prestissimo, almost fast enough
for my mortal eye to imagine
cotyledon to stunning blossom
known all-at-once
in timeless Mind—the barrier
of becoming, broken.
As if there were
an instant plan
for everything natural,
and it was perfectly
beneficent.” (Kronenfeld 12)

There might not be an answer to the questions above. If there is, it isn’t an easy answer, nor a singular answer. Nevertheless, there is an undeniable beauty to the world. If Only There Were Stations of the Air is both a cry against the constant march of time, and a celebration of the beauty life holds regardless. “Flowers growing in timelapse to music,” to me, feels like a love song for life’s unknowable and sublime movements, for our ability to find meaning in the small things.

If Only There Were Stations of the Air is a collection that continues to come back to me, imploring me to find beauty in life while it lasts. There is a transcendental beauty to this collection, one best felt by reading it for oneself. It is a work that both affirms and retreats from life, both worldly and ethereal in one. Most certain, however, is that it was a wonderful spring break read, perfectly suited for afternoons spent beneath the blooming dogwoods and winter-hardened cedars of my native Middle Tennessee.

If Only There Were Stations of the Air is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Press

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Natalie Gardner is a trans writer hailing from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is currently pursuing a BA in English with a minor in philosophy from the University of Tennessee. She loves transgressive fiction, hiking, and schlocky, B-tier horror movies. When she isn’t working, you can find her haunting the coffee shops of Fort Sanders and DIY shows across East Tennessee. Her work in the field of linguistics can be found in Feedback Review in Second Language.

Lee guides readers toward recognition of the violent, addicting natures of the relationships and thought systems that ‘kill us’ or force us to surrender pieces of ourselves. In “This is how they teach you to want it…” Sheena urges us readers to challenge our roles in patriarchy, faith, and liberation, and to consider the levels of agency we have within our lives and others. Especially since a lot of us have no choice but to do so and find safety. This line from the title poem exemplifies this point: “The way you will shut your own eyes, cover them. Cover your own ears. Fold in on yourself. The quiet within the folding mimics mama’s womb”(Lee 17).

The key question here is: What are YOU willing to do, and what evil are you willing to commit? What part of yourself are you willing to betray? And are you courageous enough to switch paths? In the poem “About Prey, the Hunted, the Feral,” Lee insists that the reader knows where they stand and that even the worst deniers cannot disown their true belief. She asks in very few words, “What is the likelihood that you know where you stand?” This line is so powerful because the author already knows the answer. By the end of the book, Lee asks us how much more can we take, giving every pound of proverbial flesh to our murderers, our oppressors.

Lee uses very strong language to convey themes of violence, patriarchy, sex, faith, and the erasure of black and brown people. How They Teach You reads as a condensed demonstration of unspoken and unbearable pain, but one that is exhausted and sick of being hunted. This kind of pain that transcends the body and seeps into the fabric of the world around us, persisting like a permanent stain.

First, Lee split the book into three parts to convey the key components and consequences of what she calls “The Slaughter.” The first handful of poems in this book are derivatives of the title, meant to break each part of the polarizing statement: “This is how they teach you to want it.” This is to say that the oppression of the most vulnerable groups gets so bad that they are inevitably taught and beaten into wanting it. Antagonized, faith, and loved- bombed into the compliance of their literal and figurative deaths, in they teach you the narrator says, “You’re the kill who wants to be the kill, this is how they taught you” (Lee 20). Lee insists that the predator, the hunter, and the slaughterer (whether through love, security, or faith) drive the speaker crazy to the point of self-sacrifice.

Lee uses the hunt and hunted, the prey and preyed on, as a vehicle for understanding what makes us the undead. She also uses the term “the hunted hunter” to mean one not yet slaughtered.  Shanta argues that there is no survival of the fittest, as the dead never die and will eventually haunt the so-called fittest, this line from ‘This Story is About’ Lee writes  ‘This story is what imma tell, I’m the kill who caught the hunter, I’m the kill who eats, not swallowed, Dead, but not surrendered” (Lee 12).

