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Sundress Reads: Review of Dreams for Earth

Amid beautiful, velvety, esoteric illustrations by Ángel Faz and Jack (Anna) Jackson, Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi’s poetry nestles like a jewel. In a debut poetry collection traversing everything from motherhood and political activism to the digital age and ongoing global crises, Hirsi does so deftly, boldly, and without flinching.

Dreams for Earth (Deep Vellum, 2025) is comprised of sixty-three poems that are broken into six sections. Hirsi is never cautious about style or structure, utilizing a new poem format which she terms ‘orb’. Among other rules on rhyme scheme and patterning, the structure comprises 24 lines in 8 tercets. There are five ‘orbs’ in the collection, but the unique style is far from being the only structural feature Hirsi engages with. Deliberate spacing, clear visual mimicry (see Again Birthing Again Birthed Again Again Again [46], and August. Blackberries Everywhere. [81], etc.), alongside incomplete and overflowing lines. This enjambment in particular leaves thoughts half-finished, guiding the reader to different, yet natural conclusions. Each use is interpretive, strongly aligned with the breadth of the poetry––by which I mean Hirsi warps the tools at her disposal far beyond their intended purpose to better suit her rhythm and narrative. The resulting impact is like watching a master at work, particularly identifiable in Kill the Messenger.

Similarly, the two halves of some of Hirsi’s poems (Anticipation, among others) exist in duality, as lines to be read all at once. This duality, however, extends beyond the structure of the poems and into the themes themselves. Hirsi’s uncompromising womanhood and motherhood seamlessly co-exist: to fear and to be feared. Or in  Hirsi’s words, “My daughter brings new reasons to live but also new reasons to fear” (47 Orb: Bloodletting). This was one of a few themes that carried a certain, memorable glow, with the two identities reconciled through a shared understanding: “No pill will make me forget crimes of men with power” (116 Thresholds).

Another theme that runs through the collection like a sparkling, meandering river: Hirsi’s faith, which glints through her language in moments of impressive clarity. Although she discusses her references and inspirations in the ‘Notes’ section at the end of the anthology, citing Patterns and An Astrology, echoes of the Old Testament and faith ring throughout, interrogative and resounding in their questions, “If God can break a promise / we can’t expect much of mortal men” (27 Patterns). But it was Hirsi’s perspective that I adored. The interweaving of faith with spirituality and nature: “What is the Fibonacci sequence but God singing” (78 Hubris).

Hirsi offers not just a vision for the material needs of Earth to be met, but one where we understand each other and the world around us—the soil beneath our feet, the birds, the beasts, a dream to live in tandem with nature. This idealism is not untested or passive. Rather, the collection reaches deeper into that desire, toward an underlying fear that the sacred natural things are being perverted by technology and heartless science, a sentiment underpinned by a greater plea to bring back community. Hirsi conveys an infuriating sense of powerlessness over how taxes are spent funding genocide, how the miracle of creating new life is reduced to “geriatric pregnancy” (115 Thresholds), and how there is: “no validation of the force wielded by The World” (115 Thresholds). We are aligned with the speaker––simultaneously a voice of the inner consciousness, a YouTube user, and a dating app participant. Hirsi asks what it is to be human in the present day. But the voices with which she asks are the real magic of the collection.

From as early as the first poem, two voices emerge: the first, a dreamer—the tree who grows despite the fears of “disease drought men who think they own”; the second, the shadow that the dreamer casts in bright sunlight. The fear of being a poor mother, of being unfit for generational wisdom, “I have trouble feeling worthy / of hearing so much guidance” (34 Of Naming and Not). From the first, we are given a gentle schooling: worldly advice from one still so wide-eyed and hopeful. The second is darker, offering fragments of understanding. As with deciphering an ancient text, one must be comfortable with not understanding everything. Some things are not designed to be understood. Laid out flat and picked apart. Hirsi’s poetry has teeth. It will not surrender any interpretation without effort.

This is the same tone the collection takes to political commentary. Hirsi refuses to be silent, and her struggle bleeds through every page to offer splinters of a non-white perspective in America: “Those advising against our home birth don’t / know all the ways this country tries to kill us” (45 Again Birthing Again Birthed Again Again Again). But her protest extends beyond her borders, specifically to the Palestinian genocide. When reading Fecundity, I am reminded of the words of Omar Al Akkad, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

And so, I think of the second installment of a DREAM FOR EARTH, “Yesterday was the time to become ungovernable” (94)—a call to anger, to become monstrous. And yet Hirsi asks us to imagine if “there were no divisions / if there were no stores / just joy / like children finding flowers / or discovering pockets / or the feeling of The Sun on a cool spring day” (61 Poem About Pockets). Dreams for Earth is beautiful.

I did not have enough room to discuss all my favorite poems from this collection, so here is a brief list of my favorites and the power they hold for me.

  • Orb: Do Not Disturb, for its inscrutable grief and unique genesis.
  • Dreams for Earth, for its blazing hope, vision and boldness.
  • Patterns, how do you kill a frog? You boil it slowly, with routines and patterns it recognises, and you remind it that ‘this is all normal’.
  • Frequently Asked Question, for its doomed, tragic hope.
  • Solidarity, for its pain and its refusal to stop moving forward.
  • Remarks by President Biden on Recent Events on College Campuses / his truth in his lies, for the clarity and passive revelation beyond its structure and insight.
  • Tell the Children, for the revolutionary importance it places on teaching children wrath just as much as love.

Dreams for Earth is available from Deep Vellum in paperback and eBook format.

Rachel Bulman (she/her) holds a BA in English and Creative Writing as well as an MA in Publishing from the University of Exeter, specializing in interactive and children’s fiction. Her written work has appeared in The Book of Choices, Velvet Fields, and Exeposé, among others. Find her on Instagram @worm.can.read, through her online portfolio, or ask the bridge troll who taught him his riddles three.

Sundress Reads: Review of Toothache in the Bone

Sundress Reads
A cover of a book, showing a hand-drawn illustration of the left half of a hip bone in the center. The background is beige like parchment paper, and the skeleton is drawn with pencil shading. There is a rectangular border around the hip bone drawing. The title, "Toothache in the Bone," is written in red in the bottom-right corner. The author's name, Colleen S. Harris, is written beneath.

Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025) by Colleen S. Harris is a raw exploration of death, grief, trauma, and resilience. This poetry collection examines the body and its limitations under strain: diagnoses of bone damage and infertility; the death of loved ones; a marriage; and constant hospital visits and struggles with body image. Harris’s poems reflect on the human condition and the complexities of life with chronic illness, revealing physical and emotional scars with vulnerability that leaves an ache in the soul.

Throughout the collection, medical imagery is a recurring motif. Harris uses these vivid depictions to convey the physical experience of illness and show how it affects everyday life and one’s sense of self. Each poem is infused with visual references to needle jabs, broken bones, and allusions to medical terminology, such as macrophages and CRP (C-reactive protein) test numbers. These depictions of physical suffering linger with the reader, showing the deep influence of chronic illness on the speaker’s perception of everyday life.

In “Primum Non Nocere (First, Do No Harm)”, Harris writes: “First you must be patient, a patient / patient, who understands three months / of waiting for the chance to supplicate / to the physician could be worse… // When the day / comes, remember not to use the upper numbers of the pain scale, no nurse / believes anything above an eight” (23). These lines illustrate the speaker’s frustration with a healthcare system that does not adequately serve its patients. The endless cycle of waiting for appointments, enduring blood tests, and interacting with doctors who dismiss her symptoms renders the speaker drained. Her lack of agency in her medical treatment and constant pain creates a sense of helplessness towards her body: “Pain is a marriage, / a commitment, ‘til death do us part” (33). The speaker ultimately accepts that this senseless suffering will always be part of her life. Through this candid depiction of the intense psychological toll of illness, Harris guides us to understand the feeling of being trapped in a body that constantly betrays you. 

A central theme of Toothache in the Bone is coping with loss, grief, and the myriad complex emotions they evoke. Harris engages with loss in its many forms: the loss of health, the loss of reproductive possibility, and the loss of people. In “Rituals of Grief,” Harris grapples with reproductive loss through parallels with the mourning behaviors of elephants and crows. She writes, “Animals know the importance / of company, how a critical mass / of community can sustain grief // at a bearable level” (26). Later, she recounts the experience of losing a pregnancy, writing: “No animal, alone, I am buried / within these walls… // no crowd to wing with me, to step / in solidarity toward your body… // to prove that… I remain beyond your remains (27).

In contrast to the sense of community and shared grief found within elephant and crow groups, Harris highlights the alienation and loneliness that surround sudden loss among humans, particularly the experience of miscarriage. The societal stigma around miscarriage often forces women to grieve their miscarriage privately, internalizing their loss as a personal failure: What is wrong with my body? Why isn’t it working as it should? Without any community support to help her carry the weight of this pain, the speaker falls into a deep depression. Speaking openly about this issue is crucial to normalizing discussion around miscarriage and building community among women and individuals facing similar challenges. 

The thing I find most compelling about this collection is its unapologetic discussion of death and the nuances of the grieving process. Harris artfully describes the range of emotions that arise when navigating loss. In “On Letting Go of the Dying,” the speaker mourns both the death of her dog and her dying marriage. On witnessing the last moments of a beloved pet, Harris writes: “My mother / made me see his ribs pushing their way rudely through / his skin / I was not brave / when I carried him for the last / time… // Five / years passed before I could reach into the too small box to spoon // his ashes into a pendant…” (23). Through the use of visceral imagery, Harris illustrates the speaker’s confrontation with death, its brutality on the body, and its permanence. Death is often perceived as a biological, inevitable reality of life. Harris voices the fear and heartbreak of witnessing a loved one’s final days. It is a type of sorrow that never truly leaves you.

The latter half of the poem shifts in tone as Harris redirects the reader’s attention to the unhappy marriage. Harris describes it as a “skeletal, / gasping thing,” writing, “I needed // no memento, did not want to drown in the ashes. I wore my / good red dancing shoes instead” (24). Like shedding layers of old skin, the speaker is relieved to cast off her dying marriage and start life anew. Harris uses this juxtaposition to emphasize that accepting loss is not always negative; at times, it is a necessary process for growth and survival.

I have never read a poetry collection as devastating as Toothache in the Bone. I found myself moved by its honest discussions of illness, death, and body image, particularly in “Primum Non Nocere,” “Nel Mezzo Del Cammin di Nostra Vita,” and “I Dreamt I Was Unblemished.” Harris’s unflinching account of coming to terms with illness and loss reverberated deep in my bones, staying with me long after I finished reading. Her ability to articulate difficult human emotions, such as self-hate and sorrow, allows the collection to resonate with readers both with and without chronic conditions. In this collection, Colleen S. Harris masterfully gives voice to the hidden pain that our bodies hold.

A South Asian woman smiling and sitting on a green couch. She has black hair, half lying over her right shoulder and half down her back, and is wearing a wine-red turtleneck. Behind her are two closed window curtains, one light blue and floral print, and the other solid teal.

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.

An Interview with Sarah Clark and Ashely Adams, Editors of ALOCASIA: 99 queer writers on plants and nature

Following the release of ALOCASIA’s new poetry anthology, 99 queer writers on plants and nature, editors Sarah Clark and Ashely Adams spoke with Sundress editorial intern Tara Rahman. Here, they discussed the poetics of botanical terminology, the resilience of queer plant and human communities in surviving and thriving in harsh environments, and the important work of protecting and cultivating Indigenous identities, knowledge, and wildlife in the face of oppressive and exclusionary systems. Together, they imagine new possibilities of being with the natural world—of burning away the dry brush and clearing the way for new bonds to grow.

Tara Rahman: Why did you choose the plant name, ALOCASIA, as the title for this anthology?

Sarah Clark and Ashely Adams: The title of the anthology is derived from the magazine’s name ALOCASIA. Now, where did the magazine’s name come from? It’s the name of a plant genus found in the Aroid family (the family many common house plants are part of). They have an interesting growth habit where they spring up from tubers or rhizomes as bunches of stalks with these shield-like leaves.

They have also been endlessly manipulated for visual aesthetic. I’m not sure if there was a deeper meaning at the time than it was a good sounding name, and we were very much into houseplants. Funny enough, Sarah doesn’t even own any alocasias due to their tendency to pick up pests. (Ashely did, and they did indeed end up with mealy bugs every time).

TR: Can you speak to the usage of scientific or botanical names of plants in these poems?

