I started reading seriously in college, but I began telling stories much earlier, in elementary school. Before I knew enough Chinese characters to write stories, I filled my notebooks with drawings of imaginary worlds inspired by the fantasy stories I loved—Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy. I even invited my friends to become characters in those worlds. I have no idea where those notebooks are now, but I still remember the immense joy of inventing stories.
As I grew older, I discovered English as a more adequate language for my storytelling. I dreamed in Chinese before I learned to write. English became the language through which I learned how to shape those dreams into fiction. Its precision, syntactic flexibility, and ability to render subtle shifts in time and perspective opened up new possibilities in my writing. Learning to write in English not only expanded my imagination but also gave me the tools to transform imagination into literature.
I took my first introductory creative writing class during my freshman year at NYU and wrote a series of memoir vignettes. That class was the first time I realized writing could be a lifelong pursuit. Around the same time, I began reading literary fiction. I was captivated by William Faulkner’s nonlinear manipulation of time, drawn into Fyodor Dostoevsky’s morally turbulent world, fascinated by Orhan Pamuk’s intricate labyrinths of memory and identity, and impressed by Alice Munro’s expansive portraits of Ontario. Their works reshaped my understanding of what fiction could do.
These writers encouraged me to ask questions that continue to guide my own work: How do we define ourselves? Where is the boundary between the self and others? How do we navigate the tensions between languages, cultures, and histories in an increasingly interconnected world?
Today, I am committed to writing about the Asian diaspora. Inspired by writers such as Yiyun Li, Kyle Liang, and Shangyang Fang, I explore displacement, belonging, and cultural inheritance through fiction. As an Asian immigrant in the United States, I am still searching for my own place within American society. That ongoing search shapes my writing and motivates my desire to support emerging writers and help bring their voices into the world.
Yuanhao Lin is a fiction writer from Beijing, China, and an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Columbia University. Their work has appeared in Breakwater Review. In 2025, they were shortlisted for the StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize and the Madison Review Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction. When they’re not writing, they enjoy cooking and playing Mahjong. This summer, they plan to read W. G. Sebald and learn how to make Schweinshaxe.
Abi Pollokoff’s night myths • • before the body(Red Hen Press, 2025) is a tour de force of inventive language. She constructs an incredibly original poetic landscape via fragmentation, punctuation, dichotomy, and white space—one saturated with feminist critique and riveting social commentary. Pollokoff’s writing is extraordinary and surreal, carrying readers into an intimate meditation around the multiplicities of womanhood.
Like rainfall, the atmosphere of night myths • • before the body is simultaneously staccato and seamless. While reading, I was immediately struck by the innovative creation of compound words that endlessly dot these pages. Within one of the first poems, “wildflower mythology,” words like “stemwrapped,” “soilsoaked,” “goldthreaded,” and “shadowplucked” surprised and delighted me. Although none of these are in the dictionary officially, they felt so deeply accurate, visually-clear, and aesthetically coherent that I would easily vouch for their inclusion. Pollokoff here puts forward her own mythological voice with these words; she establishes her artistic voice and epistemological vision early in the collection to articulate her own becoming. Borrowing from the compound word “wildflower” itself, Pollokoff brilliantly sees patterns already existent in language and generously extends them to other natural phenomena.
Pollokoff’s structure, ordering, and paginal layout are also designed with curiosity, attentiveness, and care. With the eye of an architect and the mind of an artist in communion with her world, she places the sequence “lilies & these eroded” in the center of the book. Pollokoff writes:
weigh the phrase against its foliage: so much vastness in the gasping roots so much in the gasping tides • here & over that way here & over that way & here & here & here &.
Her gorgeous language describing lilies on a shoreline brings together earthy diction like foliage and roots and water imagery. The open vowels in “gasping tides” connect to the vastness of nature. The repeated phrases in the second stanza excerpted above mirror immemorial natural cycles. In the notes section, Pollokoff notes her intention to match “the nadir of the speaker’s emotional self-consideration” with “the vertex of the book’s ‘v.’” The foresight to be mindful of the physical artifact of her book with the speaker’s interiority is nothing short of remarkable. Pollokoff beautifully gives her speaker a chance to refract, reflect, and grow across the second half.
I resonate strongly with “particular reminders when prayers for the body aren’t enough” for its reflection on womanhood, and more generally, living with a body that changes. Pollokoff’s poignant questioning include vivid images to capture philosophical reflection; for example, “it’s not a question of streets or piano keys / it’s not a question to fill veins with tendrils of curved bark” and “is the body swallowed in fabric to hide / or to hold it.” Anyone who has selected particular articles of clothing based on feeling insecure or ashamed of their body will recognize this speaker’s experience. The title also evokes the social norm to express ‘thoughts and prayers’ instead of offer action to help someone in need. Pollokoff’s poem is a reminder full of smaller reminders for those who wish they were a different shape or who are struggling with changes in their body; she conjures fruits, wrists, cityscapes, and muscles to help readers towards self-acceptance by sitting with their beauty.
The poem “to forest is to hide a woman” also touches on the experience of holding self-doubt and self-love. Pollokoff writes:
i swarm. myself to be a. body. to become. a woman i am. leeching woman lisping & claiming. a name. for which i do. not ask i do not ask. to woman i do not want. to quiver i. want. to know what my insides are. i want. to know what. is a woman.
i want to know how. my insides are i. want to catch the dripping. light of stained. glass hanging from. rafters. & drink it into. me. hold it. hold it close to. breezes &. sing a little. in the light. don’t make light.
Such wants—to be known, to be understood—are universal. Pollokoff’s fragmented syntax makes a stop and go effect, mirroring the thought process of someone holding uncertainty and desire inside them simultaneously. The periods force me to read more slowly, and through that adjustment, I’m able to recognize more multiplicity of meaning from these words. For example, there would be less room for curiosity in the opening of the second stanza excerpted above if it simply read: “i want to know how my insides are. i want to catch the dripping light of stained glass hanging from rafters…” Because of Pollokoff’s deconstructed and then reconstructed sentence structure, phrases like “my insides are i” echo more clearly, loudly. Moments of defamiliarization with phrases like “light of stained” also piqued my curiosity, making me want to read again and again.