There were a handful of relatable lines and literary elements that added to the reading experience. Strong storytelling in conjunction with direct references to the reader are featured in each part like a guidebook, tips with ittle bits of wisdom, a table of contents, and an on-theme disclaimer for the content that will follow. Multiple figures—honest archetypes that we readers could choose, or choose not to identify with—appear in this collection, too, making the poetry even more engaging. The archetypes of Fevered Feral, Hunter of Humans, Hunted Feral, Hunter of Wild Women, Hunted Wild, and Woman Hunter: Corpse Eater represent those who either take part in the slaughter, those who perpetuate the slaughter, and those who are cognizant of it and have and have the will to fight it.

These poems do not blame the victim. They do the opposite; they vindicate and validate all the nasty feelings that come with victimhood and the nasty business that is knowingly or unknowingly keeping those gears turning. This chapbook allows readers to face oppression and perhaps face the ways they’ve betrayed themselves because of its perpetual nature. Shanta Lee has set out to create something more than inspirational, a battle cry for the vulnerable, for the oh-so-neutral walking corpses in our world, and she has succeeded. This is a book that will move you to advocate for yourself and others and give recognition to the slaughter(ed). 

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In my childhood home, I maintained two separate bookshelves: one for fiction, the other for non-fiction and poetry. It was easy to maintain this separation because I didn’t own many books—frugal by nature (I’m a middle child and a Capricorn), I was always more keen on borrowing from the library than buying books outright. I would only commit to buying a title if I had read it and absolutely loved it. For a long time, my shelves consisted only of these all-star picks, titles that had been gifted to me, and holdovers from my undergrad degree.

The danger came when I started working as a bookseller.

Part of a bookseller’s job is to read pre-publication versions of books (ARCs) in order to keep astride of what’s going to be for sale in the coming months, as well as to write and submit reviews to publishers so they know how their titles are being received. My bookstore had a bookshelf of ARCs in the break room for us to pick from as we pleased. Dangerous.

Before working as a bookseller, I primarily read fantasy and science fiction; Holly Black was my role model from young, Star Trek my favorite piece of media ever, so those were (and still are) my comfort genres. But between stacks of free ARCs and my 40% bookseller discount, my shelves exploded, flourishing with genres I had never before considered touching—like the broad-scope ‘literary fiction.’ Stoner by John Williams has become a pillar of my readership, a title that I will revisit time and again as I get older. I also began to include literary criticism, such as William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life, a commentary on Stoner. By virtue of being constantly surrounded by books and readers of all kinds, I was fostering a deeper, more holistic love and appreciation for literature.

Mid-way through my tenure at the bookstore, I moved out of my family home and into an apartment. I only brought one bookshelf with me—both for ease of travel, and in some silly attempt to keep my overflowing library in check.

“Once my bookshelf is full, then I’ll stop!” I’d foolishly promise myself. “That’s my sign to read what I have before getting new books!” Yeah, right.

Now, my shelves are not separated by genre, instead a mix of fiction and nonfiction and poetry whose only taxonomy is alphabetized by author. They are my point of pride in the apartment: a Mary Oliver collection that is the envy of my friends; five editions (and counting) of The Hobbit, a formative book for me; signed copies from when I had the incredible pleasure of meeting beloved authors—looking at my shelves fills me with unabashed joy.

I have a stack of “priority” books on my bedside table—Stone Butch Blues and Silencing the Past, Bardugo’s The Familiar and Orange’s Wandering Stars—though I’m largely a vibes-based reader and often ignore my long-suffering TBR. It’s just so nice knowing I now have my own personal library to patronize, shelves containing a spectrum of genres for me to choose from, whatever mood I find myself in.

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Isabeau J. Belisle Dempsey (they/them) is a proud Chicagoan, Belizean, Lesbian, and Capricorn. They hold a BA in International Studies & Spanish and are currently earning an MA in English Literature & Publishing, and they hope to eventually put their obsession with commas to good use as an in-house editor. History book co-author, amateur poet, freelance copyeditor, and generally just along for the ride, you can find Isabeau in your local bookstore surreptitiously fixing the shelves—they were once a bookseller and never quite broke the habit.

Nora Hikari (she/her), a Chinese and Japanese transgender poet and artist based in Philadelphia, spoke with Sundress intern Isabeau J Belisle Dempsey about her latest collection, Still My Father’s Son. A 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, Nora is the author of GIRL 2.0 and The Small Lights of Her Heart, with her work appearing in publications like Ploughshares and Palette Poetry. Her poetry explores themes of gender, family, trauma, and fragmentation, offering a deeply personal and multifaceted view of identity. Nora’s experience influences her creative process and the unique way she navigates the complexities of language and voice in her writing.

