The earliest stories I absorbed were variations of Korean folktales and myths from my parents. We don’t have heirlooms or gold, but we do have stories. There’s a story about a prankish frog who always does the opposite of what his mother tells him to do. When the mother frog falls ill, she asks her son to bury her body by the gloomy riverbank, hoping he will do the opposite by burying her by the sunny mountainside instead. But the son listens to her dying wish and buries her by the riverbank. This always made me teary-eyed, and I vowed not to disobey my parents, though I frequently did. There’s another story I remember about someone airing out all their dirty secrets into an empty forest where they think no one will hear, but really the trees are listening and catching the secrets like chlorophyll. I always laugh at the thought of that. But I suppose I’d be fine if all the trees in the world knew my secrets. I trust trees.
I don’t remember the first book I read, or the first story I wrote as a kid. I wish I could attest to some transformative narrative about my journey as a writer, something that sparked in me one day, but the truth is I was always writing. What I do remember is being weirdly competitive during elementary school book log competitions, and going through so much loose-leaf paper that my parents eventually bought me a mini laptop so I could type my stories. I’m drawn to various forms of storytelling, but especially writing that doesn’t take itself too seriously—the kind that’s playful, theatrical, campy, satirical, absurd, nonsensical. I’m propelled by inventive writing that experiments and isn’t afraid to break rules. I love this quote by Ray Bradbury that alludes to imagination and play as generative tools: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
In high school, I came across Jenny Zhang’s “How It Feels,” which felt transformative and eye-opening for a teenage girl and a young poet who was a lot more dramatic and angsty than she would have liked in hindsight. There’s a line by Zhang that has since stuck with me: “Why are some people’s feelings so repellent and others so madly alluring?” It begs the question of why people care to write. Or why people care to express themselves. I think about this across other forms of art too—some songs and films about suicides or breakups or family divorces or growing up are considered earnest and romantic, while others are cringe, tacky, off-putting. I remember being so embarrassed to express myself or attempt anything, but then again, isn’t that how everyone feels about living? To me, language is living. Language is transformative.
One book I’m currently reading is White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link, a collection of short stories that retell classic fairy tales in contemporary and futuristic settings, with lots of spins on pop culture. I remember finding this book in my friend’s dorm about a year ago and flipping through the first story, which features an ostentatious billionaire who sends his sons on a series of goose chases and cats in lab coats who operate a cannabis farm. I thought it was so brilliant; Kelly Link is a writer who performs play well, and her writing is gritty and otherworldly. Other writers who perform play on the page and inspire me are Carmen Maria Machado, K-Ming Chang, Toni Morrison, and Franny Choi. I’m drawn to the funky stuff that reimagines and reinvents worlds. I love stories about mythical creatures, queer desire, ghosts, lineage, strange neighbors, annoying teenagers, bad breakups, altered states of consciousness, transformation, collective memory, and messy embodiments of women and girlhood.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to work alongside bright, compassionate, and inspiring people at Sundress Publications, a nonprofit press that platforms diverse, imaginative, and cutting-edge voices. Send me a DM on Instagram @corinayii if you’d like to talk about writing, swap book recommendations, or just chat!
Corina Yi (she/her) is a student at Pomona College studying English and Creative Writing. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Agave Review, the literary magazine at the Claremont Colleges consortium. She likes collecting postcards, painting, drinking tea, cafe hopping, and going on spontaneous adventures.
This month we had the honor of speaking with Mckendy Fils-Aime about their powerful debut collection sipèstisyon. The collection is an exploration of memory, both personal and cultural. Mckendy’s poems are visceral and immersive, each one plunging you into the deep end whether you’re ready for it or not, but always giving you a moment to return to the surface and breathe; to reflect alongside the poet about the good, the bad, and the unbelievable. These are poems that deserve to be read again and again, and they will reward you each time you do. The collection is available at Yes Yes Books right now; our interview is below.
Ada Wofford: Many of the poems share the same title as the collection and have a superstition serving as the epigram. Can you speak about the superstitions you chose for your epigrams and what they mean to you? Or if that’s too broad, why did you want to share these specific superstitions with readers? I was particularly interested in the first one, “If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory.”
Mckendy Fils-Aime: I started writing superstition poems during a 30/30 in 2017 as an additional challenge to myself. Many of my favorite collections featured a group of poems with a shared naming convention. In the past, I had tried my hand at writing such a series, but failed. The self-imposed challenge in 2017 was another attempt. I picked Haitian superstitions because they felt familiar to me and were a fresh way to explore the topic. I treated the superstitions like open-ended prompts and wrote to the ones I thought were the most interesting to me. When I was putting together sipèstisyon, I picked the superstition poems that were the strongest and complemented the project’s narrative. Like all books, some poems didn’t make the cut. There are a handful of superstition poems that I adore, but left out because they weren’t serving the book.
AW: Building off of that, memory plays a large role in the book. From personal memories, to passed-down memories, to cultural history. The poem “what we sacrificed” plays with the imagery of you and your family around a fire pit, throwing in “the furniture pieces turned javelins / meant for my mother’s skull. / my mother throws in a photo album/of other men…I throw in a wedding ring…I throw in letters / to a future self.” The poem ends, “it’s hard to tell when a flame is working / what is memory & what is kindling.” Can you speak about this idea of memory being both a solace and a burden, something that can soothe but also burn?
MF: Memories can be places of refuge or great sites of pain depending on your point of view, who you’re asking, or even when you’re asking. There are moments in sipèstisyon where the speaker and addressees have different perspectives on traumatic experiences, and that results in conflict. Our brains can be untrustworthy record-keepers, but they’re also our first confidants. Sometimes they’re all we’ve got. In sipèstisyon, there’s an impulse to forget, and with good reason, but that’s not conducive to healing. That also risks throwing away the small joys that can exist alongside terrible periods. Thankfully, the speaker understands this by the end of the book.