SC and AA: While we can’t speak for the authors, our feeling is that plant names carry immense meaning. There is a poetry, a literacy, in botanical terminology. There’s a delight in learning and applying terms like petiole, umbral, or extrafloral nectaries. Someone could write a whole book on the implications of scientific names (a “universal” name derived from a long dead language) or how common names twist and turn over time.

For example: the false Solomon’s seal is a common perennial found across North America. Just looking at the name, we can infer that there is some sort of “true” Solomon’s seal and that some characteristic of it reminded people of Solomon’s seal. Furthermore, we can guess that this is a name that came after colonization. We can ask all sorts of questions from there. What were the Indigenous names for the plant? What about this humble plant inspired settlers to invoke religious iconography? What makes a thing the “false” version of another? We’ve generated so many things we could explore within poetry with just one plant.

TR: Gardens, succulents (e.g., saguaros), and other houseplants are recurring images throughout the anthology. What is their significance? How do they reflect the lived experiences of queer individuals?

SC and AA: We build so many connections to the plants we cultivate. As writers, we’re drawn to interrogate the connections we make, especially the ones closest to us. Beyond the “write what you know” aspect, there’s tension at the heart of cultivation. Change must happen both in the plant and the caretaker for the relationship to work, just as change must happen to ensure the survival (and hopefully more) of a queer person in often hostile environments. M.P. Rosalia’s poem, “sapling, taken from the northern pacific coast, kept in a jar” is a great illustration of this. The sapling, despite being cared for by the speaker of the poem, cannot survive within the confines of the jar. It is a being meant for sun and immense space.

TR: Many poems in the anthology consider ideas of queer sensuality, such as “Dry Love” and “looking for a soft place to land.” How does the image of nature connect to or embody queer desire?

SC and AA: Plants, from a human perspective, are very strange organisms. They communicate in chemical networks hidden to the naked eye. They create their own energy from water and sunlight. They reproduce through insect intermediaries, the wind, water, even from shards of themselves. They can be male, female, both, or neither. Everything we adore and survive on comes from the sexual peculiarities of plants. The question isn’t so much how does a plant embody queer desire but how it could be anything but?

TR: In “Plancestors,” Rebecca Kinkade-Black writes, “‘We are all connected’ / is not just some trite phrase / It is remembrance / that we are all unified by the molecules that make us.” Tell me about the importance of building community with our queer planty relatives, and the importance of recognizing the diverse “systems of connection” that make up our existence.

SC and AA: We want to give an answer beyond the practical reasons (like “need food”). Society pressures queer people to act a certain way, to be normal, be natural. However, when you study plants, you find that what thrives in nature goes beyond anything that humans can imagine. Anyone who really opens themselves to learning the realities of biology opens themselves to the possibility of being. As Kinkada-Black illustrated, our furthest relatives are our relatives and we can draw on their ways of survival to benefit our own.

TR: Ashely: Tell me more about your choice of language, syntax, and form in “Prescribed Burn,” such as the use of dialogue and definitions.

AA: I’m a sucker for a braided essay. I love putting disparate elements together and letting a reader build connections. I like to think it creates personal narratives in less expected ways. I also confess I kind of hate writing in the “I” voice in my nonfiction. This is definitely one of my more “personal” personal narratives.

I also love using the language from the natural sciences. My first degree was in fisheries and wildlife. I am always excited when I can bring together that life into my writing. There’s always that tension when you sit the scientific next to more lyrical writing. I feel that tension gives you a better appreciation for each type of writing. I certainly didn’t come to appreciate everything I learned in my undergrad until I switched to creative writing pursuing my advanced degrees.

Finally, I think all these tensions can allow us to look at discourses we’re saturated with (in this case, gender-based violence and discrimination) with a sense of surprise and curiosity. It pushes a reader to think of the quiet ways oppression shapes the way we look and approach the world. A hike in the Florida scrub is laden with risk and privilege and burden.

TR: In “Mother of Thousands,” Nikki Wallschlaeger writes, “…I ask you to take the batteries out of the clanging wall clock before I go to sleep to prevent the supremacist art of domestication from permeating my dreams.” How does capitalist exploitation and domination over the natural world intersect with systemic inequality and the marginalization of certain communities?

SC and AA: This is the flip side of your question on connections. To maintain hierarchies, there has to be a breaking of bonds–not just between people, but the land they occupy as well.

When you break these bonds, you get this cascading system of exclusion and oppression. I think Marcy Rae Henry demonstrates this well in the poem “Los saguaros are being destroyed”. Boundaries are drawn on fluid landscapes for nation-states to claim. The claim leads to oppression of the beings who dare to occupy the space in contradiction of the nation-state’s will, no matter how long they were there before the powers that be: “…saguros can live two centuries / As long as this country has been / Longer than this f r o n t e r a”.

The poet correctly states that the removal of the saguaro is done as a means to remove people. And these ideas of worth and humanity are fluid, ever shifting depending on what those at the top of the hierarchy deem as valuable. One area of wilderness is a wasted economic opportunity while another is a paradise worthy of utmost preservation. The removal of saguaro is a serious crime unless it’s done in service of a border wall.

TR: Many of these poems juxtapose imagery of the natural world with capitalist, corporate landscapes, such as in “i want clean water dammit,” “the office // the after,” and “An Anti-Pastoral.” How can we reconcile this “simultaneously / medicinal & poisonous” (from “An-Anti Pastoral”) relationship between humanity and the environment that surrounds us? How can we reimagine our relationship with the natural world?

SC and AA: Despite the aims of capitalism and bigotry, humans inherently crave connection. It’s arguably the reason the species has been so successful. It’s our instinct to bond with other beings, even non-human ones. It’s one of the deeply charming things about humans. We’ll look at a plant and declare it our friend and confidant, 1.5 billion years of evolutionary separation be damned. Obviously, human development imperils many organisms, but we hope the writers of this anthology show ways we might build partnership with the natural world, even as we become more urbanized. A spider fern in an apartment window can be a challenge to the corporate world–an existence based not on monetary value, but its beauty and tenacity and plain existence.

TR: In “Prescribed Burn,” the speaker states, “Still, I bend down…and think a better future is possible. One where we listen to those who have suffered. One where we let the fires burn.” How can we imagine a future that is more sustainable for marginalized communities, both human and plant? What kinds of burnings would need to take place?