Author’s Note: As discussed in Still My Father’s Son, “I” am a plural system, a single physical body which houses multiple personalities/personhoods/personas. For the sake of convenience, we will fluidly switch through the first-person pronouns “I” and “we,” as contextually relevant, for the duration of this interview, just as we do in our private life.

Isabeau J Belisle Dempsey: I’m interested in the formatting choice for “Notes on a Poem:” To me, it called back to childhood school days, the child self. Can you tell me about the importance of the format for this particular poem?

Nora Hikari: I was nine years old when I was first taught how to write outline notes by My Father, indeed as part of a school assignment. He illustrated the process by walking me through His own outlining of His Sunday sermons as a chaplain. The memory is, like many others, a bright spot of great tension for me—a locus of innocence lit by the wonder and awe of being His student, twisted through the years by the increasing context of His mounting cruelties and abuses. Like many things My Father did to me, or even for me, this moment was likely inconsequential to Him but would go on to develop into a powerful nexus of captured psychic energies within my own private mythology. The memory is still vivid to me, if distorted (or perhaps clarified?) through the fracturing lens of trauma. To this day, my preferred note taking style is still outline notes, and every time I start a new outline, I still have a moment where I think of that afternoon with My Father in Yokota Air Force Base.

It felt fitting to delve into such a charged format for the design of this poem. The poem—and certainly, the book overall—is highly concerned with breakages—with fractures, splinters, fragmentations. I’ve always been fascinated by lineation in poetry—the structural and poetic role, certainly, but also by the political and social implications of the conventions of breakage, where breakages are considered acceptable, what kinds of breakages are considered effective, and indeed, what kind of breakages are considered abominable, pathological, maleficent. 

The outline note format provided a very flexible avenue into a nuanced exploration of breakage. Implicit to the structure of the outline note format are hierarchies to lineations and breakages— relationships are illustrated between subsequent and preceding lines in stark ways. Beyond utilizing negative space for the visual impact, the outline note structure has an extremely clear, metric, definitional logic of connecting concepts and captured lines. Each subsequent indent communicates something clear and specific about the relationship between the concept in the parent entry and the child entry. To me, this provides a new axis entirely to play with on the page, a third dimension of meaning-space where conceptual marriages and divorces, conceptions and births, could be illustrated, instantly and intuitively. It allows for the fluid and unobtrusive implementation of a number of tools which I needed to tell this particular story in this way. 

In particular, the child-parent structure allowed the format for call-and-response, a way of dialoguing with a single voice. Of course, there is also the matter of voice itself. We, as a plural system, are a collective who speaks with a single voice, and yet many voices. These voices can be cacophonous or harmonious, and the tensions which are illustrated by that reality afford an avenue of insight into our intrapersonal relation. Each indent offers an ambiguous avenue into distinguishing each voice of the Greek chorus—and while we are shown the reality of “there is a breakage in voice here,” we are not shown anything more specific than that—we are not offered the name of the voice, the cadence of the voice, her timbre or color. All we receive is the information that the voice is possibly different where there is a break, or perhaps it is the same voice with a different internality. We can know there is a difference from how the poem breaks, but we can only know how they are different by what the line says.

IJBD: The complex nature of gender is threaded throughout the collection and is reflected in the title—Still My Father’s Son has a feeling of frustration at the seeming inescapability of family and their expectations, a sentiment expressed in “My Father Comes Back from The War.” Can you say more about how gender and family interact for you, and how this might feed into the collection’s theme of fragmentation?

NH: I have a very particular understanding of gender, one which is informed by my

experiences as well as my theoretical grounding and analysis. My understanding of gender splits it into two parts—once again, fragmenting something “cohesive” into dynamically opposed parts via the necessity of their difference in character. On the one hand, there is Gender as the internal experience, the subjectivity, the expression of agency, the “individual.” This gender is concerned with autonomy, with recognition, with acknowledgement, and expression. Interwoven with this Gender, the weft to the warp, is Gender as the social experience, the political dimension of gender—gender as a regime, gender as a force of power and subjugation and violence, gender as a system which is embodied through domination, and proliferated/perpetuated through brutalization and suppression. We can call this construct by any number of names or faces— “patriarchy,” “gender hegemony,” “The Family,” “misogyny,” “transphobia,” “the oppression of children…” It is gender as ideology and gender as class system, with all of the implicit burden that entails.