AW: In the poem “on superstitions,” you write about a pastor calling “superstitions the devil’s / proverbs.” I take from this the concept of fear. That superstitions are meant to invoke a sense of fear, but culturally they can be fragments of wisdom as well; small phrases or stories to remind us to keep our wits about us (e.g., don’t walk under a ladder). You touch on this in your interview with Shō Poetry Journal, saying, “I didn’t write the superstition poems out of fear or the need for control, but an interest in exploring these sayings that I grew up hearing.” May I ask you to build on that a bit and speak about the role you see superstitions playing in our daily lives, either positive or negative, either as a source of fear or of wisdom? Do they play a role in your life today?
MF: Regardless of their nature, I think all superstitions are a type of cultural artifact. Even the silliest ones have a history attached to them. Superstitions are just another attempt at preserving the beliefs and stories of the past. Are they a form of magical thinking? Sure. Are they an attempt at control? Sure. They’re also proof of what we can carry through time with just our voices and language. The superstitions in sipèstisyon are cultural signifiers and points of nostalgia. They remind me of my youth and act as markers of identity. I love when other Haitians and Caribbeans come up to me after I read a superstition poem and say “Oh yeah, I remember hearing that as a kid” or “Have you heard this one?” Those moments mean a lot to me.
AW: The imagery of a car crash is repeated throughout the collection; you write about nearly getting hit by a car as a kid, and in “the first accident” you write about a car accident from the point of view of a passenger. Can you speak about the significance of this imagery and the theme of experiencing a “near miss” in this collection? And do these near misses relate to the concept of superstitions in any way?
MF: sipèstisyon is about the aftermath of surviving harm. Sometimes harm comes from a visible source like a vehicle or physical violence, and sometimes it’s systemic, which can be invisible. One of the final poems in sipèstisyon is called “ode to the gris-gris bag,” and it explores the moments in my life where I’ve narrowly escaped death. The poem references an ancestral force that is looking out for me. I think often about survival and the unseen, about the unobserved forces, whether spiritual or manmade, that help us stay on earth a little while longer. Maybe superstitions are an attempt at rescue before we even encounter the “near miss.”
AW: In the opening poem you compare memory to a museum, later you ask if “naming is a culture’s way of colonizing a body,” and in another you write, “solitude is a kind of death when a home / is remade into a mausoleum.” All of these images relate to the concepts of intention and context. This is something the art world has been dealing with since Duchamp placed a urinal in a gallery (and probably long before that, but he’s the most famous example); the idea that how one frames something (or someone, for that matter) dictates how the rest of us are supposed to see it/understand it (i.e., it’s art if it’s in a gallery, or in terms of museums: “it’s not grave robbing if you’re an archeologist”). In your poem, what was once a home is now remade into a mausoleum through its context, through how it relates to how that space is being inhabited. How do these concepts (intention and recontextualization) play into your collection’s other themes of identity and selfhood?
MF: Early in my writing journey, I discovered the world of poetry slam and spoken word. I learned and still learn so many things from that space. One of my first lessons was the importance of framing. In slam, how an idea is presented to an audience can be the difference between whether or not a poem succeeds. Framing applies to so many other mediums, whether we’re talking about writing, other forms of oration, or visual art. Even in therapy, when we reframe, we’re altering our perspective of an event or experience in hopes of uncovering some insight to better heal. I couldn’t write about trauma, relationship, selfhood, and identity by looking at events from the same angle. I see each reframe as a new chapter in the narrative of sipèstisyon. To reach the collection’s conclusion and the speaker’s views of himself, I had to change my vantage point, and that required intentionality.
AW: From dissecting the Pokémon movie to musing on WrestleMania, the book explores not just nostalgia, but specifically millennial nostalgia; can you speak about the significance of incorporating your nostalgia for pop culture and how these pop, one might even say “lowbrow” (though of course I’m not saying it!) influences like Pokémon and Wrestling can function within a form like poetry?
MF: In sipèstisyon, the poems that reference pop culture help situate the book in time. I wrote them because I wanted to reflect on past experiences as an adult. But equally as important, I wrote them because I’m a big nerd. I’m a millennial, so Pokémon and WWF are key parts of my childhood. To this day, I’m still a huge fan of anime and video games. Leaning into pop culture and nostalgia is one of the ways I have fun with my writing and share my personality and interests with the audience. It’s an additional connection point between me and the reader. Poets can be so serious, myself included, and I think writing about nostalgia or our current nerdy/niche interests can be healthy and balancing. I also want to say that the exciting thing about writing and reading poems is that they can be inspired by so many different things. I’ve read poems in the shape of nutrition labels that are dope. As long as they’re not offensive and executed well, I’m here for the pop culture poems.
AW: What are you looking forward to as a writer-in-residence at Sundress?
MF: I’m really looking forward to the dedicated time to write. Life is pretty busy right now, so I know I’ll appreciate the change of scenery. I have a few projects that I’m working on that I really want to focus on during that week. I’m also interested in seeing how being on a farm will influence my poems.
AW: And lastly, is there anything I didn’t touch on that you would like to talk about? Any new projects we should look out for?
MF: I’m working on a few different manuscripts right now, but nothing is close to completion. I’ve been working on my second poetry manuscript, a collection of poems about a shapeshifter in Haitian folklore called a lougawou. I’m also in the early stages of a chapbook that explores identity and labor. I’m hoping to have a working draft of the former by the spring.
Mckendy Fils-Aimé is a New England-based Haitian American poet, organizer, and teaching artist. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, CantoMundo, and Periplus. His debut poetry collection, sipèstisyon, was published by YesYes Books in 2026.
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.
Forty Bouts in the Wilderness (MoonPath Press, 2025) by Katy E Ellis is a poetic memoir that plays with the multiple meanings of “bouts” and “wilderness.” It’s about becoming homeless due to one’s spiritual beliefs and finding one’s place when family becomes equivalent to alienation. The book is split into three major parts, giving readers multiple reflections on what family can mean for the family outcast and how powerful grief can lead to reinvention, and a new acceptance.
