Home and Other Duty Stationsby Emily Lake Hansen intricately explores the complexities of home and family. She begins by proclaiming “I don’t know what home is- a house / that doesn’t spread between coasts” and uses the rest of the book to explore how to find imperfect snippets of home through deeply realized relationships and artfully described places.
Shifting settings among naval bases across America, Hansen delicately captures the tension and uncertainty of a displaced childhood and the inheritance of intergenerational imperfections. She employs parallel narratives, overlaying the past, expressed through the relationship between her parents–a sailor and performing mermaid–through the lens of childhood, onto the experiences of wife and mother, creating a deftly interlocking work of remembrance and introspection.
Although the impermanence of places figures deeply in Hansen’s work, she expresses profound wonder at the natural landscapes of beaches, mountains, and deserts, as well as her interactions and encounters inhabiting them. In clear narrative rich with natural images and complicated characters, Hansen chronicles the uncertainty of a troubled family, exposing the reality of home and placelessness.
Emily Lake Hansen is the author of Home and other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books, 2020) and the chapbook The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press, 2014). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, Midway Journal, and Up the Staircase Quarterly among others. She is a PhD student at Georgia State University and serves as the poetry editor for Minerva Rising Press. When she’s not writing, you can find her playing entirely too many children’s board games in Atlanta.
Kat McKay is a Junior at the University of Tennessee studying English Literature, Creative Writing, and Classical Civilizations. She is the Creative Director of the Highlander Reading Series and an Event Coordinator for the Women’s Coordinating Council. You can usually find her in the woods. Or not. She gets lost easily.
Like everyone, our thoughts are heavy during this time. COVID-19 has no doubt changed us already in countless ways—emotionally, physically, and financially. In the face of global suffering and community mourning, we want to share some of our resources in the hope of meeting the diverse needs of our community.
Poets in Pajamas (PiP), a Sundress Publications live-feed online reading series produces poetry readings for an online audience. Readers read from their own work for fifteen minutes and then engage in a Q&A for an additional ten or fifteen. PiP has archived readings on their Facebook page and though they had booked out their readers for the year, they expanded their capacity for new readers in the hope that they can support writers with canceled events or launches.
As part of Sundress’s ongoing commitment to service, we recognizing that COVID-19 is causing hardship by cancelling readings, launches, tours, and other needed promotional efforts. To combat this, Sundress Publications is now accepting submissions for consideration for inclusion in our new review series, Sundress Reads. We’re looking to write featured reviews for books with release dates from February 1-April 30, 2020.
Follow us on social media–Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram–for daily prompts to help to keep you writing.
As part of our ongoing commitment to women and non-binary authors, The Wardrobe highlights work from recent published collections in all genres. Each month, we present a list of all participating authors and presses, and once per week, our editors will promote a single author, reprinting a selection of work from the published collection. Think of it as a kind of “Best Dressed” feature, but without all the tabloid snark. Currently accepting submissions.
Craft Chaps is a series of substantive essays by contemporary writers on creative writing practice. Each chap focuses on one aspect of craft and also contains a writing exercise and bibliography for further reading. They are freely downloadable at Sundress Publications and can be printed and stapled as 5×8 booklets. Through offering chaps from different perspectives and literary communities, we encourage students to resist “universal,” often cis, white, male notions of “good” literature.
Sundress Publications is proud of the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology. This project continues to promote the diverse and growing collection of voices who are publishing their work online. This anthology serves to bring greater respect to an innovative and continually expanding digital world in the same medium in which the work was originally published.
CookBook is a video series by the Sundress Academy for the Arts and hosted by poet/food-enthusiast Darren C. Demaree. Each episode features food and a long conversation. Guests include writers/artists/publishers/community members/musicians/ecstatics from all over the world.
Sundress makes our chapbooks available for free to download online. Some recent examples include To the Bone, by Angela Narciso Torres; Wolf Daughter, by Amy Watkins, and more.