Pollokoff’s commitment to sustaining such an inventive, clever, and transformational poetic across the entirety of night myths • • before the body makes this thoughtfully crafted collection a standout in contemporary poetry, and one I will return to many times. Her unique diction and deep care for humanness will reach those looking for both a cerebral and emotional reading experience.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is Cofounder and Managing Editor at Two Cardinals Literary. At Sundress Publications, she serves as Assistant Chapbook Editor. Livia has been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA in poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
Sea ditties and punk-rock ragers. Bears and mayflies, fires and water. Computer coding and cyborg dreams. Xenomorphs and ghosts. And through it all, the empty orchestra of grief and longing. In Karaoke at the End of the World(Jackleg Press, 2026), Genevieve DeGuzman explores the speculative nature of loss in an astounding array of language and image that takes the inevitable “what-ifs” of mourning and spirals them outward into this world and imagined ones.
The collection is sectioned into tracks, like the musical tracks on a karaoke night, and each one serves up different tempos and tones whose cohesion lies in shared images and experiences. The sections not only function as references to the title, however; they also take us forward and backward in time and space, sending the reader off onto different tracks of a multi-verse created by grappling with the incomprehensible, specifically the loss of a mother in a world that is falling apart.
The relationship between daughter and mother is explored in many ways, using both the speculative and the natural to great advantage. In “The Xenomorph Learns to Swim” (one of the poems in the collection that references the xenomorphs of Alien), DeGuzman writes, “Given enough time, everything shifts back, / to fetal position. Back to that formation // we always knew, swimming inside our mothers. // Before we gulped air for the first time, / and learned that we could drown.” This longing for simplicity and an earlier innocence is also seen in “Small Bodies of Water:” “The moon is the mandala at the top. / As is the mother. When revealed on a clear night, // both can turn a daughter back to wilderness again, / a grown woman to mouthless vulpine girl.” But in “Burning Heart Emoji,” reality and practicality intrude, the short lives of cicadas and mayflies juxtaposed with our own fragile existence where we “hear the mayfly speak, / beating inside my scorched chest. Fire. / Heart on fire. My heart on fire.”
DeGuzman’s ability to render grief not only occurs through natural images, as in the poems above, but takes grief beyond the real world, making it sing completely new melodies. In six poems that are spread throughout the collection with titles that read like computer code, DeGuzman rehomes the stage of grief, personifying the grieving daughter as cyborg, the Mother as a mysterious figure, simultaneously creator/absence/caretaker. The second poem in the series— “config == Daughter_var1, loop”—begins with the words “When pink blooms choked the rivers, Mother decided” and it continues with the mother “coding” the daughter to survive a seemingly endless timeline, leaving the Daughter to determine a different destiny: “Fed never satiated. A Fibonacci-shaped longing so perfect / I reprogrammed it to track the time.” In the third poem, the Daughter sees the Mother only in dreams, sends messages that are not answered. In the fourth— “Daughter_var1 Can Still Dance When She Breaks,”—the Mother returns to perform a clean slate procedure: “Restart, erase / were commands / you dipped / like lures / in the coded pools / between my bones.” In the fifth, the Daughter begins to shut herself down, and in the last of the series, the Mother “leans down, touching my face, her hands / a green garland around my head” as the Daughter notices birds all around her, beseeches them to make “pretty plunder of my wires,” to take the last shimmering pieces of her to the sky. In this intensely moving and original sequence, DeGuzman has crawled inside the heart of every grieving person who has ever wanted to wipe the memories away, to be reprogrammed with a clean slate, to shut down and be taken by the earth, to remember what was beautiful.
With humor, pathos, inventive line breaks, and staggering insight, Karaoke at the End of the World walks the perfect line between practical fact and the surreal, between the black and white of “Nothing downs a bird as reliably as a clear surface ”(“Anxiety as a Bird in Need of a Wildlife Rehabber”) and the fantasy of “Familiar Ghost,” where “For months, my mother in the hospital, the ghost played outlaw, unpledged warrior facing off with me on a beach, our blades angled against the sun, water darkening the sand at our feet.” DeGuzman may take us to the end of the world, but she does it with great tenderness and imagination, gives the readers a karaoke night where all are welcome to sing and grieve together.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of four poetry collections from Sundress Publications, most recently Unrivered (2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Tahoma Lit Review and elsewhere. She lives and creates in the Chicago area, curates and hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, and is the co-editor/co-founder of Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.
Following the release of his debut e-chapbook, So Rain, Christian Yeo Xuan spoke with Nafisa Hussain about the collection’s meditations on love, grief, migration, and belonging. Here, they discussed the title’s poetics of overwhelm and risk, the porous boundaries between familial and chosen love, the entanglement of personal and political pain, and the recurring imagery of birds, rain, light, and trees as ways of approaching masculinity, memory, survival, and longing for community.
Nafisa Hussain: What is the significance of the title So Rain, especially in relation to the final line of “Road Trip Sonnet”?
Christian Yeo Xuan: On the one vibes-based hand, the title is pretty. On the other less vibes-based hand, it’s a nod to overwhelm (syntactically compressing “so let it rain…”, or “so it rains…”). Rain itself is laden with metaphorical significances but it can also be a vehicle for other metaphorical significances (“a rain of light”, “a rain of knives”, “a rain of Jacob Elordi lookalikes,” etc.). It’s a sensation of being caught in something, there’s a phenomenon that happens to you, that you have little control over. On the other hand (I’m on three hands now but don’t let that bother you), it’s a form of belligerence, a demand for the rain, for what’s behind the cipher of rain. In lyric as in life I try to dive head-first into moments of gnarly density, even if it takes years to parse through them, even if it takes many palimpsests. Those moments feel the most fruitful, they’re where the magic happens. I have a good friend, Jessie, who says that in the long run, intensity is the most important thing in any which direction or vector. Another friend, Nina, recently said that it’s important not to lead a seasonless life, which I wrote down immediately. So, I mean, the title is defiant—it’s a refusal to shell up, it’s a poetics of risk, of swinging at the fences.
NH: What would you say are the distinctions and similarities between familial and chosen love within this collection?
