Eric Tran’s debut full-length collection, The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House Press, 2020) is at once heart-wrenching and heart-warming, an emotional experience that makes you feel both seen and able to see more clearly. This collection of poems is a wonderful and welcome introduction to a poet whose work is fluent in the emotions of anguish, joy, and everything in between.

It would be reductive, though, to say that The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer is a book about nerd culture or a book about queer love, though it is certainly about both. In some ways, it’s difficult to pin this collection of poems down to a single topic, not because it lacks focus but because there is a versatility to Tran’s poetic focus. He writes about comic books, queerness, mental illness, grief, and so much more—often in ways that intersect and complicate each other. Gutter Spread feels alive, vibrant, and complex as Tran offers a guided tour through the world he’s created.

This collection seeks respite in the shelves of the local comic store and drag shows and in stolen glances of the lookalikes of lost lovers. It looks for forgiveness as regret manifests like suspects in the board game Clue. It yearns for adventure and escape in the wake of the 2016 election and is pulled into the fantasy world of Dungeons & Dragons—a world where anything is possible. These poems find joy in food and positive media representations in the pages of comic books. Tran’s speaker filters his experiences through Stranger Things, X-Men, and more.

Tran pens an ekphrastic poem based on Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 art fixture, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), in which the floor of the museum is filled with “Candies individually wrapped in multicolor cellophane, endless supply. / Dimensions vary with installation; ideal weight 175 lbs.” The artwork was created after the artist’s partner died of AIDS. I’ve seen a version of the fixture in person at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas and the grief and love are as palpable and limitless as the candies scattered on the floor. Tran’s poem transported me not only back into that moment in the museum, staring at the manifestation of sweetness turned bitter, but filled me with that same sense of grief, of love, of longing for what has been lost. Tran breaks his poem and scatters it across the white space of the page, evocative of the literal piece of art he’s imitating and the complicated emotions he’s exploring.

It’s through carefully crafted and powerful writing like this that Tran is able to create an intense emotional and visual landscape throughout this collection. Further, by filtering his poems through pop culture references and artistic allusions, Tran creates a world that is our own—not just the world we live in, but our own interior world as well. Tran takes us not only to new experiences in art museums and at D&D sessions, but brings us back to our own experiences as well. Tran offers not just relatability, but the reminder that we are not alone, and the ability to cope together as we play a game. These poems invite you to play D&D with them, to crack open a comic book and read it through new eyes. Tran offers a unique world to us, but he also offers us encouragement to find a way through ours, to cope with the pain and discover the joys there are around us.

In a particularly powerful section of the poem “Recommendation,” The speaker projects his desires — “Give me kapow! Give me shazam! Give / a one shot with perfect speech bubbles / where people know exactly what they want / to say.” Just like the colorful comic book worlds that this collection loves and admires, the world of Gutter Spread is a world of fantasy, where anything can happen and people live without want or worry, but it’s also a world much like our own, where we must seek escape within the pages of those fantasies.

The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer isn’t a quiet collection of poems. It screams its way into a room and announces itself proudly and in defiance. It announces, too, a promising career to come for Eric Tran—one I’m excited to follow.

Quinn Carver Johnson was born and raised on the Kansas-Oklahoma border, but now attends Hendrix College and is pursuing degrees in Creative Writing and Performances studies. Johnson’s poetry and other writings have been published in various magazines and journals, both in-print and online, including SLANT, Nebo, Right Hand Pointing, Flint Hills Review, and Route7 Review.

As we prepare for the release of her full-length poetry collection, Lessons in Breathing Underwater, author H.K. Hummel speaks with Sundress Publications’ editorial intern, Erica Hoffmeister about the importance of women’s stories.

Erica Hoffmeister: Can you describe the meaning of the opening epigraph, lyrics from the song, “Night Has Turned to Day” by The Fantastic Negrito in how it relates to the collection as a whole?