Sundress endeavors to be a writer-centric organization. It is out hope to support writers always but especially during this time. If you have ideas for how we might do that, our inbox is always open. But no matter what, we wish all of you health and success in all that you do.
A 501(c)(3) non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology.
Sundress editorial intern Kimberly Ann Priest sat down with Sarah Clark to discuss their thoughts on beestung, the magazine for which Clark is the editor. Topics ranged from aesthetics to diversity tokenism to bees.
Kimberly Ann Priest: What is your overall goal for the journal? How would you like audiences, a few years from now, to feel after connecting with the work represented in this journal over a period of time?
Sarah Clark: Overall, I want to create a space for two-spirit writers and writers under the non-binary umbrella to thrive in, and feel at home in. My focus is, and will always be, these writers and readers. Of course, I hope that in the future, audiences will wonder why more spaces like this didn’t exist before! I’m not the first editor to create a space for two-spirit and writers outside of the binary — there are a lot of places doing really good work in this regard. But I hope that more and more readers will gravitate toward our publications, as easily as they gravitate toward any other publication.
Over the years, I’ve had some really good conversations with other marginalized writers about how there can be a feedback loop that’s created when we carve spaces for ourselves. Only Native writers reading Native publications, only queer writers reading queer publications, only disabled writers reading disabled publications. And while this is already a success — getting read at all is a success! — I do hope that quote-unquote general audiences will come to us and will come to find merit in our work. And maybe understand both our aesthetics and ourselves as human beings more and more.
This is also part of why I wanted to make our issues short — 7 writers or artists per issue. I hoped that beestungwould be bite-size, something to read on a commute. A taste that will cultivate a hunger.
KAP: The phrase “historically underrepresented writers” has become commonplace in the literary world. I see it everywhere, on calls for submissions specifically. Every time I read it, I am reminded that there is still a lot of work to do in terms of recognizing individuals who fall into this category and who do not feel like their voice is honored in the literary world. Can you speak a bit about this? What work do you still see as left undone and how will this journal contribute to doing that work?
SC: You’re very right, there’s a lot of work to do to bring historically underrepresented writers to the fore. There’s been progress in recent years, though some of it has reeked of tokenism. No one should ever be publishing someone simply to “diversify” their publications. And this was part of my goal with beestung. To hopefully create a safer place where writers beyond the binary can feel respected, without worrying about whether they’re being looked at for their identity first, and the merits of their work second.
One of the major pitfalls that I hope to avoid is to create what’s called a parallel canon. That is to say, if the canon is a monolith of what one is “supposed” to read, that a parallel canon is an addendum to this, but a canon nonetheless. I strongly disagree with the idea that there even is such a thing as “The Best Indigenous Writing” or “The Best Non-Binary Writing.” Instead, I believe we all need to read more widely. I hope that beestung can provide a taste of what we create.
One aspect of this is that there must not only be a push for marginalized writers, but for marginalized editors to deeply and truly read their work. And with that, there must be support for marginalized and multiply-marginalized editors. We can’t simply exist as “check-boxes.” We have to be given a chance to curate and create worlds and works outside of that which exists in the dominant literary palate.
KAP: I love the title of your journal, specifically that you’ve taken a noun and verb and combined the two to create an adjective. How did you come up with this title? What was your inspiration?
SC: Thank you! beestungis a nesting doll of puns and meanings. We are honey and we are sting — we don’t seek to showcase pain alone as a sideshow, and we can just as easily revel in the sweetness and euphoria of who we are. The title is also a pun, playing off of the slang term “enby” and the word “tongue.” Enby’s tongue, get it? It’s a pronouncement of our voices (our tongues). Bees, in general, fascinate me, too. We come together to create structures and communities that are a miracle. Bees can be fierce, but also so communal in their societies. And bees — like us — help make the world itself thrive. We’ve both existed side-by-side for millennia.
KAP: What sort of work are you looking for? I’d love to hear about some of your favorite published pieces — poems, stories — and why these resonate with you.