My experience with gender is one where I have been subject to a peculiar gendered violence, wherein my “deviance,” or rather my defiance, have been punished by the forcible ejection from the realm of Legitimate Genders into the punitive class of the third gender—the faggotized-subalternized gender, the gender-class of Tranny. This is a violence which has been inscribed in my body by the whirlwind of social forces which saturate our human world, but which starts first at the smallest unit of political control that Gender can exert—The Family. The Family is the basic unit of gender control. It is the locus of the control of reproductive labor, it is the locus of social-ideological indoctrination, the locus of gender-enlistment and gender-punishment. The Family teaches us what kinds of embodiments and existences are acceptable, and which are not, through the ever-articulate but non-lexical and ineffable language of violence and harm, of policings and subjugations of will, both extravagant and surreptitious. At the head of The Family is The Patriarch, and the head of the Nuclear Family in particular is The Father. The Family is a little universe, and The Father is God. By merit of His ability to wield the greatest structural gendered violence, The Father is kinged and granted apotheosis. One of the core tenets of this book is that violence and power are two sides of the same blade—that power requires violence to make itself physical. Absolute power requires absolute violence. In this way, The Father is to The Family as Patriarchy is to Gender Hegemony. 

In turn, the implications for fragmentation are simple: the separation of things requires them to be cut apart by a blade, and the fracturing of things requires them to be struck with a force.

IJBD: A lot of grief is held at the core of the violence in this book—a throughline of regret and hesitance, despite the violence ultimately always being carried out. I’m thinking of the lines “I killed things because I could” and “I come into this world / ready to do horrible things / for the sake of my life,” among others. What is the importance of violence, and the reactions around violence, in the construction of the collection’s narrative?

NH: I touched on this briefly in the last question, so I’ll build on that foundation: to our eye, violence is simply “power” which goes by another name. Or rather, “Power” is what “Violence” becomes when enacted successfully. Power and Violence are the opposite sides of the same edge, the mathematical consequences of each other in a balanced equation. The book is concerned with power, and as such, it must be concerned with violence. It is concerned, in particular, with the structural disempowerment of children. Childhood is a peculiar form of existence—an identity which is undeniably a systematically oppressed class, but one which literally everyone occupies at some point, and one which everyone will one day leave, if they manage to survive it. A child is powerless insofar as they have a significant structural disadvantage in the ability to enact violence. An adult can do almost anything to a child, with relatively little recourse, especially if that child belongs to that adult. Incest, psychological trauma, and child abuse are not aberrations of a healthy system concerned with a healthy society, but rather the primary functions of a violent system concerned primarily with the enclosure of power within certain classes. The child knows this, in their heart, in their gut. They know this in a way that transcends language, through the fact of their scars and their bodies. And a child who has been subject to the extremes of violence understands that they have been put through this by the merit of their own powerlessness.

I knew this as a child. I knew that the reason I was subject to psychological and physical torments at the hands of My Father was because I did not have the sufficient capacity for violence. Surely, I had at some point in my adolescence the physical capacity to overpower My Father, at least in a somewhat trivial sense, in that anyone with a knife technically has some kind of physical capacity to overpower someone who is unarmed—but what happens then? The societal structures in place privilege the authority of The Father over the child in a comprehensive manner—legal institutions, social mores, and so on. My Father could wrap His hands around my throat and squeeze until I faint, and I would have no path towards recourse, because, as His child, I am His property, and it is His purview to discipline me how He sees fit. On the contrary, what happens when I attempt to fight back against My Father? I know in my gut as a child that there is nothing I can do. I have no power, because I do not have the capacity for violence. So, in turn, out of a desperate need to feel heard, to feel like I have any kind of capacity for autonomy in the midst of systematic violations of autonomy, I turn to whatever violence I can find. The brutalization of insects and other small animals. The torments of bickering with younger siblings. The careful dissection of beautiful plants that have no ability to respond or resist, the slicing of flower stems and the peeling apart of the roots of weeds. The catching of fish. The grinding of worms under stones, or their cooking under the concentrated light of the sun.