H.K. Hummel: “Night Has Turned to Day” is about waking up from a coma, and waking up to a world that has turned upside down. The Fantastic Negrito’s song serves as a counterpoint to the Smith’s song (“Girlfriend in a Coma”), which appears later in the collection. The tension between the two might be the joy and reckoning that we sometimes have to contend with simultaneously. More subtly, I enjoy the prayer that is embedded in the lyrics: “lord mama, oh night has turned to day.” As a collection about motherhood and survival, that small benediction—lord mama, oh—feels like the right utterance with which to begin.

EH: Why breathing underwater specifically, for the title of this collection?

HKH.: The book centers around a medical complication that started out as a result of giving birth, but one complication caused a series of other complications. During the physical crisis, my lungs filled up with liquid, and consequently, I was put on life support in a medically-induced coma. So, the collection is divided up into sections based on the breath cycle, with a ventilator briefly taking control in the middle. As a Californian who grew up on the coast, learning to breathe—or hold your breath until you can breathe—was a basic survival skill. Surfers learn quickly how to hold their breath and dive deep, below the orbital force of the breaker, to surface on the other side. I suppose this is how we survive the pounding any kind of trauma exacts.

EH: Some of these pieces weave in true stories of women, such as in the poems “Annie Londonderry Sells Advertising Space on her Shirtwaist,” and “Jeanne Baret, After Tahiti,” of which you include details in the book’s endnotes. What had you select these stories to incorporate?

HKH: As I wrote this collection, I was very aware that I was shaping the narrative of my daughter’s origin story. And, I was also aware that the story of survival is a story that belongs to all of us. I wove in a chorus of women who could sing much better than I about the difficult barters we make, about loss, and spirit. Erling Kagge, the explorer who completed the solo trek to the South Pole says, “Wonder is the very engine of life…It is one of the purest forms of joy that I can imagine…It is one of our finest skills.” Although this collection includes a catastrophe, the driving force is wonder.

EH: How do themes of memory and reality play into an overarching narrative?

HKH: Sometimes, it is unlearning that makes us wiser. PTSD wreaks havoc on one’s sense of reality. My background in poetry and in meditation meant I knew how to study my emotional and imaginative inscape. So, that’s what I did: I studied the surreal and hyperreal innerspace I was experiencing, to parse out what was me, and what was the trauma. I wanted to capture, as much as I could, the way that time bends strangely in a crisis, and its aftermath. In “Dreamboats,” I became fascinated by the detritus that exists in my consciousness. All those men I lusted after as a tween? They still live in some corner of my mind, even as I do things like wash the dishes, or stand at the gas pump, or lecture to a roomful of college students. That’s a strange fact that I find sort of delightful. As I built a poetic schema for making sense of catastrophe, I found myself reaching back into my childhood, into my own origin story. As a product of Southern California in the 80s, that means an odd mix of pop culture heartthrobs, Pacific coast landscapes, and surf culture. I had an urge to write odes—celebrations—for those mundane parts of my life.

EH: Can you speak to the language of physical movement throughout this collection, specifically how poems like “Life by Bicycle” relate to the speaker’s bodily experiences?

HKH: I wanted the poems that come early in the collection to contain a movement through space that grounds what later in the collection becomes a hallucinatory trajectory through time. Jeanne Baret and Annie Londonderry both travel around the world (by ship and bicycle, respectively). Elizabeth Eckford braves the spit-fury of a mob. Marie Curie builds a trapeze, which she really did after Pierre died suddenly. “Life by Bicycle” and “Compass Rose Spins Like a Ouija Board Planchette” address the living we do, despite (in defiance of?) the body’s vulnerabilities. We take journeys, we work, we fight revolutions, we swim, we make art, we make love, we make poems. Maybe it is necessary to affirm this once in a while.

EH: Would you like to explain the coordinates of the locations you use in the poem “The Compass Rose Spins Like a Ouija Board Planchette”?