SC: This is a tricky one, because I’m always waiting to be surprised. As I said before, I’m not looking to simply showcase pain. Nor am I looking to produce bubblegum pop work with the purpose of alleviating our oppressors. Whatever phenomenon a writer or artist can create is something that I absolutely want to read, see, and obsess over.
Since we only publish 7 writers or artists per quarter, it’s also hard to narrow down just what’s my favorite. I was so pleasantly surprised when syan jay sent me a poem in the form of a Venn diagram.
The microhybrids and photography of S*an D/ Henry-Smith reminded me a lot of the balance between seemingly-simple structures, and the meticulous work that goes into them — something akin to a spider’s web.
Eleanor Eli Moss sent in a hybrid that I hadn’t been expecting at all — I highly recommend that everyone reads more of their ongoing work on SubStack to check out more of what they’re doing, because it’s truly revolutionary — so urgent! so nuanced!
Elliot Rose Winter’s poems balance the raw with the cerebral, nature and the interior.
Lyrik Courtney. Oh, god. When I first read their poem, I took a sharp inhale, and immediately showed their piece to my partner. Their piece is an excellent example of conveying pain and realness without catering to an audience of fetishistic gawkers (“it is nothing new. ‘slut’ one closed circuit”).
Briar Ripley Page wrote about the body, what we do to the body to feel at home, what we can imagine for the non-binary body. Another truly singular piece.
Lastly, Joanna C. Valente gifted us with two poems. They were the first person who I solicited, a little selfishly. When I was first coming out as non-binary and two-spirit, they were already writing about their gender presentation and their right to belong. At the time, I had felt that I was either a fraud or not good enough for wanting to keep wearing makeup and for keeping my long hair. I’ve learned a lot from Joanna, and I owe them a debt. Two debts, I suppose, as their poetry about love, the self, and will itself sings from the page.
Each of the writers and artists in the first issue of beestunghas brought something crucial to us, and I’m eternally grateful.
For those folks out there who are neither binary men nor binary women? Please send us your work. You’ll never know until you try. And even if your work doesn’t make it into an issue of beestung, I know your work will find its place. Whether that’s in a publication or passed around to a group of trusted friends. What you create matters, and is making a difference, no matter what.
Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She’s edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.
Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Still Life (PANK, forthcoming 2020), Parrot Flower (Glass Poetry Press, forthcoming 2020) and White Goat Black Sheep (FLP, 2018). Her work has appeared in several journals including The Laurel Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review and The New Delta Review. You can find her work at kimberlyannpriest.com.
I’m going to start by admitting the image on the left is not my bookshelf. When I texted my mom to ask if she could take a picture of my high school bookshelf so I could write this transformative article about my finely-tuned reading material she sent a picture of my 16-year-old sister’s bookshelf.
Mom: Cate said hers is more artsy.
I had to laugh. We have the same black wood-finished bookcase from Target, but somehow, hers surpasses me in a made-up ‘Artsy Bookshelf Contest.’ I guess fairy lights must be the sole determiner of coveted ‘artsy’ titles.
Yes, my sister always had a talent for complimenting me and insulting me in one sentence—a quality I ultimately love about her. On one hand, the art on her shelf is art I made back in the days of free time, but on the other, she’s insinuating my bookshelf aesthetic is no match for her elephant tape dispenser
Maybe she has a point. I organize books by where they fit on my shelf. My one back home (the ‘high school’ one) is two rows deep on the top two shelves. Thinly painted metal bookends try to contain the young-adult chaos from overspilling.
My college shelf continues on the legacy of trying to contain the chaos with thin chicken-coup wires ( a ‘steal’ from Homegoods is what my mom calls it). Some books I have yet to read, others are textbooks of semesters’ past, and I have a good stack of albums I regard with childhood remembrance to my latest Waterparks album with catchy and personally unrelatable tunes like “I Miss Having Sex But At Least I Don’t Want To Die (a hit radio-bleeped classic).
A further example of my love for music is displayed on the middle outward-facing encasement at the top is specifically saved for my collection of treasured BTS albums. The brave yellow-hooded BT21 character, Chimmy, is bodiless, but a good guard nonetheless.