The first part is forty tercets describing the speaker’s family unexpectedly “calling her from the dust” for her father’s emergency hospitalization in the ICU. Every day is “like the first day of kindergarten” to her, being surrounded by siblings who act as if they never shunned her for years. Visually, the tercets stand upright with immediate tension, as if bringing us into the claustrophobic medical setting with her.
In footnotes, Ellis provides context to the unmooring disassociation she feels with her attendance, including anecdotes of how she questioned her family’s Christianity and its purpose, leading to her religious rejection and isolation from her family. As she binds these episodes with stunning metaphors of nature and fantasy, the imagery brings to the fore beautiful, unsettling grief. One of my favorite sets of lines concludes “Bouts 19~21”’s ninth footnote; during a period of personal distress, “[her] mother and sisters stood in a nearby pasture, bleating mournfully across the strong budding vines of pink-red climbing roses that enveloped the low, fieldstone wall I’d built between us.”
We are with her as she untangles the complexity of her memories with the urgent reality of her father’s comatose state, followed by his faltering health and memory whenever he wakes from his “grisly hibernation.” Her father is the parent who she found the most comfort in before and during her ostracization, and she openly laments his fractured mind:
“What if my father opens his eyes, sees
me as stranger among his children’s ranks?
Brother-sister tides push me out to sea.
A child lost, found, or—? His face a blank.
I fear I won’t survive another sleep
and wade the shadows where forget flows deep.”
Within the footnotes, Ellis also weaves in her family’s history of miscarriages. Another unwanted loss of family that was shared but then hushed, parallel to her experiences as the black sheep. The speaker miscarries twice, a daughter and a son, and her pain for the loss haunts her throughout the chapbook. Miscarriages are brushed aside by her family, and, again, she is comfortable not conforming to their mentality of rarely mourning the dead children. She practices private rituals for hers. In the seventeenth footnote for “Bouts 28~30,” the moon guides her soul to “the pearl’s blue center, where a child resides,” her love for her lost son embraced, kept precious and eternal.
Part two, “Pilgrim’s Pace,” recalls the speaker’s globe-trotting with her husband to cities of divine respite through Europe and Asia. It is done to help validate herself and to heal from her painful miscarriages. Her free-flowing journey of spiritual exploration and healing contrasts with memories of her stricter Christian upbringing, and her quiet disappointments with her family’s stagnant and willful dismissal of her life-changing experiences. In “Dear Istanbul,” Ellis writes:
“Yesterday, my grandparents offered me weak coffee, cookies and Bible verses… They forgot they found my presence more harrowing than my absence, that my voice no longer harmonizes with the plodding organ pipes that pound Easter hymn-notes like wooden stakes into my heart of doubts.”
What’s powerful about this part to me is that the speaker wrestles with the idea of forgiveness. Forgiveness to whom? For what? Her younger mind once thought she was the one who needed her family’s forgiveness. But through her travels, she gradually witnesses other practices for letting go, for worship, for death, and she reconsiders. In the cityscape of Fatima (“Worthy of Belief”), she makes peace with her wounded spirit, realizing that grace can shape into many forms “like a time-lapse film of a seed come to light / when spirals burst open and sunflowers appear. / She knows my prayers before I do.” It’s a heartwarming section of self-acceptance that feels poignant after her somber childhood recollections.
It is during her travels in part two that she mentions she and her husband had been trying for a child again, and she rejoices in finding a new sense of home in part three, “[Re]turnings.” After she and her husband’s globe-trotting and healing, a period compared to floating in space, they return to North America. First, for mourning, due to her beloved uncle’s passing, her father’s decline, and her lost son.
And she celebrates her five-year-old daughter throughout the grief. Whether it has been her daughter’s playful obsession with gemstones or her careful nursing of a hurt robin, she has been an innocent joy in the speaker’s life, her motherhood helping her “earth into place.” To her daughter (“When You Grow Up and Read This”), she fondly writes:
Feel your breath lift green glass beads faceted amethyst each ring of silver on the long chain where I hung a lighthouse, a Tahitian pearl or a compass— each morning choosing a talisman more than lucky enough.
Forty Bouts in the Wilderness has stayed with me long after reading. Ellis’ touching wordplay for truly belonging makes this book unforgettable to me.
Heather Takenaga is a poet and writer born and raised in Riverside, CA. She is currently writing short stories and poetry. When she is not volunteering, she is drooling for cat cuddles, moonlit walks, and a reading vacation.
In sipèstisyon (YesYes Books, 2026), Mckendy Fils-Aimé’s debut poetry collection, language is lacerated by the breath of memory. Titled sipèstisyon, the Kreyol word for superstition, the collection speaks through and against the smothering regime of English by assembling a sonic Kreyol terrain. The oral form of superstitions is invoked to elevate the acoustics of resistance and revival. Truth-telling, herein, does not merely vibrate the ache of trauma and violence but appears as an affective experience suspending us within the temporal orientation Fils-Aimé’s speaker migrates us toward. Vanishing lines are brought closer and vocabularies overflow.
Though memory is often attributed to interiority and the past, Fils-Aimé writes it as a lived condition, as history. It is the marrow from which all contemplations, anguish, and wounds surface and coincide. The first poem, “sipèstisyon” comes to warn us of the fragility of memory: “If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory” (6) all the while it is made into an entity, an object of interest that can be plundered, with the speaker asking, “if memory is a museum // what happens if it’s ransacked?” (6). It is here where Fils-Aimé’s collection dilates: in the collapse of memory’s infrastructure. We are thrust into the nonlinearity of remembering—its illegibility, obscurity, and entropic tendencies. How, then, must we speak of ruin after it has happened? How do we absorb the shame, not so much as an exercise of erasure, but of personal absolvement? The speaker answers within a position he has occupied, in the register of the interstitial aftermath.