CYX: Clichés are terrible, but some clichés are true—love is love, right? I try to elide the distinction between familial and chosen love. In both cases, the stakes are high, you start to feel interconnected, you live and die for another person, and then that ebbs and flows, because it has to, because that’s how it goes. I think if you love someone, and that someone is your family, of any description, geography solves nothing. You’re going to love that person regardless. The same inherent human dramas play themselves out. If there’s any difference, it’s manifestational. You can betray given family the most, inasmuch as you might also drop everything to show up at their doorstep. It’s the most socially legible, right? So, you’re socially allowed to sacrifice, but also to constrain. Compulsed even, in certain societies. Chosen family is a bit more free and freeing, but it can end up occupying the same space. You end up rehearsing the same stakes.
NH: What is the significance between personal and political pain in pieces like “Snippet #15” and “Snippet #7”?
CYX: Both snippets try to pull focus on the political by looking at the personal. It’s that old truism that the more specific something is, the more universal. I mean, I could have had poems that paraphrased Omar El Akkad and ended with “Free Palestine”, but instead I tried to localize these poems to this very specific moment in time in the town of Taanayel, in the Beqaa Valley, embedded in the Syrian and Palestinian refugee crises. “Snippet #15” relies on a sleight-of-hand, it tries to set up a familiar narrative frame. It has all these funny details about Tomiyasu and BTS, and then it pulls the rug out from under you. I think it tries to reflect the pain of, like, Syrian refugees who live in tents for ten years and stop going to school. There isn’t a hierarchy of suffering, but it’d be remiss to focus on this East Asian speaker. “Snippet #7” uses the persona poem to enter a poem of witness sideways. I struggled with this poem for a long time, and then the persona unlocked it for me. I think because it’s so absurd, it was the only way I knew to apprehend that level of suffering, of what it means even to witness that. Both these poems use the Yanyi prose-poem as a way of holding horizontal thinking. Ultimately, all pain is political, and an apolitical aesthetics is window-dressing—it’s a total waste of time. We live in a time of genocide. It is frankly a joke to be apolitical. You have to look at the war machine and do something about it. You either love something or you don’t. There’s no point making excuses.
NH: Birds are mentioned in multiple poems, whether that be ducks, geese, ladybirds, or as a metaphor in “Poem in Which the Father is the Metaphor.” What drew you to this choice?
CYX: I don’t know, is it my hyper-fixation on peregrine falcons? My love for Vulfpeck? My brother’s childhood encounter with a pelican? Jurong Bird Park? On a more serious note, I think a sense of being caged carries through many of these poems, of carrying a held-in rage born of a lifetime spent suppressing the will. I think birds are this cipher of everything that the speaker does not have—and if you think about the image of the person watching the bird, in that scene, the bird is in flight, while the speaker is not. If I had to guess, it would be that I envied them, the birds. They have no separation between their real life and their daily life. They are not waiting to be free. They just are.
NH: Why does certain nature imagery, such as rain, light, and trees recur across multiple poems?
CYX: It’s got to be the poets I love—Louise Glück and Jean Valentine use so much nature imagery, and then, of course, Victoria Chang, Aria Aber, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Carl Phillips, so on and so forth. You are what you read, etc. I think there’s also something unruined about natural phenomena, that someone who mostly kicks it in urban spaces is drawn to. Some of the most mesmeric encounters I’ve ever had have been with nature, in expanses of quiet. It’s funny, because I’m very prone to animal imagery in fiction. I don’t know why. I’ll ask the trees.
NH: Could you discuss your choice to work across a variety of different poetic styles?
CYX: I read an interview today where Yasmin Zaher said that one of the best ways to create a character’s downfall is to give them an obsession, which bodes well for my tangling with form. To me, form is substance. It gives you an entryway into a poem that gets closer to the heart of the thing. With what Diane Seuss and Terrance Hayes have done with the contemporary sonnet, the pressurized container gives you an opportunity. Sound and rhythm are pleasurable, which I’m sensitive to after spending all my teens listening to hip-hop. Punctuation and breath, particularly between stanzas, are really important to me. Over the last few years, I’ve also come into contact with more visual artists than ever, including my friend aj, who was always busy yapping my ear off about installations and topography. I’ve spent a lot of time perambulating around galleries being weirdly drawn to abstract expressionism and wondering why. But maybe all of this is retroactive; it’s really about the poets I kick it or have kicked it with, all of whom are pushing the boundaries of what poem can do, what poetry is, for the possibility of song to carry the truth, or a truth, of the mystery of lived experience. I’m extraordinarily lucky that some of my favorite poets are my friends. What I know about topography, I owe to Aishvarya. What I know about strangeness is from Will and Imogen. The fictive poem, I learned from Annalisa. What I know of compression, I owe forever to Lis. My biggest inspiration is the crew. What luck. I don’t take that for granted at all.
NH: Could you expand on the duality between tenderness and tension within brotherhood?
CYX: Being a boy is a funny thing. I’m at an art residency in La Plata now, near Buenos Aires, and spent the afternoon drinking maté and watching Arsenal round up the EPL title with Dabi, who’s a screenwriter from Honduras. I grew up in boys’ schools until I was sixteen, and my friends and I thought of ourselves as a brotherhood; I think we literally used that term. This sat nicely alongside my three brothers, who are some of my best friends in the world. Unfortunately, I think masculinity is a tricky thing—even if you love each other, your id is playing against trauma, you always have to hedge against the possibility that other men are going to punish you for your soft belly. You even have the tools and language of violence for that; in Singapore, the language of the military trickles down through everything. Back in high school, friendships were so intense, it was like I love you, you’re my brother, we’ll be together forever, it’s us till the end, backs against the wall, this kind of thing. Male loneliness epidemics feared us. The boys I ran with were so angry, but I would see them cry. And smoke in the toilet, and cry. People’s dads were beating them up. They listened to so much Death Cab for Cutie, and played football at the back of the class, and stuffed shit in the ceilings, and hit each other’s dicks to say hi. It was a very specific time, an education in a centrifuge of sorts, the duality continuing into adulthood. I think it was Sophie Mackintosh who said, “what is a boy but a hurtable man?”
NH: How do the poems navigate the complexity between familial harm and familial love?