And yet, there is also a desperate grief behind these acts, that both animates and haunts them, a curse upon those who choose to take up the mantle of Blade in service of the act of Cutting. I am another one, the child thinks. I am one more Father waiting to happen. I am another act of brutality waiting to be born, pregnant with cruelty, waiting to birth another chance at subjugation. There is a grief and a shame in that. The fear that I am just like Him. That tension fascinates me and horrifies me. It is, perhaps, the only fear that matters to me at this point: the fear that I will become Him.

IJBD: I was struck by “The Lessons,” the triptych of poems that use religious figures Uriel and God to form a narrative thread about a sort of “coming of age” tale. I was especially struck by the casually violent language that also contains threads of sensuality. Can you tell me more about the significance of religion in this collection?

NH: My Father is a pastor. He was also, pointedly, my Pastor. In this way, and the ways that I elucidated above, My Father was, to me, The Voice Of God On Earth—The final Authority, the It Doesn’t Go Higher Than This, It Stops At Me. My Father was not just the owner of my body and my life, He was also the authority over my immortal soul. 

As a studious daughter of a pastor, I learned much about Christianity and The Bible from a young age. In my studies, I beheld an entire network of connections between cruelties and violences and religious supplication. The body of the book in its entirety is an exploration and explication of my findings from these studies. 

To note on sensuality: I believe that violence is a sensual act, regardless of the moral valence of that thing. It is profoundly physical and intimate and, frequently, profoundly violating. When experiencing psychological, physical, emotional, or sexual violence at the hands of a family member, that violence carries with it additional implications with its sensuality.

IJBD: Poems often deal with the emotional and the spiritual, and many of yours do, too—but there is also an emphasis on the physical. Can you speak on your relationship with the physical, with the body as both a concept and a personal object, such as in “The Body Answers?”

NH: Part of my repudiation of the violence of the Church involved, for me, a repudiation of mind-body dualism. To accept the Church was wrong about the world, and to be able to accept that My Father was wrong about me, I had to accept that, likewise, they were wrong about The Soul. I am not a body riddled with a captured soul, seeking to claw its way back to Heaven, desperate to avoid the torments of Hell. On the contrary: I am my body, and my body is me. As a trans woman, I have a predictably complicated relationship with my body. I have, over the years, been indifferent to my body, hated my body, loved my body, rejected my body, harmed my body, cared for my body, transformed my body, molded my body, and so on. What the progression of ideas about The Body in this book articulates, briefly, is the coming to terms I had to do with my body to survive the ordeal of contending with trauma. I do not hate or love my body. I am my body. And so, as my body, I will love myself, despite all the forces that would attempt to stop me.

IJBD: I loved how “Anti-Ode to Wholeness” is juxtaposed against the running theme of fragmentation as a state to avoid. Instead, it shows the positives of embracing our fractures—our kintsugi. Can you say a little more about your perspective on the socialized pursuit of “wholeness?”

NH: I really appreciate you asking this question—I think that fragmentation is an extremely complex thing. On the one hand, it is frequently the consequence of violence—glass shatters, bones break, skin splits, plates crash and scatter. In this way, it is almost that the fragmentation and the violence itself are one and the same. And yet, there are also forms of fragmentation and fracture which are not only positive, but valuable, necessary even, beautiful even. At the core of our plural existence is an overwhelming commitment to survival and a profound self-love. In the sense that “wholeness” is the inverse of “fragmentation” on some level, “wholeness” to us is synonymous with the things that fragmentation saved us from— the torment of loneliness and isolation, the bitter cold of being unloved and unheard, the ache of being without gentleness or care. “Fragmentation,” or “fracture,” on the other hand, are a path towards liberation from these things. For us, fragmentation meant community. It afforded us the opportunity to experience being loved for the first time in our life. As we wrote in “Fragments I,” “Love was the first technology created, even before / light. It was invented out of desperation. It was hopeless.” Fragmentation was a psychic technology we innovated to survive, and it was the only thing that allowed us survival. I do not hesitate to say that, without the adaptive trauma of psychic fragmentation, we likely would have died many years ago. It is through the strength of our community, our intertwining love, our collective support of each other’s weaknesses with our respective strengths, that we have managed to survive this long. “Technologies designed to withstand force / will develop crumple zones. To protect what matters.”