HKH: I wanted “The Compass Rose Spins Like a Ouija Board Planchette” to have a layer of hyper-specificity to it as it works through ideas about connections and intimacies that traverse great distances. Google Maps can serve as a companion interface with the poem, and if you put in the coordinates, you can locate the exact bend in the Little Red River in Arkansas, or the inlet on Rottnest Island in the Indian Ocean that I am describing. Despite the many kinds of distances that separate us, every poem works towards intimacy.

EH: Why did you choose to include details about the U.S.’s problematic medical system in brackets at the end of specific poems, rather than within the pieces themselves?

HKH: That wasn’t really the way that I thought of them when I wrote them. When I was organizing the poems into a collection, my writing partner told me I had to let in a bit more of the “true” story. I know better than to ignore his advice. So, I began by imagining that the bracketed sections between the poems gave the reader tiny doorways into the “real” scenes in the gaps between the poems. It happens that the medical system is problematic. At a quick glance, I am your average, neurotic woman.

EH: Stories of women’s bodies and trauma used to be somewhat of a taboo to write and read about. Just how important do you think stories like Lessons in Breathing Underwater are to tell?

HKH: As I wrote, I was writing against so many things that one shouldn’t discuss in polite company. I received a letter from a minister who read my poem, “To Begin,” one Sunday morning and found solace. Taboo or not, the very plain fact is, we have bodies. And we all must do the human thing: endure. If we’re lucky, we’re awake enough to feel the sweet parts, the transcendence.  

H.K. Hummel’s Lessons in Breathing Underwater lucidly examines personal catastrophe by presenting it side by side with artifacts from natural history, art, and objects of wonder. Drawing on elements of domestic fabulism and anesthetic hallucination, she maps the blurry territory of trauma. Memories of her own childhood off the coast of California help her make sense of the oceanic feelings surrounding recovery and motherhood. “We spend whole lifetimes getting unlost and unlost and unlost,” she says. Hummel asks about the difficult barters we make to live open and loving lives, and a chorus of historical and mythological women respond with a collective song of survival.

H.K. Hummel is the author of Lessons in Breathing Underwater (Sundress Publications, 2020), and the co-author of Short-Form Creative Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018). She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, one of the founding editors of Blood Orange Review, and she directs Atelier, a creative editing studio. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Southern Maine, and an MA in literature from Eastern Washington University. Her poems have recently appeared in Terrain.org,Hudson Review, Museum of Americana, Booth, and Iron Horse Review. 

Erica Hoffmeister earned an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Chapman University, and currently teaches college writing across the Denver Metro area. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019).

I didn’t consider myself a writer until I found myself wanting to drop out of college. Growing up, I told stories for my siblings to act out, stapled sheets of legal paper into booklets of poems, and kept locked or rubber-banded notebooks in every purse but hardly thought these actions different than other creative games like digging through the dress-up box or building tree forts in the woods. The fresh discomfort of studying books and writing at university surprised me. Literary activity in the first semester of my undergrad felt at odds with the freedom and bodily expression writing had been tied to in my youth. I struggled to read and write in sterile classrooms, under fluorescent lighting, on a rigid schedule between gen-ed courses and promptly decided to quit.

My resident advisor at Ohio State responded to my drop-out plans by asking me first to take my notebooks to a professor he knew. That professor turned out to be the poet Kathy Fagan, who, in an oft-recalled office visit, convinced me not to drop out, enrolled me in her hybrid poetry workshop, and pretty much changed the course of my life. Or, maybe better: helped me acknowledge the writerly course on which all those creative acts had already set me.

That acknowledgment—trying to write in workshops, failing to convey what I wanted, receiving praise here and there, bending myself to the task of producing work—enabled me to endure academia through the seven messy years it took to finish my BA in English. My need for freedom and space to move, learn, question, and play outside institutions never left, but neither did the desire for and act of writing.

Now, finishing an MFA program I can see as a total blessing most days, sending out a manuscript for my first real book, I know the potential utility in the academic classrooms I found stifling. But I still have a sweet spot for operations and writers who move in between academic and non-academic spaces and was tickled to learn about Sundress while working at the University of Illinois’ Ninth Letter.

This chance to work remotely as a Sundress intern has me envisioning again that writerly life I craved as a pissed-off undergrad all those years ago. Reading, writing, extending the literary circle bit by bit, and getting to do so under an open window, between hours of working on my own writing, next to a stack of marked-up books—dreamy. Of course, I’m romanticizing it. I am also interested in the ways this opportunity will challenge and surprise, how it will compare to my other (paid, university-associated) work. I hope, by the end of this internship, to see Sundress as a brief home, and to sense that my restlessness and drive may have been useful in the lives of other writers, readers, writers-to-be.

 Aumaine Rose Gruich is an MFA candidate at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has received support from the Chautauqua Writer’s Workshop and the Illinois Department of Dance’s Choreographic Platform. Aumaine’s work is published or forthcoming in magazines such as Pleiades, Court Green, Phoebe, and Bluestem.

What might it look like to drown in the floating world, the sometimes-pleasure world, a world where one may become momentarily, or, for longer, lost? Meg Eden looks at loss and states of lostness through water images in this collection of poems out from Press 53.

The book’s primary focus is the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the following Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, as other reviews note. Yet a particular generosity of Drowning in the Floating World is the way Eden, though using a largely documentary lens, occasionally includes an intimate first-person speaker and, in the book’s last section, extends focus to non-tsunami water imagery. These choices open hopeful possibilities, views to contrast the loss the book illuminates.

Much of this collection’s power comes from Eden’s clear, direct tone, which makes the poems feel like a door swung wide to their subject matter. Eden’s careful linework, even in experimental forms (a list poem, a back-and-forth conversation poem between radiation-poisoned cows and their owners), feels deliberate and spare. Traditional forms throughout the book—villanelle, triolet, ekphrastic, haiku—further emphasize Eden’s skills of clarity and compression. This surface level clarity allows the book’s narrative threads to shine; no stylistic decoration distracts from the swell of water, the response of cities, each important victim or survivor.

Images ground the narrative, here, showcasing human desire to contain sweeping sorrow and chaos. Eden’s images reveal our tendency for both cluelessness and care in the face of horror, as her speakers tend to not look away from what floats toward them in their long aftermath. One of the most moving things about the book’s images is the way they prompt a reader to recognize how disaster can turn objects of the lost into treasures. In the poems, it is easy to feel burdened by the long list of left-behind things: boats, jackets, a lunchbox, a litany of dead girls’ dresses. This burden feels appropriate, subtle, and powerful.

Eden tempers the weight of these images with playfulness in sound and voice, though, creating productive tension. Subtle rhyme in her spare lines makes me read them twice, finding unexpected delight or new shades of moods in otherwise somber stanzas. The multiple characters and personas that appear, too—speaking buildings, survivors, ghosts, spirits, corpse washers, and landscapes—create a complex, shifting chorus, introducing surprising perspectives to a tragic narrative. “Here I stand,/ a new tsunami stone,” a defiantly surviving town hall claims. Or, see the end rhymes in “NASA Satellite Triolet,” which sing with an almost sweet, wave-like longing: “Whatever happened to the beach/ has floated away into the sea,/ capping the bay with floating debris.”

Sandra Beasley says that poetry of witness and documentary poetry “cannot transcend the trauma that marks it.” Eden’s images are not transcendent, and her persona poems, even as they introduce variation and nuance, stay fully entrenched in the world of the disaster. And yet, amidst the necessary wading-through, she nestles what feels like a close “I,” providing intimacy in her documentary landscape. This particular speaker doesn’t have to say much, or profoundly, to give the collection depth, yet in two key places, it provides a meeting place, a center of warmth and observation within the loss.