CYX: I don’t want to be all hand-wavey and “two things can be true at once”, but I think I do have to get all hand-wavey and “two things can be true at once.” “Grace” is, I think, the only poem of mine my friend Iris likes; she brings it up all the time apropos of nothing, like, I’ll literally send her something new and she’ll say, “I love the one with the tigers.” That’s an example of a poem where the two operate in parallel at all times. I think the Yanyi prose-poem is great for horizontal thinking because negative space encourages quick jumps. There’s also “Masculinity Studies,” which is my friend Lis’ favorite. The lyric essay allowed me to build on long lines and recurring sonic moves, to fritter back and forth between harm and love, like an otter. It’s easy to rely on stereotypes and Kit Chan’s 天冷就回来 to pontificate about blood being thicker than water, implicating brutality and tenderness and KTV mandopop songs where the instrumentals are way too long, that sort of thing, but I think that might just be an ocean of nonsense, a well-adjusted, stakes-less, middle-class fantasy. You have to look at the penumbra, where reasons end. You have to look at the ebbs and the flows.
NH: Which of these poems is held closest to your heart? Are there any in particular that were difficult to express with words?
CYX: Probably “Ars Poetica (When I keep learning you, something breaks).” When I moved to Paris, I had just finished two years of conscription in the army, and I got into my first ever residential writing workshop. I was really thirsting for community with people who were serious about poetry, and who also I could, like, kick it with. In Paris, I had attended this poetry workshop in the basement of a bar in 11eme, and it was full of these really unserious geezers, save for two friends whom I kept, Nico and Victor. But I got a grant to go to Kenyon, so I went, and there were these incredible poets with The Gift, and it was this gorgeous, alphabet-mafia-run, green oasis in the middle of Gambier, Ohio, and I felt like I was on the cusp of a new thing, and everyone was really funny, and we wrote and workshopped and had drinks, and I wrote “Ars Poetica” there. Then I did a road trip with my friends Aishvarya and Eileen back to New York. I mean, it was perfect. Kenyon changed my life for all kinds of reasons—it gave me my road trip buddies, and Will, Jessie, Imogen, Annalisa, Tangie—it threw a hammer into the heart of my poems and reconstituted whatever it touched. I was never the same again. The other one that’s close to my heart is “i think i call it dreaming, but,” but I’ll leave that story to the birds.
To answer your other question: “After the After” was difficult to write. The chemistry lab at my high school was this awful place, it felt like where all souls went to die. A couple of times, I went after playing football and everyone was sweaty, it was all cheap deodorant, like the Adidas kind from Queensway, with fruits in the name. I might be misremembering. I used to be terrible at lighting the Bunsen burner; I could never remember whether the hole had to be open or closed, and when we had to light a petri dish or something. I would turn around to chat shit with my friend, and by the time I turned back around, all the ammonium chloride would have disappeared, like an avoidant boyfriend, and I would be like, what? And have to redo the whole thing, including the bit about the Bunsen burner, and going like, what? And that’s what writing “After the After” felt like—I turned back around, and all my memories had disappeared.
Christian Yeo Xuan is a writer based in Singapore by way of Paris and Beirut. His work has been published or is forthcoming in ANMLY, Indiana Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Oxford Poetry, and New Singapore Poetries, among others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize and has placed or been a finalist for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award, Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, and the Bridport Prize. A Fall ’25 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, he has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, Tin House, Berlin Writers’ Workshop, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. He holds a BA in Law from Cambridge.
Nafisa Hussain (she/her) holds a BSc in Anthropology and Sociology from Brunel University, where she primarily focused her work on race issues in the UK. She has published book reviews in the Hillingdon Herald Newspaper and volunteers for the Books2Africa charity.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Shelby Hansen. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, August 30th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/poetryxfit.
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!
Shelby Hansen is a creative writer and self-proclaimed fantasy maestro hailing from the northern plains of Texas. She recently graduated from the University of Tennessee’s English program with a focus in Literature and Creative Writing, where she won several awards for her fiction. Her writing often focuses on womanhood, identity, and the reclamation of the self through a speculative lens. This is reflected in her debut novel, which she hopes to publish soon. When she is not writing or teaching today’s youth, she enjoys reading, crocheting, swimming, and spending time with her two cats, Stella and Gemma.
This event is made possible by a generous grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.
When we attempt to reiterate personal experience on the page, we often stick too closely to the facts and forget that the passage of time gives shape to the telling. We create “shape” in many ways, including a unique structure, imagery or sensory repetition, or playing with retrospective parallels. More than that, we forget that personal narrative is also about wonderment, and on the page this can look like an imagined projection of the future: hopes, assumptions, fears, expectations. In other words, the parts of the story that—before this point of arriving at the page—only existed within our hearts and minds.
We’ll use four essay excerpts to study how authors have used retrospection and projection in their work, then we’ll practice those same moves through guided prompts. Students will come away with a new or renewed understanding of specific craft mechanics and new angles to approach their own ideas.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly April Sopkin via Venmo @asopkin
April Sopkin writes fiction and personal essays. She was the 2024-25 writer-in-residence at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, and was awarded a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant to support her in-process short story collection. Her work has appeared in Joyland, MIT Technology Review, Carve, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 Tin House Scholar and has won the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, the Patricia Aakhus Award, and the TSR Nonfiction Prize. She writes Something Out of Nothing, a regular newsletter about seeking meaning in a multifaceted life.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.
This month we had the honor to speak to Brooklyn-based poet and musician Elizabeth Devlin about her poetry collection Milk Spine(Dancing Girl Press & Studio, 2024). Her writing is visceral, rhythmic, sinuous. It’ll prick your palm then crawl inside your ear and get stuck in your head—in a good way! The poems reward multiple reads, and like a great song on a newly discovered playlist, they inspire you to keep hitting play, to keep going back and reveling in the anticipation of that one perfect hook. When everything comes together, the whole thing just clicks! Devlin has that in spades, and it was a treat to get to pick her brain about her process and the intersection of poetry and music.
Ada Wofford: The collection opens with “Milk Fat,” which begins, “For three years, I stopped living, / so I could give life.” This is such a powerful opening. On the one hand, it seems to pit living as something against giving, but one could also see giving as living; that they are two sides of the same coin. Can you speak about how you view the relationship between giving and living and why you chose to open the collection with this observation?