IJBD: As you mention in your “Note on Authorship,” being a plural system is integral to your (collective and individual) lived experience/s and intimately informs your writing. I really liked seeing who contributed to which pieces. How was the experience of working together on a project like this?

NH: The prospect of writing a book, collectively, was always kind of both a trivially simple task for us—we do everything we do together, collectively, on some level—and yet simultaneously incredibly daunting—we all have distinct voices, perspectives, memories, and experiences, and these necessarily beget distinct styles in writing. To write poems together, and to stitch them together into a single manuscript, meant having to work extremely delicately to find the seams in our styles and merge them together, the points of similarity and inflection that allowed them to rejoin after having been split through our plurality. It allowed us to play to our strengths—Mal’s more aggressive, emotionally weighty style; Hikari’s lighter, brighter, more lilting voice; Wires’ balanced, more mythic voice—which in turn allowed a particular kind of development and progression of thematic and tonal structure. Relatedly—we have another full-length coming out this coming winter with Game Over Books—titled THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TRANSSEXUAL CALENDAR, which still features work from all three poets and the editor in our system, but shifts the balances of whose voices are more prominent, in this way profoundly changing the stylistic character of our second collection compared to our first. The opportunity for us to work as a collaborative team in varying expressions and emphases provides us with really fun avenues to discover things about ourselves and, in turn, our relationships with each other. Mal and Hikari, for example, think of themselves as significantly distinct from each other—rightfully so, as they both fulfill extremely contradictory roles in our system. And so, moments where Mal and Hikari had to intimately collaborate—whether on a particular piece, or simply across the manuscript—afforded us an avenue for really interesting investigation into where they could connect, where they could relate and intertwine. The process was not without its frustrations—the writing of this book took a number of years and extremely frequent iteration in vision before we could settle on something that we all collectively found satisfying. Yet we believe ourselves bettered by it, and, hopefully, the work as well, although we leave that assessment up to the reader.

IJBD: Nora, as the within-system editor of this collection, did you find yourself delighted, surprised, interested in what you read between the different contributed works? Did you learn anything new about anyone in the group?

NH: Oh, it was absolutely a delight to work with the rest of ourselves on this as the editor of the book. As the self primarily entrusted with providing a coherent vision for the whole text, I was afforded the unique opportunity to challenge each of ourselves to stretch beyond our previously understood roles and stylistic comfort zones. For Hikari, who is so eager to expound on love and joy—what would it mean for her to express the grief and pain she finds impossible to face? For Mal, whose righteous fury and anger protect our system and keep us grounded in our principles—what would it mean for her to admit to her greater tendernesses, the implicit love behind that blaze? For Wires, who frequently maintains the integrity of her control over her self and selves—what would it mean to allow others to steer a piece alongside her? Each of these questions, when answered, offered us a greater and more intimate understanding of ourselves and each other. And while the work is, of course, for the reader—it is more primarily for ourselves. The poem saves my life. Is saving my life. Will one day save my life.

IJBD: Finally, are there any particular pieces that you really love or feel are core to the collection’s narrative?

NH: Despite Mal’s (relatively) constrained contributions to this particular book in terms of sheer poem count, her perspective and experiences really ground the narrative. In this way, her poem—the only poem in this book that is entirely her own personal work, that is to say, Monologue for Five Selves—acts as the heart of the book, the beating core from which the book moves and breathes. It was an immense exercise in both stylistic and emotional vulnerability from her, to allow her anger and grief and rage to fall away to reveal their inner animating force, the love she holds for our smallest self, the soft child interior of our system who she is uniquely charged with protecting, and in this way, it is also the most profoundly honest piece in the whole text. When she spoke in this book, she spoke briefly and succinctly: this book is about love. And so, the book begins with the dedication that she selected, a dedication which we all share but which is profoundly and uniquely her heart: for Rina.

Still My Father’s Son is available now!