A poem near the center of the book called “In Tokyo, three months after the earthquake,” says: “The air-conditioning is off in every building,/ saving for Tohoku, loving for Tohoku./ I drown in my sweat […]” and goes on to make a joke about an obnoxious, glittery sign out the window, which feels like a bothersome distraction to the speaker’s thoughts. How relatable this speaker feels, set in the midst of a city, embodied, watching her community try to leverage their comfort for others. Her irritation at the sign also highlights the intimacy this voice brings: she finds something manageable upon which to fix her attention, a detail easier to name and reduce than the inexplainable aftermath of the tsunami. A similar speaker arrives in the penultimate poem, “Okinawa Aquarium,” where she observes the preserved stomach of a dolphin, cut open to reveal swallowed debris. The sight causes her to imagine a conversation with God, where, as if voicing the dolphin, she admits, “I felt so full—even briefly, I thought I was really filled.”

Beasley’s assertion is not wrong: I cannot read any transcendence of disaster in this close “I.” Calamity cannot be annulled by observation, even by honor, or by hoping to benefit others through one’s own lack, nor by personal reflection in the face of the divine. Yet Eden’s choice to include a speaker who chooses these actions alongside her unfolding calamity suggests the possibility for, if not poetic transcendence, worthwhile response off the page—to and beyond the Tohoku and Fukushima Daiichi events—in the drowning world.

Drowning in the Floating World is available at Press53.

Aumaine Rose Gruich is an MFA candidate at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Assistant Managing Editor of Ninth Letter. She has received support from the Chautauqua Writer’s Workshop and the Illinois Department of Dance’s Choreographic Platform. Gruich’s work is published or forthcoming in magazines such as AGNI, Pleiades, Court Green, Phoebe, and Bluestem.

I can’t articulate to you how incredible it feels to have landed my first editorial internship, especially for an organization as fine as Sundress Publications. I spent most all of 2019 navigating my two intense jobs: working as a Community School Director at a small public high school in Queens, New York and working as a psychotherapist at a private practice in Washington Heights, Manhattan. As a queer, non-binary LMSW of color and as someone who identifies as a highly sensitive person, a day of working as a social worker would often deplete me to the point of exhaustion.

After working over 65 hours a week while juggling a dog, a chronic illness, and a small inner circle of friends and family, it was nearly impossible to find time to read and write. Most of my days would begin at 5:00AM and end around 10:00 PM. I was lucky if I managed to read a chapter or write 500 words during a lunch break without having to navigate a student crisis or tend to clients in distress. And while I loved having the privilege and opportunity to show up for so many different folkx and communities, I can’t deny some of the emptinesses it left me with: I was starting to feel like a fake.

Having barely any time to read, write, or apply to writing conferences left me profoundly dislocated: could I even call myself a writer anymore? Would applying for the MFA be a waste of time? Did I have the emotional willpower needed to suck it up and keep pushing through? These are but some of the questions that filled my brain space, that made me wonder if writing—and truly writing—was some pipe-dream I hadn’t yet critically debunked.

Having said all that, a new job landscape and some time off has left me energized and hungrier than ever to re-plunge into the literary world—a world that has always, through some variation or another, made me feel seen. Made me feel heard. Made me feel visible and important and here. With the start of 2020 and new opportunities ahead, I look forward to having more time to sit with writing, to devote to reading, and to decolonize the definitions of what really makes someone a writer.

I am writer because I say I am. I am writer because words have always fostered an intimacy and electricity within me. I am a writer because my soul-scape illuminates like spilled neon when I think of what it means to occupy a voice—to center stories that have been erased, to bring communities and people from margin to middle, and to continue to investigate and exfoliate what things in life bind us together, and what things in life cause us to bend away from one another.

I am so incredibly thankful to be given the opportunity to represent Sundress in the capacity of an editorial intern and am thrilled to discover what new areas of success and challenges await me.

Sabrina Sarro is a current social worker in the state of NY. They hold an LMSW from Columbia University and are currently pursuing an MFA from the City College of New York—CUNY. As a queer non-binary writer of color, they are most interested in investigating the intersectionalities of life and engaging in self-reflection and introspection. They are an alumnus of the LAMBDA Literary Emerging Voices for LGBTQIA* Writers Retreat, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Yale Writers’ Workshop, and many others. They have received scholarships from The Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing and the Community of Writers’ at Squaw Valley.