Again, I organize by where everything can fit in a somewhat immaculate state. The position of honor for my most beloved books does not stay on the shelf. They float.
Since my freshman year in the cramped, yet warm space of my Hess Hall room is where this concept and artistic need initialized. Books and music are my ultimate loves even if I’m not an expert in creating either, I admire their mere creation.
The grayscale posters surround my favorite book series. Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne, is a series that shaped my interests in emotional and apocalyptic storytelling. The same descriptions apply to Issac Marion’s Warm Bodies. Zombies have been on my mind since my early middle-school-age fascination with “The Walking Dead.” As for a zombie who would learn love and understanding is the cure, I like to believe those words can cure all apocalypse epidemics (fictional and real as idealistic as it sounds).
Like my personality and appearance, my shelves have always been a semi-functioning mess with an element of chaotic good to keep things interesting—and on some appealing artistic level. Chimmy will remain guard with his fearsome tongue if anyone thinks they can touch my BTS albums without my permission.
Emma Hudson is currently a third year student at the University of Tennessee working on her double concentration BA in English: Rhetoric and Creative Writing, along with a minor in retail consumer science. She’s a busy bee; she is the Editor-in-Chief of the up-and-coming Honey Magazine. Emma is also a long-time member and leader in UTK’s Creative Writing Club and on the Executive Board for UTK’s Sigma Tau Delta, Alpha Epsilon chapter. In her free time, she figures out how to include K-Pop group BTS into her research projects and watches “reality” tv shows.
Sundress Publications announces the release of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry, an anthology edited by Ruth Awad and Rachel Mennies.
What does it mean for a poet to love a dog—especially knowing it will never outlive them? The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry catapults readers into the marrows of living and feeling alongside our mysterious canines: a species that often teaches us what it means to be human. These selections interrogate our lives as they’ve intertwined with humanity’s most beloved house companion. What catalyzes our hunger to share our vulnerabilities and lived realities with these curious, interdependent animals?
Writers, including Chen Chen, Noah Baldino, Hanif Abdurraqib, Carly Joy Miller, Maggie Smith, and Raena Shirali, among others, grapple with the simultaneous heaviness, happiness, love, and loss that comes with dog companionship, exposing deep truths about what it means to share space with our fellow non-humans. This collection examines both the routine and the unexpected lives this anthology’s poets have built with their dogs, exploring wildness and domestication, boundaries and freedom, rescue and grief through works centered on the complicated, expansive writer-to-canine connection.
Ruth Awad is the Lebanese-American author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio, with her four bratty and joyous Pomeranians.
Rachel Menniesis the author of The Naomi Letters, forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2021 and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, the 2014 winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Her poetry has appeared at The Believer, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and her nonfiction has appeared at The Millions, The Poetry Foundation, and LitHub, among other outlets. Mennies serves as the reviews editor for AGNI. She lives in Chicago, where she works as a freelance editor and writer, with her spouse and her rescue greyhound mix, Otto.
For this installment of Lyric Essentials, we are joined by Sundress author syan jay. They read poems from poet laureate Joy Harjo, and talk about the role of storytelling in indigenous poetry. Thanks for reading!
Erica Hoffmeister: What is your personal connection to Joy Harjo that led you to read her poetry for Lyric Essentials?
syan jay: Joy Harjo is the first Indigenous poet I was ever introduced to, my first connection to seeing how storytelling could be done on our terms through poetry. Her book, “Map to the End of the World” was the first poetry book I read outside of school and I instantly felt bonded to it. Her and her work have been integral to my creative landscape since I was a child. I cannot imagine a world without her work.
EH: Of Joy Harjo’s expansive body of work, why did you choose these two poems?
sj: These poems have been sitting in my mind recently. To think of the ways my people, and Indigenous people all over the world, have survived or haven’t survived these apocalypses of settler colonialism and all its violence. I think it’s necessary to look at the ways in which we interrogate the systems that have displaced and dispossessed our people, and the methods in which we continue ceremony and connection to each other. This includes questioning the ways America is seen as America by settlers and non-Indigenous people who may benefit from settler colonialism now.