“mwen pa pale kreyòl” (which translates to “I don’t speak Creole”) agitates his own shame of linguistic in-betweenness when, in telling a story in Kreyòl to someone, the speaker is criticized for the nasally sound he’s making, “laughing at the kreyòl i create / from the cinder blocks & cement // of english” (9). Here, his usage of Kreyòl appears to be awkward, clumsy, with the person listening condemning him that he has made a mockery of their architecture by building it with American machinery (9). The speaker laments this remark and at the same time accentuates the linguistic hybridity he settles between: “owning two skyscrapers // of dialect pressed against the skyline of speech. // i dream of two thin tongues, one in each of my nostrils / & how to sever the one closest to you / at the root” (9). The lexicons of Kreyòl are diluted through the sedimented structure of English, the body of words stiffening in its utterance; and seemingly, at once, the speaker has in front of him a hallway of locked doors with not enough keys to open them (9).
Fils-Aimé vertebrates the somewhat gelatinous nature of memory through language. In the following poem “my father apologizes for giving me a western name,” we are placed at the mouth of the speaker. He wonders if “naming is a culture’s way of colonizing a body, / if my tongue is just another island impaled / by French & American flags” (10). “soup joumou” finds itself in the speaker’s mother’s tongue as well, “shriveling like a snail / in the salt / of my English / i wanted to swim / against the current / of whitewash” (11). What I found striking is how the locus of the mouth is seemingly where Haitian heritage is reinforced as a migrant, reconstituting what it means to institutionalize the very voice they use as something that can both be disciplinal and transgressive. There is this, likewise, an excess and abscess of two languages; and oscillating between them is an embodied but disorienting experience. When the cadence of Kreyòl bleeds into English’s rhythm, the dissonance experienced from being an immigrant becomes less conceptual and more operational. Suddenly, visibility is determined on which is more audible.
Though Fils-Aimé lingers in the tension of what I observe as “unbelonging,” we see in the poem “bilingual” that reconciliation of being fragmented. He writes:
too bad we can’t push the rewind button on a lost language, can’t rewrite an alphabet on the chalk-brushed blackboard of erasure. best we can do is fill in the fissures of our vernacular & smooth out the chipping.
listen, pay your teachers no mind when they say we speak broken French. they’ve never had to reassemble the remnants of their mother tongues after mourning (48).
Here, the speaker reconfigures fracture into fascination—“we open the china drawer / of our mouths, there’s copper / more than anything else” (48). These lines ultimately resonated with me because I understand this continuous, cascading residue that colonialism leaves within a language, this enduring afterlife of language compounded into a container that co-opts it. But Kreyòl is not complicit in becoming a spectacle of the English language. As it fills its own fissures and remedies its own precarities, the isolated fragments, at once, choreograph its autonomy. What Fils-Aimé does here is essentially translating that echo of a lost language into resonance, apprehending the vanishing voice not by strangling it (like what America does to non-English vernaculars), but by suturing it within the already existing polyphony coalescing in the myths, folklores, and superstitions he already understands.
Language gives memory texture, friction, fibrous moments. In “Invocation for the God of Laughter,” language is exhalation, “a boisterous song // from the quiet orchestra of our lungs…. / O language excavated / from the moments when language is lost” (57). This is perhaps one of my favorite poems out of the collection as it nears its closing. I am fond of this idea—of this interstice—where language cannot be flattened into a smooth surface; that there is this disruption in voice: song, laughter, the very act of breathing. Actions that operate on the very basis of sound and community and are therefore non-isolatable. It is from here I find the power in sipèstisyon. Superstition becomes saturated with chortles, guffaws, rapturous ruckus, bellows, wheezes, giggles (57-58), aural elements which cannot be colonized into syllables. Though what they do is splinter and multiply across the sky.
We return to the mouth by the last “sipèstisyon.” At this point, superstition has become almost like an inquiry into the possibility of fruition, of the future, of foundation. It reminded me of Natalie Diaz’s “Postcolonial Love Poem” where her speaker has “learned Drink in a country of drought” because Fils-Aimé’s speaker is a “seedless orchard—a drought in a grove / called potential. but I’m as resilient as a fig, / as defiant as a field of echinacea” (66). Both speaking about the aftermath of colonial violence, there is this fluidity that is bred from trembling at the perimeter of loss and reclamation. Fils-Aimé ends his collection with arms unfurling, “to stuff / fistfuls of sunlight into my mouth. / watch me nourish & be nourishment. / watch me become my own harvest.” (66). It ends in a truth we all know too well: there is resonance that remains after undoing power. Language noises out its own emancipation and immersion. And it breaches syntactic containment, seeping, leaking, and unraveling memory with it.
Zie Madayag (she/her) is a writer and academic from Metro Manila. She is a recent graduate of a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature: European Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She has worked and volunteered at non-profit organizations and cultural institutions promoting artistic and literary production. Both critical and creative, her research interests include corporeality and materiality, spatio-temporal entanglements, ecologies, and the rhizomatic potentiality of the periphery.
I began keeping a journal in the summer of 2022. Fifty three years prior to that event, Joan Didion wrote that “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” Is this true now, when all the world seems no longer a stage, but rather billions of public digital diaries, pulsing and flashing across our collective vision? Does this make all of us “anxious malcontents”? Probably. I like reading other people’s diaries. I am interested in them. I am interested in writing and privacy and publicity; I am interested in knowledge and its dissemination.
In my work, I have argued that the fields of literature and history are inseparable – indeed, that they are one and the same. All history is a work of fiction; all nonfiction works of history. In this way, we understand ourselves.
I read constantly about the past. I read constantly. I understand myself through that material. Mark Kurlansky and Lilian Faderman convinced me to study history when I read their books on my A Train commute to high school. Wandering through Dublin in 2023, I spent hours on park benches reading the works of David Foster Wallace. Crying inconsolably in the woods of Vermont, I finished Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Either/Or. Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends was near biblical to me during my sophomore year of college – I would carry my annotated copy in my bag at all times, turning to a page at random and consulting when needed with my liturgy. The year prior, I had done the same with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ novels on Brown’s quad my senior year was a twisted revelation. Driving across the country, my companion and I took turns reading aloud from Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, which I finished alone on the floor of a motel bathroom. This is not a reading list so much as an autobiography.