Elizabeth Devlin: “For three years, I stopped living, / so I could give life,” is a reference to the sacrifices one makes when choosing to become a conscientious parent. There is a dissolution of self, and ego, in service of one’s progeny. I agree that giving is an attribute of living; some of the most rewarding things I have done in my life came from positioning myself in a role of service. But what that line specifically refers to is the devotion required of parenthood; there is little freedom, autonomy or sense of self, once one chooses to be a good parent, especially at the beginning. Parenting a newborn is challenging but is also an exhilarating and powerful act of service, selflessness and love.
AW: In “Up/Pick Me,” you work in a call and response pattern that depicts what a woman is or needs versus what she gets, how she is perceived, “I am in need of religion/It must be a sin to look that fine.” The writer Anne Lamott once quoted a friend of hers as saying, “You’re not a body having a spiritual experience, you’re a spirit having a body experience.” On the surface, the poem is about sexism, but that sexism is rooted in the denial of the spirit (or inner self) via seeing the body as an object. Can you speak about this idea of spirit or inner self versus the corporeal, and how poetry might function as a conduit between the two?
ED: Most days, I feel like a moderately evolved ball of nerves, bouncing from one sensation to the next, hiccupping through a series of physiological and chaotic responses to internal and external stimuli. My poetry lives, and finds color and smell, in the awareness of my corporeal self. Whether I am appreciating my body or not; I have never been able to dissever the two. I do not believe I have a “soul,” nor do I subscribe to any religiosity that purports humans possess an essence separate from the body that is exclusive to us or other sentient beings, or the byproduct of being the chosen progeny of an all knowing, omnipresent being god/goddess. I do not believe there is another plane on which people exist after they die, where individuals will be divvied out their punishments or prizes. I believe that this life is it.
So, when you ask me to speak about this idea of spirit or inner self versus the corporeal, and how poetry might function as a conduit between the two, I am at a loss. We are made of stars, and no energy is created or destroyed. Considering this, I could not separate my corporal form from a literal or metaphorical idea of soul. They are interlinked bedfellows. This all said, I do feel there are things we have yet to understand, or define, and I identify these things as metaphysical, and some may consider that an indication of “spirit/soul.” I love the idea of having a soul because it allows me to contemplate fanciful things and exist in the realm of woo.
AW: You write with a lot of rhythm and rhyme (I didn’t realize until I finished the book and read your bio that you are also a musician), “relative to the / rickety-racket, / bury-that-hatchet,” and in another, “but I love you like a sister / or a brother, / from another mother, / with your free, Whitehall condoms, / cell-phone-bling, pawn-that-ring brokers / and the elevated rittle-rattle.” This produces musicality in the poems that I find quite refreshing. Can you speak about these elements and what they mean to you as a poet?
ED: Humor and play are very important to me, in life, and in poetry. I am so pleased that you received these lines in this way; thank you for sharing your reflections. The musicality of the world is undeniable. I hear melodic voices in all things; poetry is just another instrument, or vehicle, through which we may construct songs. Alliteration, onomatopoeia, the flow, verbiage and syntax, and how beats and syllables flow from the mouth when read aloud, this is where the fun lies. Whenever I write, I am always reading out loud, to hear that rhythm and ensure its presence.
AW: To build on this (and if you’ve already answered this, then just ignore), written poetry is inherently a visible medium while music is not. How do you think of poetry as something visual and what can the page accomplish that sound can’t?
ED: Sound is visual to me, in that, it induces literal visual responses, which can cast my sight in shades of color and feeling. I do not have chromesthesia, but sound does change my sight and the way I perceive shape and color, so, in this way, when I hear poetry read aloud, particularly lyrical poetry, the sound does have a visual effect. I put great consideration into how words appear on the page, as well; format and line breaks, and the play that can exist within, allow poetry to have visual impact outside of the sound. Both things are important.
AW: I’m very curious about the title of the collection, it conjures in my mind a spine molded out of curdled milk, seemingly solid but viscous the moment you touch it. Can you speak about your inspiration and why you chose the title Milk Spine?
ED: I love this; “it conjures in my mind a spine molded out of curdled milk” is right on point. Milk Spine was a reference to being a milk producing mammal and how my life was ruled by the hunger of my child’s need to suckle. It’s also a playful way of referring to the spine of a book. The book’s spine and the spine of the body, give structure, definition, support, and much of what is spoken about in this manuscript, is about the corporeal body, organs, spine, blood, fat, so the title was a reference to that, as well. Breastfeeding is such an animalistic, ecstatic and sensual ritual. It bonds mother to child in a parasitic way that is emphatically welcomed by both participants. There are some mutual benefits to breast feeding but, at times, I also felt I was submitting fully to this being I had created. The poem “Letdown” addresses the complexity of this relationship in detail. I have never felt so simultaneously powerful and helpless, as when I was breastfeeding. The mammary imagery does include images of curdling, and I hope that the narrative of a failed relationship is illustrated by that. The milk, and the romantic love, outside of the mother/baby relationship, is sweet and fatty and life giving, until it is not.
AW: The concept of religion and spirituality appear throughout the collection, though sometimes in contradictory ways; in “Flushing Ave,” you write, “if there was still religion / lifting these two boot souls to God, / But there isn’t.” Later in the collection, you have a poem titled, “Church of the Orishas: A mother’s prayers: after Psalm 143:1” in which you write, “OH GODDESS, hear my prayer, / Give ear unto my supplications, / In Thy faithfulness answer me—in Thy righteousness.” I’m going to leave this as broad as I can because I know this is such a complex topic to discuss, but if you’re comfortable, can you talk about what religion and/or spirituality means to you as a poet? And if you’d like to speak about the specific poems I quoted, please do.
ED: I was raised in strict, patriarchal religiosity; it was the source of a great deal of confusion and oppression in my childhood and catharsis in my adult life. Harkening back to your previous question about spirit, while I do not subscribe to a particular faith or religion, and do emphatically believe that what we have in this life is what we get, and nothing more, I do think there are undefined components of our existence which elude us, and so we refer to these things as magic and/or spirituality. Within this abstract understanding of the word spirituality, as a metaphysical human contemplation, I do feel greatly influenced by that which I feel, and believe I am acting within, but for which I do not have a name or defined understanding. It all feels intuitive, as life, and language, and song, and verse, feel intuitive. I enjoy playing with the idea, that, if there is a god, she is woman, and in direct opposition to that which confined me in my upbringing. Since nature, evolution, reproduction and life, feel inherently feminine to me, when giving a voice, description and narrative to an omniscient being, I want her to be female identifying. In “Church of the Orishas: A mother’s prayer,” I chose to juxtapose these narratives. Yemaya is a goddess in, and with whom, I can identify and have faith in. She is relatable and invokes faith in me; utilizing her to relay my personal narrative as a young mother, allows space for womanhood, and a sense of peace and strength, that was not present, or considered, in the religion of my childhood.
AW: In “Letting Go is Hard,” you write, “I’m not a person / but a place, a thing.” Is this echoing the type of objectification discussed in “Up/Pick Me” or is this touching on a different form of dehumanization/alienation? And if so, in what way?
ED: Yes, this is certainly echoing the same type of objectification that we discussed in “Pick Me Up.” When I wrote these poems, I was joyfully and painfully aware of how my physical body both elevated and inhibited my experiences. I appreciate you picking up on this and connecting these contradictions. Many of the poems in MS are struggling with this same contemplation and trying to make sense of the narrator’s personhood and concept of self.
AW: You have such a knack for association that it makes not quoting you at length difficult but there’s a great section in “As Things Developed She Was to Have All Manner of Revelation” that I’d love to ask you about. “Leaning on an enlightened pillar / of debt and obligation, / there is no catharsis / in communism, / or Christ in capitalism, / just a solo communion, / Yeezus and / I AM GOD (DESS).” There is so, so much happening in such a small space. I took it to be an exploration (or fever dream) of spiritual hunger; one goes to higher education (“enlightened pillar”) to expand their horizons, only to be fed a bunch of corporate speak and rubrics, spit into a society that cares only about the material, and with celebrities as the only thing resembling something like a divine figure for us to worship. Can you speak about this poem and is this interpretation anything like what you were going for?
ED: Oh my god, what you wrote here is so on point and beautiful and full of understanding. Thank you so very much for giving my work such generous and insightful consideration. I appreciate you and yes, yes, yes to everything you said; I have nothing to add.
AW: And to follow up, can you speak about your use of association in your poems, making one line suddenly change meaning by its context with the next line and what you enjoy about this close-knit style of writing?
ED: Are you referring to enjambment and the line breaks?
AW: Yes, I am.
ED: I have a close friend, Barbara Schwartz, with whom I have been in a poetry writing group for over eleven years now, and she is the queen of enjambment! She has taught me the power and playfulness of leaning into this poetry mechanism, to keep the reader on their toes! It is part of my poetic playfulness. When the question, the conflict, the contemplation, the meaning, the understanding can change abruptly, from one line to the next, that is exciting!
AW: And lastly, is there anything else you’d like to talk about? Any new projects, albums, collections?
ED: I currently have a full-length MS that I am sending out to publishers. I have also been sitting on a full-length, recorded and mastered, album that I am going to release in the future. My personal life has presented some extreme challenges in the last year that have left my professional life in shambles. So, there are many things cooking but, without trying to sound trite, I really have no idea what the future holds, currently.
Elizabeth Devlin is a visual artist, poet, singer and multi-instrumentalist. Her debut poetry chapbook, Milk Spine, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2025. Her art and poetry have appeared in Cobramilk Issue 2, The Opiate, Bomb Magazine, We the Tender Hearted and elsewhere. Elizabeth is a three time recipient of the Writers Residency, at Firefly Farms, through Sundress Academy, Knoxville, TN. Between 2017-2021, she was the curator and Founding Director of Bessie’s Brooklyn, a private art salon, which hosted numerous art, music, and literary events including: The Highwaymen NYC, pRose By Any Other, The POETrap and Token Folk Acoustic
Devlin has toured internationally for close to two decades. An autoharpist/singer-songwriter with avant-garde-folk sensibilities, she defies traditional song structures, weaving small worlds where magic and fantasies collide. Elizabeth’s third full-length album, Orchid Mantis (2017), received 4.5/5 from Impose Magazine and was the follow-up to the previously released albums: For Whom the Angels Named (2011), Ladybug (2011) and All Are Relative (2009). In Fall 2021, Devlin released her fourth album, Conscientious Objector (What A Mess! Records, FR). Devlin continues to tour and will release her fifth full-length album, My Father’s Country, in 2026. Elizabeth can be found in Brooklyn, living with her large family, loving on a ridiculously hairy dog, gardening and sipping a Thai iced Bubble tea, or, at elizabethdevlinmusic.com.
Ada Wofford (they/them) holds MAs in both English and Library Studies. In addition to working at a rare book shop, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, the editor of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in The Blue Nib, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Autostraddle, Capable Magazine, Sundress Reads, and more. Their chapbook, I Remember Learning How to Dive, was published in 2020, part of which earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination.
I once had so many questions about this world. Why do mountains and rivers move? Why do the stars in the sky blink their eyes? Why did my mother weep before me? And in the universe beyond our universe, is there another me? To me, this world was like a giant question mark breaking forth from nothing, filling me with wonder and with dread. I longed to know, to understand, to grasp how exactly I had become myself, and what it was that built the bridge between me and this world. The first answer I found, the first definite exclamation mark within all those question marks, was reading. From Fabre’s Book of Insects I learned about nature; from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, about life; and from Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions, I learned how to understand myself. For the child I was, reading was like a prism: the sunlight I couldn’t comprehend, the light that had once stung my eyes, needed only to pass through it to become a rainbow — one I could see without waiting for the rain, a rainbow for me to take apart and to understand. I grew up nourished by reading.
In high school, my questions about the world turned into countless reflections. During those years, I struggled with mental illness, and the world I had spent so long learning to understand collapsed before my eyes in the wake of trauma. It was then that I encountered Lin Yi-han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise. Imitating the book’s protagonist, I found my own way of taking sorrow apart: writing it down. I wrote down the egrets by the lake, the fantasies that came between sleeping and waking, the inspiration that burst up from my reading; I broke myself apart into words, one by one, and gave myself over to words. I am grateful to my high school literature teacher, who, after reading my work, helped submit it to a magazine, where it was published. For me — disheartened as I had become — it was a chance to feel, once again, connected to this cold world.