SC and AA: When you suppress fires in fire-dependent ecosystems, dead vegetation builds up into dangerous fuel loads. These fuel loads are one of the reasons we are now experiencing some of the most devastating wildfires in modern history. Much like our land, our communities are being buried in these fuel loads, ready to ignite into radicalization and stochastic violence. To survive, we must find ways to remove this dead weight, these dry ideas and systems, and allow something new and healthy to grow in its place.

TR: Which poem in this anthology resonate most with you and why?

AA: One of the pieces I was drawn to was arushi (aera) rege’s poem “nuclear winter, burning planet”. I’m a sucker for an apocalyptic vibe and the challenge that comes in imagining and even loving a life in ruin.

SC: They’re all my babies (or should I say propagations)! It’s so hard to choose just one, but…

The use of National Park Service information cards as a format to explore trans identity and desire and anxieties. The metaphor of a trans person’s life as a nurse log, a tree that sustains the life of other young trees and plants, is really affecting.

The expectations, realities, and hope in Talicha J.’s “another year sprouts” connect with me profoundly. I’ve gotten so many ming aralias, and tell myself this time it’ll be different, this time I’ll be different.

Sreeja Naskar’s three poems “i unsaint myself in front of the mirror,” “after they left, the garden wouldn’t bloom / but the weeds did,” and “she left in autumn and everything I’ve planted since has grown teeth” that are an emotional journey linking the botanical world with profoundly queer love and equally profound loss are perennial favorites.

With the world being what it is, who doesn’t want to just smoke some oui’d with the ancestors surrounded and held by green space? June Beck’s “A text message to a New York Navajo” totally gets it.

Anangookwe Wolf’s “i want clean water god dammit” begins with a remembrance interrupted by the insistence of colonialism, industrialism, capitalist expansion and extraction.

It weaves through the centuries of loss of indigenous identity and wildlife, our struggles and strides to protect and cultivate it, and then culminates in the ferocious, but reasonable demand “i don’t want concrete                                I want clean water.”

I feel this one in my marrow.

ALOCASIA: 99 queer writers on plants and nature is available to order now!

Sarah Clark is a disabled two-spirit Nanticoke editor, writer, and freelance editor and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, EIC at beestung, and Co-editor of the Bettering American Poetry series, and a Board member at Sundress Publications. They were co-editor of two folios at Apogee Journal, #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and their series WE OUTLAST EMPIRE and Place[meant]. You can find them at: https://linktr.ee/sarah_clark.

Ashely Adams is a Michigan-based writer and educator whose work explores both present and ancient ecologies. Her writing has appeared in Flyway, The Fourth River, and other places.

Tara Rahman 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. With a strong interest in culture, identity, and global history, her personal writing focuses on intersectionality and the untold stories of marginalized communities.

Project Bookshelf: Franchesca Nicole Lazaro

In 2021, I realized my books deserved better than being scattered across random corners of my bedroom, stacked on tool racks meant for boxes and hardware. That’s when I bought two white IKEA Billy bookshelves and finally gave my collection a proper home. Now, as I prepare to move from Seattle to San Jose for a new job, I’m sorting through which books will accompany me and which will stay behind with my parents. It’s a bittersweet process as these shelves have become a map of who I am as a reader and, increasingly, as an editor.

My two Billy bookshelves sit side by side in my room, each with three shelves and a cabinet underneath. On top, I keep my stuffed animals (because even serious readers need plush friends). I organize my shelves by genre first, then by author, never by color or size, even if it’s aesthetically pleasing. Authors must belong together, and series must match. I also keep overflow books in the drawers of my IKEA bed frame. 

The right bookshelf is dedicated entirely to manga, which was my first love when it comes to reading. The top shelf holds books about manga: the Citi Museum exhibition book about manga from Thames & Hudson, edited by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere and Ryoko Matsuba; Paul Gravett’s Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics, and Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics. 

The second and third shelves hold my yearly reading selections, almost entirely shoujo and josei manga, the genres that center women’s and girls’ interior lives in ways that first taught me what it meant to see yourself in a story. In the cabinet below are my larger collections, some seinen titles, art books, and anime-related materials, which are an overflow of a collection that continues to grow despite my best efforts at restraint.

The left bookshelf is where my non-manga reading lives. The top shelf is nonfiction, and it’s heavy with feminist theory and authors’ autobiographies and diaries. Here you’ll find Anaïs Nin’s diaries alongside Patricia Highsmith’s notebooks, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique next to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, within reach. These are the books that taught me how women write their own lives and claim authority over their stories.

The second shelf is fiction—literary fiction, to be specific. These are my yearly reads, the books I want close at hand: Colette’s complete Claudine novel, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, and Mary McCarthy’s The Group. One of my favorites is Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater, about an unnamed narrator, a mother with nameless children and wife to a successful screenwriter, who finds herself isolated within her own family. Mortimer is a largely forgotten writer, and I’m grateful NYRB Classics brought this 1960s novel back into print. It’s the kind of book I want to champion as an editor: women’s voices that deserve to be rediscovered.

The third shelf is divided between two seemingly distinct interests: fashion modeling books (including Jean Stein’s biography of Edie Sedgwick) and books on book design and covers. The latter includes Penguin by Design by Phil Baines, The Penguin Classics Book by Henry Eliot, The Design of Books by Adrian Wilson, and Peter Mendelsund’s The Look of the Book. As someone working in publishing, I’m fascinated by how books present themselves to the world, such as how a cover can be an invitation or a statement, and how design shapes our reading experience.

In the cabinet below are my art books, remnants from when I was an artist-in-training while attending art school. I’ve put art on hold for now, but I can’t part with these books. They’re evidence of who I was, and maybe who I’ll be again someday. 

If I trace my reading life backward, I can see how I got here. In middle and high school, I loved The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, To Kill a Mockingbird, and East of Eden. These books showed me how stories could carry weight, teach empathy, and complicate easy answers. Those books then led me to feminist theory, to women’s autobiographies, to the kind of literary fiction that centers women’s interior lives. And all of it, eventually, led me to editing and wanting to help bring more of these voices into the world. I’m still building parts of my collection. I’m searching for more books about asexual voices and women writing from religious backgrounds. I have Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, Lucy Delap’s Feminisms, Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, and Susan Sontag’s essays. But there are gaps I’m working to fill, stories I’m still looking for!