In the college library, I taped photos of my favorite historians to the wall above my desk. I dressed as historian Hayden White for a costume party. It seems, at times, I am incapable of undergoing a conversation without invoking my personal pantheon of feminist scholars: Andrea Dworkin, Amia Srinivasan, Andrea Long Chu, Silvia Federici. Their intellect sparks against me. I simmer in pretension. My friends laugh at the way I speak through a web of references, often inscrutably so. I write notes on what I read in my journal, beside pasted-in receipts and postcards. I draw pictures of Mo from Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For to keep the ephemera company, speech bubbles with snarky commentary hanging from her mouth. I draw, write, collage, and the forms and media blend and blur.
I like it, my diary. I like to read history and fiction and poetry, which is to say, other people’s diaries. I like works which are expansive, experimental, interdisciplinary, multimedia. I am excited to read your work, so you should let me read it. I am a good reader – I pride myself on it. I am in search of something, as are all of us who read (perhaps there’s a joke about Proust to be made here, but I’ll leave it to the experts). I am inexpert and excited. I am happy to be here. I am balancing a book on my head.
Lia Ortner (she/her) earned her BA in History and Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2025, with her thesis on Medieval literature being granted the John A. Thomas Memorial Award. For the past year, she has been in Athens, Greece on a fellowship with the American College of Greece. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Lia is an educator, historian, killjoy feminist, amateur semiologist, and collage enthusiast. She enjoys drinking coffee in bed.
Following the release of Kimberly Ann Priest’s full-length poetry collection, Floralia, Tara Rahman spoke with Priest about the collection’s botanical language, hybrid forms, and haunting representations of trauma, survival, and embodiment. Here, they discussed the use of flowers as both medicinal and poisonous symbols, the fragmented formal structures through which grief and dissociation are articulated, and the collection’s intersectional attention to gender-based violence, media spectacle, power, and the difficult work of healing.
Tara Rahman: What is the significance of the recurring botanical terminology (i.e., plant classifications or taxonomy) and rare or toxic flowers in Floralia, such as the poppy and impatiens psittacina (parrot flower)?
Kimberly Ann Priest: Spending time in nature has always been, for me, a balm. I go to nature for refuge. I bring it into my living spaces for solace. I love to have flowers in my home. But nature, in all its expressions, is not a simple metaphor for beauty and good. Nature is fierce, dangerous, and poisonous, while also being tender, vibrant, and medicinal. The flowers in Floralia expose their many personalities. The opium poppy, for instance, “can be dried and used for decorations, boiled in water to produce a bitter tea, or crushed to make a low dose of morphinans.” It is also the source of an illicit drug: opium. Asks the speaker as the primary narrator of the book: “How does one classify a thing useful either living or dead? Useful for both good and ill purposes?” (67). My answer: I don’t know. We are speaking of humans, of course. How each of us make choices to do harm or heal, to do evil or good, and, of course, the gamut of choices in between these poles. How do you classify us? We can’t be pinned down to all bad or all good. We are people living in the throes of others’ choices and absorbing the consequences of those choices ,and this fact alters where we exist on the spectrum of classifications day by day. What I am communicating with these flowers is our worth and the importance of honoring that worth—to not crush, discard, or abuse it. I’m communicating the power of choice and our ability to choose to treat these fragile blooms with absolute respect, tending to their purpose as testimonies of what is beautiful, desirable, and medicinal.
TR: The poems throughout Floralia experiment with various forms and structures, including sedoka, monologue, and prose. How does form influence the articulation of grief in these poems, such as “Red-Coral Like a Woman’s Painted Lips” and “City Lights Radio Presents Floralia”?
KAP: Gosh, grief is so incredibly disruptive. It’s not linear or organized. It makes its own decisions about how it will enter our memories and our days. This is especially true with grief from a traumatic experience. The poems in Floralia speak to the fragmentation an individual experiences after trauma and how it disrupts mental processing, emotional regulation, and relational attachment. When writing trauma—not as a narrative fact but as an embodied experience—hybridity typically provides more room for formal play that mimics this experience. With the “City Lights Radio” broadcast, I wanted to show the way sexual trauma splits the mind, fragmenting memory, and how this dissociation can feel like you exist in a body of multiple interpretations of the self. I’m not speaking of a personality disorder, but rather the struggle to integrate identity after what you believed about the world and the self in the world has been shattered by a traumatic experience that challenges your belief. In the sedoka poem, there is a single voice lamenting the fresh wound of assault. That fresh wound is not easy to communicate if one can communicate at all, so the expression is sound and color and metaphors based on feeling as the speaker is trying to connect these expressions in a way that makes some sense. It’s supposed to feel a bit senseless while also being driven by identifiable emotion at intervals.
TR: How do blank spaces and brackets serve as a tool for communicating the complex, often inarticulable experience of sexual abuse in Floralia? In addition, how are these devices a vehicle for reinforcing the motifs of silence and repressed feelings (e.g., guilt, shame, fear) in your collection?
KAP: I think the question answered the question! The blank spaces and brackets are meant to communicate emotional disruption and dysregulation. Reading these poems isn’t a fluid experience. Guilt, shame, fear, grief—it’s all heavy, jarring, overwhelming then numbing. These emotions cycle. They stop and go. They expand and collapse. They can feel illuminating then suddenly spar. So, also the poems in Floralia.
TR: In “City Lights Radio Presents Floralia,” the Alive Young Woman tells the Ghost Woman, “…You may not remember the situation of your death…but your disembodied self still carries the trauma of the events.” In “ghosts,” the speaker states, “It has taken me a long time to realize I am human…I give details about how the past intrudes into the present and how this is scar tissue in my bone and in my veins…” What role does memory, embodied trauma, and dissociation play in the speaker’s relationship to her body?