For university, I moved from Asia to North America, and once again the world refreshed itself before my eyes. One culture shock after another led me to reexamine my identity and my position in the world. But unlike before, I now had words; it was the key to the world that was mine alone. I studied cultural and literary Studies, first at McGill University and then at the University of Alberta, pursuing a great deal of interdisciplinary literary research. During my undergraduate years, I also returned to China for a three-month internship as an editorial assistant. This time, it was no longer literature fishing me out from the long river of life; instead, it was I who went fishing for words in the vast, boundless sea of everyone’s inspiration, and assembling them so that the world could see.
All of these experiences have brought me here, to become an editorial intern at Sundress Publications. I want to see words ever more clearly and to embrace them; to embrace reading and writing, to embrace everyone who, like me or unlike me, has used words to search for a rainbow of their own. I would like to let the keys that different people have forged shine with their own light, so that they might open this world to ever more possibilities.
Ziyi Zhong (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA from McGill University and an MA from the University of Alberta, both in East Asian Studies. With a background spanning Asia and Canada, she is interested in identity, belonging, and the ways literature helps us understand ourselves and one another. For her, reading and writing have long been tools of inquiry and repair, turning difficult experience into meaning, and of connecting with others who are searching, in words, for a light of their own.
Swetha Amit’s short story collection, Sailing Paper Boats & Other Stories (Alien Buddha Press, 2025), is an earnest, poignant collage of stories that explore both the fragility and resilience of human relationships and the natural world in the wake of disaster. Over the course of nine short stories, Amit beautifully captures the fear, loss, longing, and cautious hope one navigates as their notions of home, family, and belonging begin to transform.
Amit grounds readers in the environment of each story through her unvarnished, simple prose and deeply honest tone. Like reading through an old personal diary that you stumbled upon at the thrift store, or a sociologist’s field notes chronicling the lives of the humans they observe, Amit presents the characters as everyday people with their own memories, perspectives, and responses to the changes unfolding around them.
Using a first-person stream-of-consciousness narration, she lays bare the unpleasant and, sometimes, precarious realities of life that happen without warning. She explores issues such as climate-induced displacement, the material and emotional toll of natural disasters on local communities, and the illness and loss of loved ones.
This is brilliantly portrayed in the one-paragraph story, “The Nest”, where the speaker contends with the trauma of losing their house in a forest fire. When the speaker comes across a quail’s nest teeming with new life, they recall: “As the sky turns orange, I feel a pulsating rush of fear in my veins. I look at the tiny home of twigs in front of me. It reminds me of my old home wiped out by the fumes of orange and hues of smoke” (35). For the speaker, even the orange setting sun triggers their memories of the fire and of a home that no longer exists. The shocking abruptness of the flashback, heightened by the contrast between a fragile bird’s nest and a home burned to ashes, illustrates how severely the speaker has been affected by the catastrophe. Amit’s intimate portrayal invites readers to engage with these experiences.
Weather and natural disasters are a constant motif throughout the collection. As I read, I was fascinated by how the climate-related imagery in the stories seemed to reflect the internal landscapes of the characters as they face upheavals in their lives and relationships. See how, in “The Floor Beneath My Feet”, the speaker and her husband grapple with marital tension and infidelity between them when an earthquake hits their home: “The wooden floor beneath us is threatening to crumble at any moment… Our wedding photo, taken four years ago, lies on the floor, surrounded by shards of glass” (16).
Similarly, in “The Wrecked Wharf”, the storm surge crashing through the Capitola Beach wharf mirrors the speaker’s mental state after the sudden passing of his fiancée: “A few days later, a wall of water split the wharf in two….Around that time, you received news about your stage four lung cancer diagnosis. The devastating news shattered my heart and mind” (40). By drawing parallels between the destructive force of natural disasters and the characters’ mental states, Amit emphasizes the emotional weight of coping with relationships that have been permanently altered, allowing the reader to better understand the uncertainty, inner displacement, and other complex feelings that arise during the mourning process. This helps immerse the reader in the narrative, making its most heart-wrenching moments linger beyond the page.
At its core, however, Sailing Paper Boats is a short story collection centered around the theme of resilience. This is most clearly seen in “Sailing Paper Boats”, where the child protagonist, Krishna, and his family are suddenly uprooted from their seaside village due to flooding. As the rising waters submerge his home, instead of falling into despair, he turns to his faith, reminding himself that “Ma always emphasized how true faith in the almighty keeps us afloat” (13). In several stories across the collection, Amit explores how faith and spirituality are powerful resources for overcoming obstacles. Prayer becomes a way for Krishna to maintain his agency and hope, even when confronted with situations beyond his control. Later on, when Krishna’s village is forced to evacuate, he notices that the flimsy paper boat he made is still holding its ground against the flood:
“I took a deep breath. Maybe we’d soon see Pa…. He might find a better job…. The government may give us better homes. Ma and Pa may stop their quarrels. Like the boat, we could also sail smoothly on these rough waters. The storm will eventually subside with time, and sunny days will smile upon us again…” (15)
To Krishna, the miraculously intact paper boat is a symbol of survival. Through these comforting lines and visual imagery of the warm, gentle sun returning in the end, Amit reminds us how we, too, have the strength to recover from catastrophes and drastic life changes.
In Sailing Paper Boats & Other Stories, Amit skillfully turns personal memories of natural disasters into narratives that connect with all readers. I could understand the characters’ unspoken fears and frustrations and see myself in the struggles they encountered, from avoidant arguments with parents, like in “Sands of Time”, to the longing for a time before, when a loved one was still alive, or when life felt more stable, when you were stronger. But much like how nature is resilient, humans are incredibly resilient as well. Reading this collection taught me a valuable lesson: “Paper boats may be fragile, but they sail on”.
Tara Rahman (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA in English Language and Literature from Smith College and an MSc in Global Development from SOAS, University of London. She is also a recent graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course in Oxford, UK. With a strong interest in culture, identity, and global history, her personal writing often focuses on intersectionality and the untold stories and experiences of marginalized communities.
Upon the release of their debut poetry collection Bloodroom, author Kay E. Bancroft spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Ruoyu Wang on the form and visual structure choices in their collection, the complex ideas around lineage and breaking cyclical trauma, and the significance of naming.