Right now, my favorite books are The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. The book I recently purchased is The Art of Manga, edited by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, a curated collection that examines manga as an art form. As I’m writing this, I’m looking to purchase The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins, a book on navigating a leadership role at a new company!

To close this tour off, these bookshelves won’t make the move to California, and they’ll stay behind in Seattle. But the books themselves, or at least most of them, will come with me. They’re the foundation of everything I want to do as an editor. They’re proof that the stories we keep close shape the stories we want to help tell.

Franchesca Nicole Lazaro is an emerging editor with a passion for developmental editing and book production. She previously worked with Brink Literary Project and currently works with Tulipwood Press. Her editorial interests center on amplifying perspectives from women, asexual voices, and religious backgrounds, particularly in literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction that explores feminism, history, technology, and media studies. She is learning Japanese and maintains a blog on women’s comics and reading. Franchesca is relocating from Seattle, Washington, to San Jose, California.

Project Bookshelf: Reina Maiden-Navarro

Ten volunteers, thousands of books, one week. Every summer, I volunteered with my mom at my elementary school’s library. We catalogued, sleeved, and organized every single book before the upcoming school year. I spent hours removing marker stains from hardcovers, scraping stickers off of paperbacks, and taping the spines of new inventory. I learned how to care for books in the most literal and physical way. 

Sometimes, I wish I could be the person who leaves annotations in my books, embracing a more lived-in library. However, those childhood summers ingrained in me the firm importance of prioritizing the longevity of my books, particularly for sharing them with friends and family members.

One of my most loved, most shared, and one with the most wear-and-tear, is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It’s a book that has served as a bridge between my nana and me in my early childhood. As I’ve gotten older, it’s become all the more precious. Two years ago, we even took a trip to Concord, Massachusetts, to visit the author’s home together.

My first copies of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins have been read the most times out of any book on my shelf. They are a huge indicator of the kind of books I adored in middle school and high school, and they’re still the books that make me want to make a career out of publishing the most.

In college, my bookshelf became peppered with a wide-array of genres. 

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is reflective of the kind of Gothic fiction that reminds me of my partner. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler finally gave me the vocabulary to describe my favorite subgenre as speculative fiction. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde grew my love for classic literature as I explored a minor in Creative Writing. Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner and many other memoirs got me through my study abroad program. Laura Horak’s Girls Will Be Boys paints a clear picture of the queer-focused lens that much of my undergraduate degree in Film & Media Studies centered on. 

As my personal library expands, I’ll keep preserving, loving, and sharing my books. I hope to take this same care to my work with Sundress Publications as I support and contribute to the writing being published this season.

A white woman is standing in front of a tree in a grove. She has short, dark red hair. She is wearing a black dress with white trim and a blue graduation stole with the words "UC Irvine" embroidered on it with gold thread.

Reina Maiden-Navarro is an editor, writer, and photographer. She recently graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in Film & Media Studies and a minor in Creative Writing, cum laude. She also works as an Editor at Prompt and an Outreach Coordinator at Bookstr. If she is not reading or writing, she can be found traveling, painting, or baking cookies.

Project Bookshelf: Greyson Finch

When I was a kid, my mom taught me the importance of books. As a published author and a single mother working full time at a small-town newspaper, she knew the value of the written word. And I grew to love them. She got me a bookshelf, painted the outside purple and the inside green. By the time I was six, it was filled to the brim with books. Chapter books, picture books, pop up books. Something of nearly every genre and age range. The shelves sagged under the weight of thousands of words. That same shelf now sits in my kid sister’s room, filled with different books, but the same weight.

When I was in my teens, I outgrew that tiny bookshelf. My books were longer, heavier. They would no longer fit. So, for Yule one year, my parents bought me a large black-and-silver bookshelf. One with enough space to fit all of my books and my trinkets. I reorganized that shelf a hundred times while I had it. Sometimes alphabetically by author last name, sometimes rainbow order. But it was always full. Fantasy, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and every story I could get my hands on. I think that’s what made me love writing so much. Reading stories by so many people about so many things. Every time a book made me cry, I found myself desperate to recreate that feeling in my own writing.

At twenty-one, I moved out of Oklahoma and up to Virginia. I packed all of my belongings into my tiny 2007 two-door Honda civic and drove across the country in two days. However, in order to do that, I had to get rid of as much of my stuff as I could. I sold or donated almost every book that I owned. The only ones I kept were either a part of my religious practice, or books I was in the middle of. Once I got to Virginia, I got sucked under the wave of my life. I was a full time college student working as much as I could to get some money.

I finally started reading again when I decided to switch my major to poetry. It was the best decision I’ve ever made. They say there’s no money in poetry. I don’t believe that. But, even if I did, I wouldn’t care. Even if poetry couldn’t keep my stomach fed, it nourishes my soul. Now, my bookshelf has a total of twelve books. Norse and Greek mythology for my religious practice, several fantasy books, and a handful of poetry books that I’ve annotated a little too much.

I’ll work on growing my collection again when I have an actual bookshelf to grow it on. But, for now, I like my small anthology of myth, magic, and poetry.

Greyson Finch (he/him) is a poet from Oklahoma. Throughout his life, he’s struggled with his mental health and childhood trauma while also growing up queer in the South. He uses that to write pieces that speak to the soul. Pieces that people like him can read to know they’re not alone. He’s been published in The Bloomin’ Onion and Wingless Dreamer. He can be found on twitter at @Greyson_Finch77 and Instagram at @greysonfinchwrites

We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Jackie Domenus

For this month’s installment of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, our editorial intern, Reina Maiden-Navarro, interviews author Jackie Domenus about their first book, No Offense: A Memoir in Essays (ELJ Editions, 2025). The memoir blends anecdote with sociopolitical fact to take a critical lens to the microaggressions that persist from an individual adolescence to adulthood, reflective of a larger experience in the LGBTQ+ community since the turn of the century. Domenus is honest, confessional, and passionate, crafting a book that is both relatable and educational. 

Reina Maiden-Navarro: Can you explain your decision to organize your memoir non-chronologically? How did you look at structure and flow in terms of craft?