KAP: It’s everything. This is sort of the question of the whole book: what role do these experiences play after trauma? I think my answer to this question is multi-faceted. Working through this dissociation, painful memories, and how trauma lives in the body (as does the women in the prose poems that head each section) is what allows us to survive these traumas. So many people don’t work through, so they continue to manifest harm to the self and others. But many also do work through and, as a product of working through, become wise. They extract medicine from the pain and offer this medicine to others. I hope that this is the enduring legacy of my own work, that all these poems I’ve written in Floralia and other books provide a roadmap for others to travel who also require healing from painful traumas. I don’t think I answered your question directly, perhaps because it is difficult for me to separate what we might consider the body and soul and all the things that fracture the soul. The body holds this fracture. It is the container. Trauma moves through the veins, rewires the brain, and physically manifests the pain we carry in our spiritual parts. It’s all one. To care for any part of the human is to care for all parts.
TR: Tell me more about your choice of language and syntax in the linked sedoka poem, “Red-Coral Like a Woman’s Painted Lips,” such as the repetition of “his body, not mine” and rhythmic enjambment (e.g., lines “…good blood drum be good / little orange-beat-beat-good-should…”).
KAP: This poem is an attempt for a freshly assaulted woman to make sense of her experience. I imagine this as an internal dialogue that doesn’t make clear sense. Her repeated attempts to clarify distinction of bodies is a desperate attempt to place a separation between herself and her assailant. But the poem communicates a lot of sound and color as you have noted, that feeling of trauma throbbing in the veins. She can’t make sense of everything. The body is overwhelmed with feeling. The mind moves in and out of reality.
TR: In “His mother”, the speaker states: “…after he slipped / into the room to feel her soft nourishing breasts and be her / little white begonia three more times…” How does this poem complicate attitudes toward gender and survivors of sexual abuse? How does the portrayal of the mother figure as “nourishing” subvert these expectations (and the expectations of relationships between abuse survivors and perpetrators)?
KAP: This poem and elements of Parrot Flower was inspired by the story of a man who became a serial rapist. His early childhood was marked by intense trauma: his mother sexually abused him repeatedly. Culturally, we cannot escape the reality that women and girls are more frequently sexually harassed and abused at the hands of men, but boys are abused, too. Typically, they are also abused by men, but in the story I was examining, this boy (who became a rapist) was abused by his mother. Naturally, this shaped his psyche and corrupted his desire. The cultural narrative that we live inside, in our case a patriarchal narrative, determines which gender is freer to perpetrate harm without consequence. Here in America, men are freer to perpetrate harm, and they are more beholden to maintain the power balance that patriarchy demands. This maintenance can be so subconscious, with all of us participating in major and minor ways and not even realizing we are doing so. But I think it’s important to contemplate our origins—we were all small children once. We were all poised for any possibility. Both boys and girls are recipients of cultural narratives and whatever harms they embody. While I don’t think we will ever live in a world where these harms completely discontinue, I wonder how much good it would do each of us to contemplate the fragile genesis of every person we meet and how we can tend this genesis with greater wisdom and care. For Brent Brents, the serial rapist, the power and control dynamic of using women was also his source of nourishing himself. He needed to both hurt his mother for abusing him and receive her sexual/emotional tending. How devastating is that? And how devasting the choices he made to perpetuate this harmful narrative. But like all of us, and like Parrot Flower demonstrates, he did have a choice.
TR: Another line in “His mother” that I’d like you to speak more on is, “…he extinguished his cigarette on her twiggy arms—that’s what young boys do—then left.” What are you hoping to have readers contend with in this last statement?
KAP: Simply the power and control narrative that men are often introduced to from a young age that positions them as the ones entitled to have power over another. This power narrative, sadly, usually manifests most clearly in their relationships to intimate partners even if it doesn’t to the rest of their social circle. And this power dynamic is a form of coping. Culturally, we have often invited boys and men to cope with their pain through bullying—typically bullying their intimate partner or other people, like children, who are dependent on them for survival. Men, more than anyone, need to change this narrative by doing deep inner healing themselves and teaching boys that power and control tactics are not an alternative to doing the work of healing their wounds. Culturally, we do possess better medicine. It’s available. Men and boys can engage with this medicine, too.
TR: In “City Lights Radio Presents Floralia”, the Male Announcer refers to the media phenomenon of “Missing White Woman Syndrome” in his dialogue, stating: “Telegenic, photogenic, the young woman memorialized in the center photo was… the most ideal progenitor of terror in the American imagination…” and that “It [e.g., sexual abuse, kidnapping, murder] could be any girl, any white girl—a pretty one.” Speak about the need for an intersectional lens in better understanding and calling attention to the issues of gender-based violence, exploitation, and drug addiction.
KAP: In this piece, I’m highlighting the voyeuring aspect of news media in relation to stories of sexual harm against women and how, culturally, white women are the focus of media attention to the dismissal of crimes done against women of color and even boys. In highlighting this, I am not saying that this is beneficial to white women. I am revealing a cultural obsession. This obsession is not beneficial to anyone because it is not about care and concern for women of any color, including white women. It is more about what provides good entertainment in media and will capture the minds of viewers. There are certainly other lenses we could consider; for instance, the fact that those with wealth receive more positive media attention than those in poverty. The point is that news media and other medias are agenda-driven, needing viewers and ratings that translate to dollars to survive, and this media agenda manifests as incomplete or one-sided information about the world we live in. It also encourages us to observe the world from an easy distance on a screen and perhaps miss the stories and needs of the people around us. I don’t know how to solve this dilemma. It is likely unsolvable. I do my best to avoid news media, not to be avoidant of happenings in the world, but rather to focus my attention on research that expands my worldview as well as the stories of individual people in my community that need direct care. Not an easy thing to do in the present historical moment.
TR: In “On bluelight.org,” the speaker observes: “People do you know. [Survive.] Mostly women.” How does this (often disproportionately) precarious struggle of women to survive, especially from marginalized backgrounds related to race and class, intersect with your own views and reflections on survival throughout the collection?