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Nora Hikari (she/her) is a disabled Chinese and Japanese transgender poet and artist based in NYC. She was a 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, and her work has been published in Ploughshares, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, The Washington Square Review, and others. Her hybrid fiction, KISS ME FAST, was featured in Wigleaf’s Top 50 for 2023. She was a reader at the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival. Still My Father’s Son is her first book. Nora Hikari can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @system_wires.

Isabeau J. Belisle Dempsey (they/them) is a proud Chicagoan, Belizean, Lesbian, and Capricorn. They hold a BA in International Studies and Spanish and are currently earning an MA in English Literature and Publishing, and they hope to eventually put their obsession with commas to good use as an in-house editor. History book co-author, amateur poet, freelance copyeditor, and generally just along for the ride, you can find Isabeau in your local bookstore surreptitiously fixing the shelves—they were once a bookseller and never quite broke the habit.

What exactly does it mean to be a young woman in this decade? Just how different are your thirties from your twenties, and is this shift into perceived maturity altered in any way from the forced infantilization experienced by Millennials and Gen Zers due to the unique struggles of this century, itself merely in its mid-twenties? In many ways, this is exactly what Audrey T. Carroll attempts to explore, if not answer (hint, our unique struggles might need magic to be overcome!), in What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024).

Carroll’s first collection of short stories is the type of book only a young writer could and should attempt; as the title suggests, the collection is about growth, blossoming, and blooming. Save for the collection’s eponymous last story, every story centers on a young woman, typically queer, struggling to understand their place in the world. What Blooms in the Dark is full of doubts, worries, and anxieties but frames these as the water, sunlight, and nutrients necessary for growth.

Many of the stories are firmly rooted in reality, though some break away like stray feathers and take us soaring through the fantastic. “The Keepers of Miller’s Grove” features a cast of teenage girls with supernatural abilities, “Domestic Spirits” will leave you wondering about the spirits behind happenstance, and “Beyond the Veil” will have you pondering the power of memories. In “The Button Shop,” Carroll writes:

“The Shopkeeper had no control over which buttons the shop provided, or what the
visitors did or didn’t choose. She was a facilitator, not a judge or even a
peacekeeper. Still, her shoulders slacked with relief when the man released the
blood-red button and, arms tightened to his sides, left the shop with a soft little
chime marking his exit.” (76)

Here she magically gifts us our deepest desires whether we’re ready for them or not.

Other stories move away from the imagined, focusing our senses on the material world
around us in order to find the very real magic within everyday objects. For example, the introduction of “A History of Radiance” reads:

This is the story of a lamp. There was no lamp without its wirings, without its
brass body, and so perhaps these structures coming into existence are the
beginning of its story. But, in truth, no one makes a choice based on fundamental
inner workings. The choice comes down to appearance, nine times out of ten, and
so the nuts and bolts of a lamp’s particulars hardly seem to matter in the long run.
And this story is one about the long run. (82)

I promise that after this story, you will never look at a used lamp the same way ever again.

“Something Old, Something New” plays out like the pilot episode of a show about
two old friends who grew out of their punk rock days that I’d love to someday binge on Netflix.
Alice and Siobhan embody the classic setup of an “odd couple” but transformed by the fact that they use to be on the exact same page. Carroll writes:

“Alice wasn’t sure what kind of work Siobhan was into lately, but this place was nice enough that Siobhan couldn’t afford it on her sporadic bartending jobs from back in the golden days of The Sapphics. It was definitely way nicer than the rathole where Alice had been for the past two years, at least until she’d had to reduce hours at her job and her landlord served her and her roommates with an eviction notice within twelve hours of them not being able to make rent.” (141-142)

In that story too, the quotidian becomes profound, a photo, a blouse, even a cup of tea is
infused with meanings and memories.

Though not all the characters in What Blooms in the Dark find their happy ending, the
collection never leaves you feeling without hope. Hope is a central theme in the book, and its
goal is to remind you that even where there is no light, something beautiful may still grow. The
overall sense I get from this collection is something like “bedtime stories for young adults.” Yes,
there’s trial, and yes there’s tribulation, but in the end there’s something hopeful. There’s one
character, Leigha from “Domestic Spirits,” who sums up what I think the reader is meant to take
away from the book, “try not to think too hard on anything but the construction of something
new and hopeful” (Carroll 126). Because maybe if you do, you too will find what blooms in the dark.

What Blooms in the Dark is available from ELJ Editions

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