Jackie Domenus: When it comes to queer and trans memoirs (and really any memoir for that matter), I believe in the structure matching the content. My understanding of myself, of my sexuality, and my gender, was/is not linear. As is the case for more “traditional” memoirs, I didn’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end with a neat resolution, so the essays in No Offense came out non-chronologically naturally. In order to determine what order I’d put them in, I took post-it notes and wrote the ages that were mentioned in each essay. From there, I arranged and re-arranged the post-its to follow a loose arc from my earliest, formative moments and microaggressive conversations, to the latest. So ultimately, the order of the essays is somewhat chronological, but the threads in each individual essay jump around in time and surround a central theme or idea.

RMN: How do you believe outside anecdotes, facts, and statistics contribute to the telling of such a personal story? What did your research process look like?

JD: For me, incorporating anecdotes, facts, and statistics into this book was a means of zooming out of my own personal experience and proving that the issues I am addressing exist in a larger context, meaning they affect others beyond just me. For instance, in the essay “Blind Spots,” I include statistics about women in the automotive business as a means of supporting my own experience of being ignored at a car dealership. Or in the essay “Thoughts and Prayers,” I include quotes from politicians reacting to the Pulse Nightclub massacre, to demonstrate that their words cause direct harm to the LGBTQ+ community at large. My research process is not very organized—it’s a lot of searching for a bunch of supporting evidence on the Internet, copying and pasting links into random documents, and deciding later which sources to actually incorporate.

RMN: The year before you published this book, you were a resident at the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA). How did stepping away from your day-to-day life help you write about it?

JD: Spending time at the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) was so refreshing for my creative process. Having dedicated time away from day-to-day life gave me the opportunity to catch up on some reading, to start drafting some new material outside of the book, and perhaps most importantly, to rest. Writing-wise, I started scratching the surface of some different themes like grief and mental illness, which I hope will be an early step toward a new, full-length project. I also had no experience with farm life before Sundress, so feeding the goats and collecting eggs from the chicken coop was a first for me and an added bonus!

RMN: You’re both a writer and a former English teacher. Yet, you also speak at length about the films that shaped your understanding of your sexuality, particularly in the chapter “Queer or Crazy.” Do you think there is a unique power in visual visibility? How do you think written forms compare?

JD: I think visibility in any artistic medium is equally powerful. If I had access to books with the same sort of sapphic representation that films like the ones I write about in “Queer or Crazy” offered, I might have written about those instead. In my opinion, it’s less about comparing the forms and more about making sure representation is offered in every medium, so folks have easily accessible options, no matter their preference for books versus music versus on screen, etc.

RMN: Can you speak to the separation of past and present self when it comes to your personal perception of your gender identity? How did your evolution of identity impact the editing of the book?

JD: My perception of my gender and the evolution of my identity was perhaps what made for the trickiest part of editing the book. I had written some of the earliest essays when I was still very femme-presenting and adhering to cis norms, so the perspective of the voice in those pieces was very different from my perspective now. I struggled with deciding whether to leave those early essays as-is, to revise them from my current point of view, or to remove them from the manuscript completely. Ultimately, I ended up keeping most of them as-is, but adding a foreword at the beginning of the book to explain my decision and make that differentiation.

RMN: How do you approach writing your story with authenticity, even when it comes to divulging your own missteps?

JD: The missteps are what make us human. Personally, I would not enjoy reading a memoir where the narrator speaks as if they are perfect, or as if everyone else they’ve ever encountered is a villain in their story. I think maybe the best example of writing with authenticity and truth in No Offense is in the essay “Burden of Proof,” where I talk about my first year teaching high school and had a trans student who was mistreated by the school and his peers. My lack of understanding of transness at that point, mixed with my naivety and non-tenured status as a new teacher, ultimately led to some missteps in how I interacted with that student and failure to advocate for him properly. To write myself as some queer savior would have been inauthentic and false, and no one wants to read inauthentic, false creative nonfiction.

RMN: As an educator, what is the value of exposing students to diverse lived experiences, particularly through literature? How do you hope your own writing contributes to that purpose?

JD: When I was teaching high school English, students who got their hands on books where they could see their own experiences reflected back at them were always the most enthusiastic to read or to talk about what they read, as were students who read about a character that led them to a new realization about themselves. Again, in the same way they might have access to Netflix shows or new movies, having the opportunity to pick up a book with diverse representation or lived experiences can open up a whole new world of understanding. As far as No Offense goes, my main audience priority has always been other LGBTQ+ folks who can relate, but I also hope it can reach people who are not a part of the community and offer them a new perspective or make them think twice the next time they go to say or ask something potentially harmful.

RMN: Finally, do you have any new projects you’d like to tell us about?

JD: The project I’m super focused on and very excited about at the moment is The QT (Queer & Trans) Nonfiction Podcast! It’s a weekly show I’m hosting that explores the best of today’s memoirs, essay collections, journalism, and more by LGBTQ+ authors. Folks can listen in on discussions of nonfiction forms, craft, language, publication, and beyond. Some fiction and poetry QTs, as well as supportive allies, will even be sprinkled in throughout! Reading and sharing true stories from queer and trans perspectives feels more important now than ever. Our words are proof of our existence, which is now, in and of itself, a form of resistance. I’ve had some incredible writers and friends on so far, such as KB Brookins, Zoë Bossiere, and Edgar Gomez, to name a few. It’s available on Podbean, Spotify, and Apple.

No Offense: A Memoir in Essays is available through ELJ Editions

[A white person is standing in front of a row of wooden bookshelves, brimming with colorful books. They have white skin, cropped brown hair, and brown eyes. They are wearing a blue and white jean jacket over a black shirt and a silver chain, their hands in the pockets of the jacket.]

Jackie Domenus (they/she) is a queer, gender nonconforming writer from South Jersey. Their first book, No Offense: A Memoir in Essays (ELJ Editions), was named a finalist for a 2025 Publishing Triangle Award and a Notable Small Press Book of 2025 by Literary Hub. A former Sundress Academy for the Arts resident and Tin House Workshop graduate, Jackie’s work has appeared in HuffPost, The Normal School, Foglifter Journal, and elsewhere. They are the host of the new Queer & Trans Nonfiction Podcast.

[A white woman is standing in front of a tree in a grove. She has short, dark red hair. She is wearing a black dress with white trim and a blue graduation stole with the words "UC Irvine" embroidered on it with gold thread.]