KAP: I think it’s just that—the fact that survival is disproportionate. We can pretend it’s not, but it is. And its disproportionate in a variety of ways. It’s not a simple narrative of straight white men having more power than anyone else. It’s also a story of which straight white men have this right and who they are willing to share power with at any given time. Money matters. Fame matters. Family background matters. Religious affiliation matters, etc. But the fact that any of these elements matter when it comes to who survives and maintains control is the problem at the heart of all of this. Perhaps our lingering questions should not be centered on what intersectional elements place a person at the bottom of society with little hope of survival, but what intersects to place someone at the top? And when someone finds themselves at the top, how can they quickly begin to disseminate and relinquish this strong hold on exceptional power? What can they give up? What can I give up when I have too much right to power? This is the ultimate question. The poem you refer to is simply referring to the fact that, in the narrative of gender, women are more often caught in the throes of survival than men, doing more work to maybe someday enjoy thriving.
TR: You open each key poem (“City Lights Radio Presents Floralia”, “Parrot Flower”, and “Red-Coral Like a Woman’s Painted Lips”) with epitaphs quoted from other poetic works, including Kimiko Hahn’s “Toxic Flora”, Song of Songs in the Holy Bible, and Patti Smith’s poem “rape.” Why did you choose them? How are they significant to the larger narrative of the collection? What should the readers take away from these epitaphs?
KAP: In this collection, each epitaph is setting up the drama that will unfold in the next section. Firstly, I love the book Toxic Flora, the poem that is Song of Songs has informed so much of my worldview about desire, pleasure, and the dedicated fierceness of love, and anything Patti Smith writes is an education in excellent writing craft. Altogether, the lines I chose from these writings highlight our fragile natures, how we can be broken and discarded, altered by toxicity, and filled with questions about how we will be seen and understood after harm. They resonate with Who am I now? and How do you see me? I have carried these questions myself, hence all the poetry to unravel my own stories of harm and what these harms communicate to me about my value in the world. As the woman classifying flowers in this book dedicates herself to discovering the medicinal wisdom of her experiences, however painful this excavation may be, I hope my reader will understand that these fragile blooms are worth tender cultivation. If they have been damaged, they are no less worthy, but cultivation is not all about gentle caresses and sunlight, it also requires eradication of toxins and predators, PH balance and good soil. The work is difficult, intentional, and takes time, but in the end, you will have welcomed and restored a beautiful bloom.
Kimberly Ann Priest is a writer, visual artist, and author of Wolves in Shells, winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry, as well as tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University, her writing is deeply focused on gender-based trauma, domestic ecologies, eco-poetics, eco-spirituality, ecofeminism, women’s studies, neurodivergence studies, classic film studies, narrative justice, arts-based research, and writing for therapeutic purposes. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals such as Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, and Birmingham Poetry Review.
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. In her free time, she enjoys reading literary and YA fiction, watching anime, and spending time with her tripod cat, Tuntuni.
The reasons I read poetry are so numerous, and each of them so meaningful that explaining them all would probably take a lifetime. For the purposes of this review, I’ll mention one: to have ordinary human experience transmuted into something that feels new, revelatory, and even magical. Which brings me to the poetry collection Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps (Milk & Cake Press, 2025) by Yamini Pathak. This book contains some of the most dazzling poetry I have ever read, bar none.
Each of the book’s sections is named after an element of a raga, which is a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music. More than just a piece of music theory, the word “raga” itself in Sanskrit is related to color, to dyeing, and the soul. That is the essential mission of a raga: to evoke a particular emotional state in the listener, to color the soul and the mind, if you will. That Pathak would choose this as the framework for her book is more than fitting, not only because Pathak’s poetry is itself endlessly vivid and evocative, but because she explores a vast emotional territory.
The first section, after the prelude, is named Thaat. A subheading simply denotes it as “The Parent Scale.” The first poem of the section, “Ghazal for the Children Born Far from Home,” demonstrates with its brilliant couplets that this section is aptly named:
Rama scaled the ocean/Bheeshma died pillowed on a bed of arrows Their ghosts in your marrow unstirring, this is my sorrow
In the bazaar you petted unblemished baby goats, you didn’t know they were meant for slaughter, this is my sorrow
Exiled from a language where yesterday also means tomorrow You wander thirsty with no tongues, this is my sorrow.
Dedicated to her sons, the poem is a perfect example of Yamini’s poetic ability as well as the themes of the first section of the book. She is able to conjure huge depths of emotion, acknowledging the sadness she feels at her sons growing up without their ancestral tongue but also endless possibility as she mentions the time-bending aspect of that tongue and the magical imagery of the religion she was raised with. Where there is beauty, there is violence; where there is sorrow, there is the memory of joy.
It isn’t just the poems themselves that make this book memorable, though. It’s often how they are ordered. The final three poems of the second section demonstrate this to devastating effect. All poems seem, in some way, to be looking back at some place, or some person, that cannot be returned to. They all deal with the death of the speaker’s father. In “On a Far Afternoon,” as the speaker’s father is dying in the hospital, they pass by “a hall / where marriages are sealed by flame. / Every morning a white mare / grazed outside.” It’s a line that Gabriel García Márquez would’ve written. In the next poem, “Everest,” she describes the moment when the painting of the same name by Nichola Roerich brings tears to her eyes when she sees it in a gallery. The only indication that these tears might be for her father comes in a line that is all the more searing for its candor: “Only a week since my father died.”
Then comes “Hunger,” the last poem of the section. The bulk of the poem describes how the narrator prepares a cauliflower for a meal, listening to Yo-Yo Ma talk on a podcast while she does so. The façade, like any façade, has cracks, and the grief seeps through: “I imagined a space like a cavernous chest, / the cello pulsing at its heart…My own chest vibrated, empty.” The experience of beauty is likened to receiving “a glimmer of impermanence.” And as Yo-Yo Ma’s band plays at the end, they “intone a dirge.” Here, it’s Pathak’s restraint that recreates the enormous tension of trying to hold yourself together. It’s heart-stopping. This section is named Alaap. Alaap, Pathak tells us, is a melodic improvisation in a raga that “defines the raga, its mood, emphasi[s], secondary notes.” The mood of this raga, then, seems to be the mood of departure, of memory, and grief.”