EH: How do you think it’s important to experience Harjo’s poetry read aloud?
sj: Her work has unshakable cadence, the ways in which she utilizes line breaks has such concussive force. I love being able to feel the way in which her words form landscapes, the low valleys to high peaks. She is one of my favorite poets to read aloud.
EH: There is a particular line from “Perhaps the World Ends Here” that reads: “It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human.” Do you make use of that concept of what it means to be human in your own writing, or in your newest poetry collection Bury Me in Thunder, specifically?
sj: Storytelling in my community, and so in many others, is a reflection of humanity itself, to explain or process the situations we’ve encountered since time immemorial. Bury Me in Thunder specifically looks at how we are made through intergenerational trauma, the experiences of our family members, and how we process our individual life events. In the case of the book, it was the ways in which I came to terms with grief and healing through these facets, and how it reinforces, instead of diminishes, my humanity as a transgender, Indigenous person.
Joy Harjo is member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). An acclaimed poet, musician, playwright, and activist, Harjo was named the 23rd U.S. poet laureate, becoming the first Native American to serve the position. She is also the chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for young Mvskoke women, and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She is the author of nine books of poetry, two award-winning children’s books, and a musical play. As a poet, she is best known for writing about vast landscapes and incorporating indigenous storytelling and histories, and social justice traditions into her work by exploring the violence of settler colonialism and the reclamation of her heritage. Awards for her work include: the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, a PEN USA Literary Award, Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writers’ Award, a Rasmuson US Artist Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Further reading:
Purchase Joy Harjo’s book How We Became Human Read NPR’s feature, announcing Joy Harjo as the first Native American U.S. poet laureate Listen to an interview with Joy Harjo, from the Academy of American Poets
syan jay is an agender writer of Dził Łigai Si’an N’dee descent. They were the winner of the 2018 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and were Frontier Poetry’s 2019 Frontier New Voices Fellow. Their work is published/forthcoming in The Shallow Ends, WILDNESS, and Black Warrior Review. They currently live with their partner in the occupied Massachusett homelands of Nutohkemminnit (Greater Boston). Their debut poetry collection, “Bury Me in Thunder” (January 29, 2020) is out now with Sundress Publications. You can find more of their work at www.syanjay.com.
Erica Hoffmeister is originally from Southern California and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. Currently in Denver, she teaches college writing and is an editor for the Denver-based literary journal South Broadway Ghost Society. 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). A cross-genre writer, she has several works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, articles and critical essays published in various outlets. Learn more about her at http://ericahoffmeister.com/
I was supposed to be in med school by now. Actually, I suck at dissection, so scratch that. I’d have probably wound up in a lab, looking at nice, sterile slides under a microscope. Science was the plan. It had rules and tangible logic, a promise that greater study would positively correlate with greater understanding. In high school, I was the everything AP science kid, the never-missed-an-exam-prep-session kid, the kid who origami folded what looked like a voice out of textbook pages and prayed it never got wet. But then, of course it did.
Perfection is a dead end. A perfect test score ends in a zero, is applauded and then silenced on a transcript to be filed away. I was a size double zero senior year of high school, the ideal anorexic for four and a half years by that point, not sick enough to demand attention, not well enough to quit walking round and round the same cul-de-sac whittling my stomach down. I could achieve these goals, but without fresh air they would decompose into a dark garden inside me one day.
My cousin killed himself during the fall of that year. He was twenty years old. We were never close—spread across the eastern half of the U.S., my extended family typically gathers only every three or four years for a requisite wedding, graduation, or, in this case, a funeral. Nonetheless, the image of his powdered face and overstuffed chest flash flooded my years of panicked perfectionism, dissolved carefully pleated calorie charts and diagrams of cellular respiration into bits of colored paper, arranging themselves into some visceral understanding of why he did it. Suicide—by gunshot, poison gas, alcohol, and silence—had marked both sides of my family tree, and I knew that no equations or scholarships could keep it from blossoming in my imagination as well. Stuck in my cul-de-sac, I needed something open-ended. So, I started writing.
It didn’t fix me. I was bad at it, but I also learned how to honor imperfection. My first poems were collections of teen angst clichés – hearts, oceans, and all – but poetry taught me resilience. I started college as a biological engineering major, and by the middle of the first semester I switched to English and Spanish. The more I studied, the less things made sense. Once, I wrote an entire paper about how I didn’t understand Ezra Pound, and that was okay.
Junior year, I decided to seek professional treatment for my eating disorder and writing became a tool to free lies that had lain silent at the bottom of me for years. I still struggled, still panicked watching my years’ worth of rules and self-control dissolve as I learned to cry open-ended instead of running in circles to numb out. But I learned to love open-ended too. To give myself to others in a way that didn’t fit neatly into an equation; no matter the numbers, there was always some remainder left. And the better I learned to care for my body, the stronger my voice became. Eventually, I heard about something called an MFA and decided to apply to graduate programs in creative writing (my undergraduate university didn’t offer a CW program).
Graduate school has pushed me to rethink much of what I thought I knew about learning. It’s introduced me to writers whose work has entirely shifted my relationship to language. Poetry workshops have shattered my ideas about reading and writing and how a classroom can function. Moving from a rather insular community in Arkansas to a new city stretched my sense of self in unexpected directions, and here I’ve found a group of writers and friends who continually teach me what it means to be fully human. I’ve met mentors who honor my voice but also call me on my bullshit and push me to put my truth rather than just my intellect on the page. And I never would have guessed how hard that would be.
So, I wasn’t born with a pen in my hand and a song in my heart. Sorry if that’s what you were expecting. Hell, I didn’t even sing along with the radio as a kid. But I do now. Writing taught me how to break patterns that would have tethered me to a legacy of silence and slow destruction. Slowly, I’ve built a voice that’s no longer paper-thin, and it’s taken me far away from that old cul-de-sac, though I’ve still got farther to go.
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Emily Bradley is a second year MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she teaches and serves as the assistant poetry editor of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts. She loves poetry, falling asleep on the couch, and the color yellow.
As part of Sundress Publications’ ongoing commitment to service, we recognizing that COVID-19 is causing hardship by canceling readings, launches, tours, and other needed promotional efforts. To combat this, Sundress Publications is now accepting submissions for consideration for inclusion in our new review series, Sundress Reads. We’re looking to write featured reviews for books with release dates from February 1-April 30, 2020. We at Sundress hope to champion writers whose work highlights human struggle and challenges misconceptions.
Authors or publishers of books published within this date range are invited to submit books, chapbooks, or anthologies in any genre for consideration by our reviewers who are standing by. Submissions will be considered on a rolling basis. For immediate consideration, please forward an electronic copy of the book (PDFs preferred), author bio, photo of the cover, and a link to the publisher’s website to sundresspublications@gmail.com with “Sundress Reads: Title” as the subject line. In addition, we request that one print copy be mailed to Sundress Academy for the Arts, ATTN: Sundress Reads, 195 Tobby Hollow Lane, Knoxville, TN 37931.
Submissions to Sundress Reads will remain eligible for selection for one year. Hard copies will become a permanent part of the Sundress Academy for the Arts library and will be made available to SAFTA fellows and staff as well as by request to affiliate journals for further reviews.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! In our latest installment, Tara Shea Burke reads poems from two different poets and discusses the connectivity of lesbian poetry, somatic poetry, animalistic poetry, and how important it is for everyone to hear about it all. Thanks for listening!
Erica Hoffmeister: Why did you choose to break the rules and read two poems by two different poets for Lyric Essentials?
Photo credit: Rae Thweatt
Tara Shea Burke: Well, for a few practical, radical, and metaphorical reasons. Because this trine of things is perhaps how I do everything. When I was thinking about what poems to read, I scanned my shelves and all the poets I love. I could have read from Tim Seibles, Jericho Brown, Mary Oliver, Megan Falley—so many poets and so many poems. But because this was about reading poems I love, I sat and breathed and got deep into my body. The first poem I think about reading aloud when we talk about poems that influence is always, always for me, Why Young Girls Like to Ride Bareback by Judith Barrington. I heard her read this poem at an AWP years and years ago, when I was either still in or just finishing my MFA and realizing how much I needed and responded to poems about the body, the lesbian body, the thrust of us.
I recorded that poem right away, then read the rest of the book “Horses and the Human Soul”, which I haven’t read fully in a while, though I return to my favorite poem often. I love so much of the book, but I was looking for another poem that really rode the wave of my body as I read it in the same way, and I came up short. So, I looked on the Lyric Essentials page and read back through what other poets had done. I was just going to break the rules, like I do, but also wanted to feel in community with other poets that may have gone outside the boundaries, and I found some writers that shared different poets. I break rules and look for shared experiences simultaneously—in life, in poetry, in spirit. I sat for a while again, and asked myself to remember, bodily, what other poems I love feel the same to me in rhythm and texture like this poem. Donika Kelly’s every poem. I immediately wanted to read “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” So, I read it aloud and felt that ride of body of lesbian body of love of queerness and animal and the rhythm and felt at home, which is what I look for, always.
EH: How do you feel these two poems or two poets are connected, so that they can be read together?
TSB: I mentioned a little of this above, but when I was first coming out, first writing, first finding my voice in literature and as a student, as a young queer writer full of animal feelings all over the place, embodied writers saved my life. I will always want to place two or more lesbian and queer writers together who bring in animals and animalistic urges, who can write about sex while not writing about sex (I fail at this and speak literally of sex) and what love feels like for oneself, and for another, as a queer body in this dominant culture that strangles everything deeply divine about our bodies and all we crave. Barrington’s poem is a perfect poem to me. Its language matches its form matches its sound and tone and experience as I read, and to me every single poem truly should be an embodied, felt, experience on the tongue aloud as well as on the page. Lesbian and queer writers do this best for me. They have been my teachers. I love so much writing people create, but I want to feel something, you know?
Barrington’s poem is about a young girl riding bareback, and not a single word is about sex and early sexuality, and yet every single word choice, every straddle and whole body singing is about the dance of the body waking up in tune with nature, the whole other world between a young girl’s legs. And that queers the hell out of it, too—so unapologetically inviting us to consider what is unsaid, what we’ve all barebacked before. Wow, this is the power of bringing the unsaid, particularly about young queerness, to life on the page. Some may say this poem is about the joy of riding a horse. I say read it aloud, again.
And Kelly’s poem is about feelings in this very frank and unapologetic way, too. About falling in love with a woman and seeing sex and love and lust and death everywhere, in sea creatures and the water and the sand and the tide. And about naming oneself in the poem! Whew. Most of her poems embrace the animal of us, which has taught me so much about my body, about what is possible when I let my love of things, of women, of creatures into my work despite all the damn rules we think we must adhere to in order to write well. Screw them all, sing the body one with the love that wakes us up, the bodies alive and alive, again.
EH: What roles have these poems acted as in influencing your own writing? Do you find one more influential than the other, or one poet more impactful to your writer’s identity than the other?
TSB: I seem to be bleeding one answer into the other before the next question, which feels like me and all the poets I love. I don’t want to compare here, but man, every time I read Barrington’s poem, I stomp my feet on the floor and rock my body and feel alive in a way I can’t quite name, for worry of killing it. The ride that poem takes reminds me what I’m here for in spirit and in relationship to language and queerness and sex and myself and this body I am loving fiercely as a big giant FU to all the powers that be, no matter how hard it is. And it reminds me how little we’ve written about the young girl’s body and how hard it is to name what we straddle. I mean, really. Kelly’s work is influential as hell for me, but in a way that reminds me to embrace deep metaphor, shorter poems that reveal and hold back just enough to make you hungry for more.
EH: I love how much we can hear your emotional connection to these poems when you’re reading! Who do you imagine is your audience when reading these poems aloud? As in, who do you imagine needs or wants to hear you read these poems by these poets?
TSB: Um, everyone. We’ve lost so much of aurality in language, at least in the way poetry asks us to consider words and feelings together. But, I know what’s happening there when we hear the same kind of reading over and over. I get it’s hard to read out loud, but really, what the crap are we doing? I feel like it is my job, when reading a poem, to practice it and read both like myself, and also in a way that honors the poem. Each poem has its own tone (I wrote town first) and music, or lack of, and subject matter, and desire. Every poem is a conversation with an audience, and I want us to read even MORE in poet voice. But I want poet voice to be something we can’t pin down anymore because we’re actually reading like ourselves, to people we truly care about reaching, and in a way that honors each poem as it is.
I love these poems. They light me up and turn me on. Why wouldn’t I read them in that way? I have spent a lot of my life wasting my words, and I aim to not do that anymore. What a waste to read these as if they aren’t magical, love-giving, life-giving, climax-giving poems? I’d read these to anyone. And, I think I’ve read the Bareback poem to children.
Judith Barrington has published four poetry collections, two chapbooks, and the award-winning memoir Lifesaving: A Memoir. She is also a creative writing teacher who has taught in Britain, Spain, and the U.S. and currently teaches literary memoir at The University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA program, and is the author of the bestselling book on craft, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. She is a recipient of many awards, including the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, the Lambda Book Award, and runner-up for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award.
Donika Kelly is an assistant professor of English at St. Bonaventure University where she teaches Creative Writing. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, and the full-length collection Bestiary, which was the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and long-listed for the National Book Award and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
Tara Shea Burke is is a queer poet and teacher from the Blue Ridge Mountains and Hampton Roads, Virginia. She’s a writing instructor, editor, creative coach, and yoga teacher who has taught and lived in Virginia, New Mexico, and Colorado. Her writing will appear in Erase the Patriarchy, a book of sexual assault and rape erasures, edited by Isobel O’Hare and University of Hell Press, and was featured in Reading Queer, Poetry in the Time of Chaos, edited by Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton from Anhinga Press, as well as many journals and anthologies. She is a board member for Sinister Wisdom, the longest running multicultural, lesbian literary and arts journal. She believes in community building and radical support for any human that wants to tell their stories, and has edited and coached writers through creative work, dissertations, personal projects, and movement-based writing for healing and growth. To find more about her writing and work visit www.tarasheaburke.com
Erica Hoffmeister is is originally from Southern California and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. Currently living in Denver, she teaches college writing across the Denver metro area and is an editor for the literary journal South Broadway Ghost Society. 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) and writes across genres.
Sundress Publications is excited to announce that we will continue our tradition of hosting roundtables on our official blog by featuring some of the amazing AWP panels that were not able to appear at AWP 2020 through initial rejection or cancellation of the panel due to COVID-19. We’d like to focus especially on panels that will not be going to Kansas City in 2021. If your panel did not make the final cut this year, or you had to cancel running it and won’t be re-pitching for AWP 2021, we’d like to talk to you!
Now more than ever, your voices are necessary. We know that many important discussions won’t make it to AWP next year. That’s why we want to make them accessible in order to build an archive of diverse, engaging voices. We’re looking for topics that are driven by passion, inclusivity, forward-thinking, collaboration, and hybridity — all things fresh and unexpected. Let’s have more conversations — the world needs them.
Past panels posted to our blog include a wide variety of topics such as using a reporter’s techniques for fiction writing, a fresh look at the cultural conversations started by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and women at war. You can see some of our previous conversations at: https://sundresspublications.wordpress.com/tag/awp/.
coup wires ( a ‘steal’ from Homegoods is what my mom calls it). Some books I have yet to read, others are textbooks of semesters’ past, and I have a good stack of albums I regard with childhood remembrance to my latest Waterparks album with catchy and personally unrelatable tunes like “I Miss Having Sex But At Least I Don’t Want To Die (a hit radio-bleeped classic).