Reina Maiden-Navarro is an editor, writer, and photographer. She recently graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in Film & Media Studies and a minor in Creative Writing, cum laude. She also works as an Editor at Prompt and an Outreach Coordinator at Bookstr. If she is not reading or writing, she can be found traveling, painting, or baking cookies.

An Interview with Abigail Raley, Author of Wet Specimen

Following the release of her first full-length collection, Wet Specimen, Abigail Raley spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Franchesca Nicole Lazaro. Here, they discussed the materiality and spectacle of the body in death, illness, and eroticism, the need for resistance against rigid gender, domestic, and ecological hierarchies, and the power of embracing our natural, “feral” selves.

Franchesca Nicole Lazaro: In “Ode to Fetal Deer,” the speaker observes: “your small body cold beneath the jar’s collapsed glass womb, your brine, mine too.” In “Flying Fox,” she writes: “Make my mouth the warehouse for your cherub’s thunder, I think, and semen trickles down my thin red jowl.” How does the body function as both a specimen and a beast in its own right?

Abigail Raley: I wrote Wet Specimen during my MFA at the University of Montana, and my professor Sean Hill took us to the zoological museum. I was taken with the way creatures are made into observable specimens. I’m also taken with the idea of spectacle, what it means to be observed or watched. The wet specimen doubles what the creature actually is—meaning it is itself, but it’s also a tool for observation. When I was at the zoological museum, I was looking at this fetal bighorn sheep, and I was thinking about how the hospital is like that too. I have cystic fibrosis, which means when I’m hospitalized, I have to be kept in a sterile environment, much like that of the specimen jar. The same doubling happens in the hospital. I am me, but I’m also a medical object under observation. That doubling also happens in eroticism, as in I am me, but I am also the erotic object you’re observing. I think that specimen/beast duality you’re tracking has to do with those divisions/replications.

FNL: In “M.A.S.H.,” the speaker tells herself: “Men’s fingers are just fingers, not bullets.” What does dissociation during intimacy or within desire reveal about the humans and animals in this collection?

AR: I’m interested in how you track dissociation throughout the work because, for me, it’s less about dissociation and more about hope. “M.A.S.H.” is a poem full of violence and grief, but the speaker of that poem is futilely hoping/trusting that those violences won’t happen. I think there’s a use in that hope, even if it is futile. I don’t think “M.A.S.H.” is a poem particularly tracking dissociation or intimacy at all. I think “M.A.S.H.” is my little utopia, where I get to be a girl forever. Of course, I don’t get to be a girl forever, and I have experienced violence, so the poem doesn’t get to live in that necessarily. I want it to, though.

FNL: In “Beast,” the speaker reflects: “Maybe it is the edge of your esophagus. In every iteration, I am touching your soft inside. There is blood in my mouth.” How does hunting function as consumption in this collection?

AR: Again, I’m so excited by your read of this section, because I haven’t had hunting on the mind, but this book is hunting quite a bit throughout. Certainly, I’m interested in consumption. Erotic experience as consumption is a pretty common trope, but I’m also interested in how it occurs naturally in non-human animals. The poems “Flying Fox” and “Anglerfish” do this most explicitly, I think, and they are some of my hungriest poems. A lot of the book is just me finding cool animal facts and writing about them. Hunting is inherently a consumptive process, so it makes sense to me that those two things would be bound together.

FNL: In “Ripe,” the speaker recalls: “a man I loved once said, I’m only waiting for you to die.” Later: “by mature, he meant your body has so much to hold, your silence.” How does physical presence in relationships aggravate domesticity for the speaker in this collection?

AR: There was a time where I was into the idea that the domestic environment was a physically entrapping space. I wrote a poem that didn’t make it into the book about the process of making a roux. I don’t know if you’ve ever made roux, but it requires a lot of standing in one place and stirring. If you stop for even a second, it could burn. The task of making it, then, is a sort of trap, if a bit low stakes. I’m curious as to how physical positions of the body govern behavior. Domesticity creates situations where bodies are coming up against each other in really animal ways. Maybe I just think that domesticity is inherently aggravated and aggravating.

FNL: In “Aubade with Cystic Fibrosis,” the speaker writes: “there was once a creature that emerged from my coffin of a throat and said, feed me” and closes with “that didn’t shake me down bright air, that didn’t consist of my body just waking up.” How does domination become intentional submission in this collection?

AR: “Aubade with Cystic Fibrosis” is about my experience with a chronically ill body. A good person to look at for this question, who has been a massive inspiration in my life, is Bob Flanagan. Flanagan had cystic fibrosis, and he did BDSM performance art and poetry. He found that submission to controlled pain was the only way to take control of the involuntary chronic pain caused by his cystic fibrosis. Submission was a necessary joy in his life. It is a gift to choose submission, because chronic illness takes that choice from you. I have no choice but to submit to illness. Maybe that poem takes on Flanagan’s choice more than I thought. To choose submission is a powerful thing.

FNL: In “But Heaven,” the speaker moves from “I was far from you and getting farther. The open air around me folded. I knew the earth would never be renewed” to closing on “I gazed, I thought of you, I smiled.” How does the collection move from feral energy to potential energy?

AR: I wonder about “feral” and “potential” as oppositional descriptors. Would feral energy be something indulgent, acted upon? And then potential energy the restrictive or repressed? Curious about your thoughts on this! I’m interested in blending death and love, but in a way that recognizes death as a banal happening. I’m obsessed with the materiality of the body, both in death and in eroticism. Maybe that’s where your feral/potential energy dichotomy is coming up.

FNL: In “Squall,” the speaker observes: “I watch the flock churn while he touches me, their nearly colliding bodies making use of all that space. His hand postures one thigh open, then the other, my stomach wide and flat as a saucer. The birds flurry, their high backs furrowing the air.” How does the speaker’s relationship with the beasts subvert the speaker’s interpersonal relationships in this collection?

AR: I love Donna Haraway’s book, Staying with the Trouble. In it, she talks about kinship in what she terms “the cthuluscene.” In the introduction to Staying with the Trouble, Haraway says, “The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.” Disability theory also contends with this interconnectedness, but Haraway focuses on interspecies kinship, which I find to be profoundly resonant, important, and true. If human-to-human relationships are subverted in the collection, it’s because they are put on the same terrain as the animal-to-human and animal-to-animal relationships. I see Wet Specimen as a book that rejects hierarchies which place human relationships and behavior at the top, which is also connected to my perspective of bodies as pure material.