I fell in love with poetry the way a lot of teenagers fall in love with poetry, I stumbled across the Button Poetry YouTube channel and spent an entire day just consuming poetry—real poetry, loud, animated, alive, and so totally unlike anything I had ever considered a poem to be before. Poems were those things that rhymed and collected dust in old books. They weren’t something that could make you feel anything and they certainly didn’t have the ability to speak to my life in any way. But what I found in these three-minute videos was the exact opposite. I found in them my experiences, my emotions, but I also found windows into the experiences of others, glimpses into worlds I had never known even existed.

So, naturally, I began copying what I found in those videos and as I watched more and read more, my poems got better and eventually, I stopped purely imitating poems I loved and my own voice began to appear in my writing. For me, that’s one of the greatest lessons writing has given me: allowing me to truly discover who I was and who I wanted to be.

In the performances of the poets who had taught me to love language, I also found a love for the performances themselves, the way they embodied a poet, made it come to life. I did speech and acting events, I starred in plays, I bombed at poetry open mics. Any chance I could get to have my voice heard, I took it.

As high school ended, I left my home in small-town Kansas to attend Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas where I’m currently pursuing degrees in Creative Writing and Performance Studies, relishing in the opportunity to dive deep into the subjects I loved the most.

At Hendrix, I joined the staff of the Aonian, the school’s student literary journal and hosted a poetry review radio show where I got to sit down with a friend and share poems that I loved. I work on the committee for Word Garden, Hendrix’s student reading series and go out of my way to soak up all of the amazing student writing generated by my peers and to hear all of the visiting authors Hendrix brings. I’ve even cut class to hear poets read.

Even now, though my tastes have broadened and changed over time, I love reading and writing, poetry especially, for the same reason I did when I first discovered it. It makes me feel alive and it makes me feel like my being alive, my listening and feeling and loving, has some effect on the world around me. It’s through poetry that I feel connected to everything outside of myself and attentive to everything within.

Quinn Carver Johnson was born and raised on the Kansas-Oklahoma border, but now attends Hendrix College and is pursuing degrees in Creative Writing and Performances studies. Johnson’s poetry and other writings have been published in various magazines and journals, both in-print and online, including SLANT, Nebo, Right Hand Pointing, Flint Hills Review, and Route 7 Review.

Sundress Publications announces the release of Chera Hammons’ Maps of Injury. An unwavering study of the body and earth moved by pain, sorrow, and hope, these poems offer new ways of knowing the intricacies of our interwoven lives and the tender beliefs that keep us going.

Chera Hammons charts a cartographical understanding of the body—one marked with illness, change, and the bone-deep need to survive. Here, hope and sorrow weave between the grasses of the Texas Panhandle, a hard place “where the land is flat and tough and everything is against us.” Yet, memory roots itself firmly, urging us forward because “what we fear may not come to pass.”

Hammons writes with an honest tenor that sits in the throat, guiding us to the places where our hands—and lives—extend beyond our grasps. There is a grace here as wide as a summer sky, a forgiveness that carries you, even when your body cannot. These verses sing through the difficulty of life, making sure “each day leave[s] its own bruise” along the spine of our collected histories.

Sandy Longhorn, author of The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, says Maps of Injury “offers a steady wisdom born from a body and a land under siege. As the speaker confronts chronic illness and the land of the Texas panhandle weathers drought, we are assured that ‘Someone will always teach us how to grieve.’ And these poems do just that with subtle beauty and stunning revelations. Hammons’ lyric narratives sing in the face of difficult times and remind us to ‘let the dangerous world in.’” 

Order your copy on the Sundress website!

Chera Hammons is West Texas A&M University’s Writer-in-Residence. Work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Foundry, The Penn Review, Ruminate, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is a winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award. Maps of Injury is her fourth book of poetry. A novel is forthcoming through Torrey House Press.