The last section is called Pakad, which is a “musical phrase that establishes the identity of a raga, encapsulating its essence.” An overarching theme here is more elusive. These poems are focused more on the day-to-day experiences of the narrator, such as perimenopause or dealing with unpleasant coworkers. (It also contains a poem called “Poem with No Apology,” which is one of the best love poems I’ve ever read. The line “I love you like I love a novel that makes me sad / it has ended” is one I will wish for the rest of my life I had written for my girlfriend.) I think, though, that this smattering of experience and emotion is the point. It comes the closest to the experience of actual selfhood, of real life, and, having read the book, it appears that this is the essence of Pathak’s raga. The reminiscences that have come beforehand have shaped the person the narrator is now. What we, the reader, are supposed to take away from that fact, I’m not sure; Pathak is a better writer than to provide an answer for us. Maybe, going back to that love poem, it is to love the places and people we encounter “like a burning building, like there’s no more time to waste.” Or maybe it comes in one of my favorite poems of the collection, “The Cosmos Asks Three Questions,” in which the universe itself speaks to the narrator:
At the airport, that woman by the sliding doors, homeless and babbling like a river with stones in its underbelly? She could be you, escaped from a parallel universe through a rent in my fabric…The galaxies are pitted with black holes, gravitational lenses that bend and distort light so that everything is chimera, illusion, Maya…If you led a blameless life, you need not fear my teeth.
Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Half and One, Gauge, won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize, and made the Shortlist for the 2025 Letter Review Poetry Prize. His debut poetry chapbook, The Remains, was published by Bottlecap Press in March of 2026. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.
Disclaimer: if at any point this post starts sounding a little too much like it was written by a pretentious middle-aged man, you have permission to steal everything I own. All 106 records, 70 cassettes, 22 VHS tapes, 109 CDs, and 79 DVDs—I mostly collect from various vintage and secondhand stores and, of course, the few local record stores around Knoxville. Just the other day, my 12 year old sister came up to me and asked if I could bring her somewhere to get a record for her friend’s birthday party. She (the friend) had just gotten a record player, and I’m pretty much the only person my sister knows who collects that sort of thing. Of course I took her to Lost and Found and it was a fun trip, but we had limited info on what kind of music her friend listens to and didn’t end up getting anything. Never fear—I made her friend a little zine on how to take care of her records instead, which was an overall much cheaper option and one that allowed my sister to pick out something else for her friend instead.
Still, it made me think about my own philosophy (if you will) about collecting physical media and enjoying art. I excluded books in the little list above because I genuinely have too many to reasonably count, but I promise they are relevant here as well. But back to my records and tapes: yes, I like them because I can hold them in my hands. Yes, I like them for their tangibility (sleeve out of the jacket, record out of the sleeve, record onto the platter). Yes, I like knowing that I truly own these pieces of art and no corporation can censor them or remove my access to them at will.
More than that, though, I love that I can’t skip a song without going through a lot of trouble. If I want to skip ahead while playing a record, I have to lift the needle, move it, and drop it into the precise groove where the next song starts. If I want to skip ahead on a cassette or VHS, I have to push a button and let the tape wind itself up and hope I stop it at just the right moment (which almost never happens). Everything takes effort and none of the effort will every produce perfection.
On one hand, this system has allowed me to develop the tiniest percent more patience, which is always a helpful thing. On the other hand, not being able to skip around on the “highlights” of an album has encouraged me to look at albums in their entirety with a much greater level of respect. Of course, I still listen to music digitally when I want to make a playlist or listen to a specific song—not every album is perfect or anywhere near it, and I don’t have the space or money to own half as many albums as I’d actually listen to. But since I started collecting media that forces me to slow down, I have slowed down.
If an artist puts ten songs on an album in a specific order, that order is intentional. The important part is that intentionality does not equal perfection. In my own writing habits, I try to apply this value to all drafts, but especially earlier ones. And with generative AI as a threat in lots of circles, prioritizing being intentional over being perfect feels like a step in the right direction both creatively and generally. While I’m hoping my sister’s friend gets as much fun out of her new hobby as she possibly can, I’m also hoping that through it, she might value art more intentionally.
Joan Alft (she/any) is an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee studying publishing and creative writing. Her short story “Pilgrim” is forthcoming in the Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine where she works as an Assistant Prose/Fiction Editor. Gothic themes and relationships, the dichotomy between the familiar and unfamiliar, and confusingly intense devotion in places where it shouldn’t be are a few things she enjoys seeing in others’ art and tries integrating in her own projects. In her free time, Joan collects physical media (records, cassettes, DVDs, CDs, and VHS tapes, oh my!), hangs out at local coffeeshops, and sews on occasion.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Alexa White. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, September 27th, 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!
Alexa White is a mixed-race, neurodivergent writer and graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned her BA in Creative Writing and Studio Art. Alexa lives in Knoxville, her semi-hometown, and is the Creative Director and Assistant Editor at Sundress. She takes delight in backroads, quarries, and the last few seconds of sunset and redefines her bedtime nightly.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “For Colored Girls: A Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf” a workshop led by Monica Prince, on Wednesday, September 9th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can register for the event here.
Join us for an online celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Broadway debut of Ntozake Shange’s seminal work, For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuff. This showcase of poets who’ve performed Shange’s work and/or been inspired by it, includes choreopoet, director, and educator Monica Prince who will lead the evening. She will be joined by an incredible line-up of poets including Shakeema Smalls, M. Mick Powell, Sullivan Summer, Jasmine Blooms and Rosa Castellano.
The evening will start and end with Shange’s words with the aim of inspiring a new generation to read her work and to give time and space to the sharing of what that work has meant to those present. It will be heart opening.
If you would like to support Sundress, you may make a charitable donation here in lieu of a ticket purchase. Your contribution supports our commitment to offering experiences like this to our community at no cost, improving arts accessibility for all.