Ruoyu Wang: Can you speak to the way “m___r” is represented on the page and its significance to the collection?
Kay E. Bancroft: This term recurs a lot in the collection, and I ultimately decided to redact the middle of it and follow this visual structure for two reasons: 1. I wanted readers to “fill-in-the blank” for themselves, to give them the agency to insert a term that feels correct to the situation of the speaker or of themself as the reader. One intended word here is “mother,” one of the main relationships and traumas explored in the collection, but as I wrote I also realized that “monster” and a slew of other terms could fit within this structure. 2. I didn’t want to give a full title to subjects in the collection that don’t feel entirely there, that have a level of absence.
RW: How do ideas around knowledge, identification, and naming develop as you grow into yourself?
KEB: Growing into yourself is such a difficult and delicate process in life, and I’m not sure we entirely ever finish doing it. We’re constantly growing and evolving, learning more and retaining the knowledge of complex and beautiful situations. With more life experience comes the ability to identify and name not only things about yourself, but also to notice and name the roles of others around you and the relationships you hold with one another.
RW: In pieces like “white Blooded” and “Google Search Keywords for Sensitivity,” how does your use of form and punctuation inform the poem’s content, or vice versa?
KEB: These poems both have unique origins but ended up living in similar formal universes because they both needed the same thing: an untethering from something.
When writing “Google Search Keywords for Sensitivity” I was reading Camonghne Felix’s collection Build Yourself a Boat, and was thinking a lot about vulnerability, queerness, and understanding the meaning of being parentified at a young age, so when I saw this form, it felt like kismet. The technical elements of a Google search provided a structure to ask a lot of questions, to pause, to create space and breath within the poem as it would look in the mechanics of a search engine. It also allowed the speaker a bit of distance in these urgent inquiries, these seekings for a name.
“white Blooded” was the reverse—the content came first, and as the speaker is moving through the reckoning of cutting familial ties and creating something new, there was a need for division. Not only was the verbiage dense on the page but it was dense to digest, and I realized the speaker required physical space to move through this heavy processing. The pronouns needed to be separated to visibly cut the speaker from their biological connections, to find what they needed.
RW: Interspersed throughout the collection is a series of “[lexicon] defined” poems. How do they connect to each other?
KEB: Each of these poems is an erasure of a dictionary listing for terms that feel inherently connected to the ideas of familial relationships and complex parent/child relationships, specifically debt, heritage, legacy, obligation, and privilege.
RW: Can you speak to the recurring images of not only body parts such as hands and skin, but also messier parts, such as entrails in “Derivation” and splayed muscle in “LBD”?
KEB: There’s such tenderness and intimacy that arises with images of hands and skin – holding hands, intertwining fingers, soft caresses, bruising hair off a cheek. Not only are they physically soft and delicate, they’re also often used as symbols of vulnerability and femininity, which are frequently poked at throughout the collection. I see them pushing the question are they symbolizing softness or strength? which lends itself to the horror element of the book. In “Derivation” specifically, hands and entrails are paired as a gruesome duo, and I see this as a moment where two kinds of softness in the body intersect in a more visceral way.
RW: How do your poems work to navigate the present in regard to the past?
KEB: The poems in Bloodroom explore a searching, a reflection, and a questioning that is uniquely identified by the context of the events, relationships, family history, etc. that occurred before the collection begins, with the speaker hoping to answer “how do these traumas, these monikers, these relationships define me and how can I break the cycle.” They look back to see what’s transpired to inform the speaker’s future, the next steps they can take to name that which feels unnamable at the beginning.
RW: Tell me about the questions of lineage and inheritance that are in this collection.
KEB: As people we’re all trying to figure out how what’s come before us has affected us, and how we might affect others as we move through the world. The speaker of these poems is trying to decipher their own lineage and understand how trauma has carried through generations, what they’ve inherited from their ancestors, and how they can break certain cycles of behavior to protect not only themself, but future generations potentially perpetuated by them and their chosen family.
RW: In “Burning Haibun for a Half-Life,” you write, “I came up emptier than I began.” How does this idea of fullness versus emptiness develop as you age?
KEB: I’m not entirely sure if it’s a development as we age, but maybe more of an understanding as we move through different seasons and situations in life. There are certain times where we seek answers and despite gaining information, things make less sense, and we are forced to radically accept what just is. It’s a moment where we have to embrace where we are in the current moment. There are others where we get to know everything we’re hoping to and have total clarity. Fullness versus emptiness is situational.
RW: Can you speak about the use of photographs and archival material in this collection, and how they punctuate the different sections?
KEB: When I started writing Bloodroom, I was beginning my MFA at Randolph College at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I had borrowed a box of photographs, audio recordings, and letters that were sent between my grandmother and grandfather while he was working overseas. I wanted to start cataloging and digitizing the materials so they didn’t get lost to time, and as I did, I found the military ID application form that ended up becoming a major part of the collection dubbed the ‘Applicant’ series. It felt like such a malleable document, a place to play and work via the prints quite literally left by someone who meant a lot in my own life, an open yet structured page playground. I started experimenting with this particular artifact and it became integral to the collection, serving as a guidepost throughout as the speaker delves into different identifiers, relationships, etc.
The photographs included in the collection are also from my family archive, one of my grandmother, and many of myself as a child. These punctuate the collection less regularly, but still allow for a small window into the different media we use to explore our personal and familial histories.
Kay E. Bancroft (they/them) is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Cincinnati, OH. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College and a BA from the University of Cincinnati. Their writing has been published in Poet Lore, Pleiades Journal, RHINO Poetry, and more. Their debut poetry collection, Bloodroom, (Sundress Publications, 2026), was a finalist for the 2025 Alice James Book Award. You can find them on most social platforms @keb.poet and on their website at kayebancroftpoet.com, experimenting with hybrid visual poetics, facilitating literary workshops and discussions, and obsessing over popular horror films.
Ruoyu Wang (they/them) is a writer from Seattle. Their poems appear in Sine Theta Magazine, COUNTERCLOCK, and The Shore, and have been recognized by YoungArts, The Adroit Journal, and Narrative Magazine, among others. Currently, they serve as the Founding Director of the SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship and study Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. They love linguistics, postcards, live music, and jasmine milk tea.