FNL: In “The New Sensation,” the speaker cries: “I have been thieved out of my body, elixered into an orgy of sensation” and closes with “Give me shape again. I am a blank field. Clarify my hill.” What role does grief play in the speaker’s relationship to her body?

AR: “The New Sensation” is that feeling you have when you’re sick and all you want is the emptiness of health. Sickness illuminates how empty the body can be because it is a state of fullness. That poem to me is grieving the senseless body, or maybe it’s grieving a mind unaware of the body. One of the blessings and curses of chronic illness is an incessant awareness of the body. On the one hand, the intimate awareness of the body is quite beautiful, but on the other hand, the pain of sensation is overwhelming.

FNL: In “Trapped in the Conga Line, I Ruminate on Intimacy,” the speaker reflects: “my hands on his body say, come home, say you’re tense, say let me move you… We will unfleetingly and without hesitation touch each other through the dark.” What does physical intimacy reveal about the expression of love in this collection?

AR: I just love community. Not that everyone should be going around touching strangers, but we’re offered so few moments to honestly engage with one another. Technology has only widened the gap between community members. Even in my small hometown, our community is deeply stratified. Most of the love throughout the book is romantic or erotic love. “Conga Line” is one of the few poems about platonic love. We’re all just creatures looking for connection to each other, so we make up these little excuses to create intimacy. The conga line is one such intimacy.

FNL: In “Landscape with Magpies Nesting in the Blizzard,” the speaker confesses: “I think I was bad in my life. I think I did something wrong” and closes with “I’m sorry. Can I begin again? I mean I looked out the window and saw the birds and I only thought of being loved.” What does the direct address of the source of pain solve for the speaker in this collection?

AR: I’m not sure that I get a lot solved in the collection at all! I’m not very interested in solutions. I don’t think they often actually exist in life, at least not permanent ones. Disability resists solution all the time. My illness is not solvable. I’ll live with it until I die, and it’s not just me. We’ve all got to die. There’s no solution to that. We can diagnose the source of pain all day long, but that doesn’t mean it’s solved. We are mostly unknown to ourselves and each other. I’m not sure the speaker solves much, either. The end of that poem is so odd. There’s a gap between the externality of the birds and the seemingly unrelated internal experience of the speaker. Why would one watch birds and only think of being loved? There’s a mismatch between the external world and the internal world, even if the speaker seems to feel that she’s figured something out about herself.

Wet Specimen is available to order now!

Abigail Raley (she/they) is a queer poet and library worker from Bowling Green, Kentucky. She is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana and is a current PhD candidate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Hanging Loose Magazine, HAD, The Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere, and feature themes of animalism, release, and the body as a grotesque vessel of sensuality and tenderness. Find her on Instagram @willyoubemyvalentine. Wet Specimen is Raley’s first full-length collection.

Franchesca Nicole Lazaro is an emerging editor with a passion for developmental editing and book production. She previously worked with Brink Literary Project and currently works with Tulipwood Press. Her editorial interests center on amplifying perspectives from women, asexual voices, and religious backgrounds, particularly in literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction that explores feminism, history, technology, and media studies. She is learning Japanese and maintains a blog on women’s comics and reading. Franchesca is relocating from Seattle, Washington, to San Jose, California.

Project Bookshelf: Ruoyu Wang

One row of a bookshelf with several books lined up next to each other vertically and their spines visible, not organized by any particular color or author or genre.

I’m home for winter break from college right now, so the picture right here is actually of my bookshelf at college. I filled about ⅔ of one shelf with all the books I wanted to bring with me from home: a mixture of my favorites in addition to books that I’ve yet to read but thought would be pertinent for my first year away from home. 

My bookshelf is mostly poetry, some essays, two novellas, and two full-length novels. I like to think about my teenage years in terms of which poetry collection felt most formative for me at the time. In 2022, it was Hard Damage by Aria Aber, 2023’s was I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes, and 2024’s was The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan. I know Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is technically a novel written in verse, but I think of it as a poetry collection, so I’ll say that for 2025. There are other novels I love, too, of course, like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (not on my shelf!), but I think I’m a writer who usually wants to talk more about poetry. 

I associate a lot of my favorites with loved ones in my life, so for example, I’ve come to associate I Do Everything I’m Told with my friends Mimi and Andrew, both of whom also love Megan Fernandes’s work. I first read her brilliant sonnet crown “The False Beloveds with One Exception (or, Repetition Compulsion)” online in The Kenyon Review a few summers ago, and I just couldn’t get it out of my head. When I read and reread her poems, I also become obsessed with the orbits of devotion, distance, and the sense of wonder and charm that can lend itself to the messiest, most transitional periods in life. 

The same bookshelf shown from a higher angle looking down, making visible the six Smiskis (small toy figurines that are green) placed decoratively on the top of the bookshelf, in addition to a potted plant.

One collection I always bring with me everywhere is The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi, which I first read in the fall of 2023 and have reread two or three times since then. It’s quite a short collection—being almost entirely untitled prose poems—but I recommend it to everyone I know and even pulled quotes from it for my Gender Studies project this semester. Dorothea Lasky’s Rome is one I read almost entirely in the waiting area of a Chinese restaurant in Richmond, Canada, and I read Hala Alyan’s The Twenty-Ninth Year in my favorite park, spread across a few days’ sunsets last June. 

I love my book(shelf) collection at school partially because it fits into such a small space, partially because it’s the first thing I see when I exit or enter my dorm room, and partially because on top of it, I can set the Smiski figurines my friends have gifted to me over time. I don’t plan on buying new books anytime soon because I’m trying to take full advantage of my college’s extensive library, but I’m so grateful to have my own bookshelf-library that gets to stay with me through the years.

An East Asian, non-binary individual standing on a walkway outside of a building in the evening and visible from the chest and elbows up. They have short brown hair and are wearing a white blouse under a black blazer.

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.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents June Poetry Xfit

Knoxville, TN — 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, June 28th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”.

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!

The theme for June’s Xfit is “Celebration.” Celebration doesn’t have to be loud or explosive–it can look like appreciation for the sun rising in the morning, the warmth of hearing from an old friend, or stumbling upon wildflowers on your walk. Whether your current celebrations are momentous or simple, let them find a home in your next poem.

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.

While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.

This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission.