For this installment of We Call Upon the Author to Explain we had the tremendous honor of getting to speak to award winning writer, educator, speaker, and activist Noel Quiñones about their brilliant collection Orange, out May 5th with CavanKerry Press. This collection explores the importance of time and place and the impact both have on who we are and how we grow. Orange is a wonderfully inventive and interactive collection that manages to engage with serious subjects while also delighting the senses. It’s a beautiful collection that is sure to make you both think and smile.

Ada Wofford: On the color wheel, orange is opposite blue, making blue the complimentary color of orange. Blue, as in “the blues,” “feeling blue,” etc. Was this a conscious connection you made when choosing the title Orange for this collection? If not, what do you think about this connection and is this a fair reading of the title?

Noel Quiñones: Funnily enough, orange has been my favorite color since childhood. I’ve asked my parents and none of us can remember when I first fell in love with it but that once I did, I was obsessed. My friends called me “orange boy” in middle school because I would show up in an orange winter coat, hat, gloves, and backpack over my Catholic school uniform. I wrote a poem in college about how misunderstood I felt for my love of orange, but little did I know how right I was.

There was a very early version of this collection that was split into six sections, one for each of the primary and secondary colors: red, blue, yellow, orange, green, and violet. I tried to fit poems into my very basic understandings of these colors, a.k.a. blue meant sadness, red meant anger, yellow meant joy, etc. I was continually frustrated by this constraint and so I started researching color history and color theory, the art and science of how colors affect humans. I was absolutely blown away as I learned that colors are so much more nuanced and dynamic than I ever could have conceived. Blue, while traditionally the color of sadness, became associated with the divine when used in the twelfth century to depict the Virgin Mary; today it is at the height of its popularity, as a survey of hundreds of countries found that blue is people’s favorite color by a considerable margin. Yellow, while of course associated with value, beauty, and joy, has at the same time meant contamination, rebellion, and perversion; most famously the 1890s were known as the “Yellow Nineties” as artists pushed back against the repression of Victorian values.

Orange, it turns out, has always been hard to pin down. In reading Joann Eckstut and Arielle Eckstut’s The Secret Language of Color, I was struck by this quote: “For millennia, orange was a color without an identity. In many languages, it’s one of the very last, if not the last, color named in the rainbow.” Cultural historian Kassia St. Clair, in her book The Secret Lives of Color, talks about a similar difficulty with orange. Since it wasn’t considered its own distinct color until relatively recently, it is “forever in danger of sliding into another color: red and yellow on either side, brown below.” Without knowing it, I had chosen a color as a toddler that exemplified complexity, one that invited frustration, confusion, awe, and engagement. This made it a perfect and yet completely unplanned title.

AW: In the poem, “How to Color Mami” you use the phrase, “the sky in your world.” I was very struck by this phrase and its use of the word “your.” In a literal sense we all share the same sky and the same world, but of course it often doesn’t feel like that when faced with the reality of the disparity that exists among individuals. Can you speak a bit about why you chose this phrasing and what it means to you?

NQ: I am so happy you felt pulled to this line, it is one of my favorite lines in the whole book! I want to cite the whole line though for context: “Won’t you draw the color of the sky in your world?” First, I love it because of how random its source is, haha. The line comes from an interview with the developer of my favorite video game of all time, Psychonauts, where you play as psychic cadet being trained on how to enter someone else’s mind and help them work through their mental struggles, whether it be depression, bipolar disorder, etc. Second, there is a color theory fact that I love: no two people on the entire planet see the exact same shade of any color. This disparity in individual experience, as you name, was central to my collection as I navigated three different peoples experience of a divorce: my mother, my father, and myself.

I chose this phrasing, put the phrase in my mother’s voice, and made this poem the first in the book because I wanted to invite the reader to consider that not only are there many different skies, but so often we don’t even get asked the question. We presume we are sharing the same experience or, when faced with a diversity of perspective, run away from the weight of holding multiple truths at once. As the first poem, I wanted readers to hopefully hold this question as they journeyed through the collection.

AW: “How to Spit Game on Mosholu Parkway” struck me as a time capsule of the early 2000s. Later in the collection you fittingly title another reference-laden poem, “The Time Capsule.” I grew up during this time too and was charmed by the various references in these two poems (the HitClips one especially made me smile), but for younger readers who did not experience that decade, what do you hope they take away from these poems?

NQ: HitClips forever! My cousin actually still has hers; we found them when unpacking her boxes after a move. Building on that, I hope the take away is that we must cherish our knickknacks. I don’t expect younger readers to know or research all of my references, but I do hope my love for this decade, for these random trends, items, and slang, endears them to do the same.

As a fellow millennial, you understand that we straddled two worlds, the analog and the digital. As we continue to move online, I find myself more and more attached to the physical. I have a VHS and DVD collection, I’ve been keeping every movie ticket I ever got since 2009, and I have binders of Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I believe there is something important about keeping things, for nostalgic reasons of course, but also for historical documentation. And so, I hope younger readers create their own time capsules like I did.

AW: Can you speak about the importance of “place” in this collection and how you use it? (I’m referring to your use of various references to places such as Jerome Ave, the Bronx, “Dogshit Park,” even Burger King; but feel free to take it further than this if you wish to speak about an inner space, a metaphorical space, etc.)

NQ: This feels so connected to the previous question. Growing up, all I heard about the Bronx was how terrible, ghetto, dirty, disgusting, dangerous, and ignored it was. On top of that, when people said these things, they directed them toward the South Bronx. I grew up in the North Bronx, in a tight knit community, where there was of course danger but also connection.

This collection is a time capsule in and of itself, for not just a time period but a place that was never talked about. The North Bronx is worthy of stories, historical documentation, and celebration. I want more pieces of art about the Bronx, about Oakland, about the Southside of Chicago, about all the places in our country so stereotyped, misunderstood, and silenced that we don’t even consider them “places”. What few stories we have about the Bronx are negative, and so I hope that Orange can be a story that contradicts, that combats, and makes people question what they believe about my hometown.

AW: Ms. Frizzle is another distinctly Millennial reference, why did you choose her to be a character in this collection?

NQ: Orange is deeply influenced by my mother’s job as an elementary school teacher of 29 years in the South Bronx. I like to say that my mother was a teacher both at work and at home. She truly enjoyed teaching and saw learning as a necessary part of life, whether it was reading books, visiting museums, or attending cultural events. This made it particularly hard to watch her feelings toward teaching sour over time, not because of teaching itself, but because of the New York Department of Education’s ever shifting and last-minute mandates and society’s lack of investment in teachers. When I made the decision to become a teacher, she cautioned me against it. But her influence had already been cemented; I wanted to do what she did. I’ve proudly taught high school for over 7 years.

As I mentioned before, I grew up hearing the most terrible things about the Bronx. But it went beyond that because I was being “taught” how to view the place I lived at the same time I loved where I grew up. I knew that I wanted to find a way to write poems about these dangerous perceptions, that I needed a persona to hold these contradicting themes. But who?

The answer came when I saw a post from @millennialmisery on Instagram (to anyone reading this, please follow if you grew up in the 90s, it is so funny and nostalgic!). They had posted a GIF from an episode of The Magic School Bus, where Ms. Frizzle takes her students through the life cycle of salmon. Not only is the school bus transformed into a salmon, but the students are turned into salmon fish eggs and then fertilized. The caption of the GIF read, “Remember when the Magic School Bus kids got jizzed on by salmon?” The comments were filled with hysterical comments about how Ms. Frizzle would get put in jail for consistently putting her students in danger. I laughed and laughed and laughed and then had a lightbulb moment.

What if we not only named Ms. Frizzle’s negligence, but also humanized her by highlighting the challenges of teaching? By using this larger-than-life character, I could showcase the nuances of being a teacher as well as the very act of teaching. I ended up writing a series of poems in the voice of Ms. Frizzle, trying my best to show her reservations, her well-intentions, her biases, her adventurousness, and her deviousness. In her I had found a way to comment on the larger themes of my collection without relying on my loved ones, offering a distance that I hope invoked the lofty power and responsibility teachers had.

AW:  This might somewhat relate to the last question, but as an educator what value do you think poetry has as an educational tool—both for teachers using poetry in the classroom as well as for readers engaging with poetry outside of the classroom on their own terms?

NQ: I am currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center (CPC), where I get to teach poetry in Chicago public schools across the city. One of my favorite schools I teach at, a largely first-generation immigrant middle school, has continued to prove to me that poetry has incredible value as an educational tool. I have many students who have either recently learned English or are trying to improve their ability in it. Poetry allows them the opportunity to see language as a playground, not a strict set of rules that overwhelms them. CPC encourages us to tell students that we don’t care about your spelling or grammar during our sessions; we care about you expressing yourself to the best of your ability. This invitation, to not just wordplay but also telling a story on your own terms, has produced poems that remind me every week of the power of this art form. I could describe some here, but I’d rather encourage people to read some of the student poems at our website; we publish 2-3 poems a week from all of our classrooms across the city.

As for people engaging with poetry outside of the classroom, I am so encouraged by the way spoken word poetry has expanded and continued poetry’s important cultural legacy. While all creative writing allows for people to feel connected to another’s story, I believe there is a unique openness and care in poetry, with its invitation to break conventions, to say the thing beneath the thing, to elicit emotion at the smallest levels of language that teach us all how to “feel.”

AW: This collection is wonderfully engaging, from scanning a QR code to having to hold one poem up to a mirror in order to read it, why did you decide that this approach was essential to what you were aiming to express/accomplish with this collection?

NQ: As a high school student, I was introduced to poetry through spoken word, where interaction was a mandatory part of it. We used our voice and body language to bring the audience more intimately into the poem. I wanted to do the same thing on the page, to push against the passiveness of the reading experience, to invite the reader to collaborate in meaning making, and perhaps gain something deeper from having to engage.

At the same time, this collection is about understanding my parent’s decisions through and after their divorce, accepting my queer identity, and learning accountability as an AMAB person. These were all, and still are, struggles I am navigating, and so I created these poetic forms that require some kind of effort, in the hopes that the effort the reader puts in highlights my efforts as a person navigating these things.

AW: Lastly, is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this collection or upcoming projects, talks, workshops, etc.?

NQ: I gotta say, I love how all of your questions are allowing me to give intertwined answers! And so, building on the previous question on engagement, I am actually working closely with my friend, fellow teacher, and paper engineer, Jean Kim, to create a 3D chapbook of selected poems from Orange that push the interactivity of my work to their fullest potential. This chapbook will have a limited run but will be available at my in-person events. I can’t wait to share it!

In terms of other projects, the experience of creating Orange really put me on a path toward interactivity across multiple artistic mediums. In the time since I finished Orange, I’ve written two award winning short stories, gained a video game writing certification, and finished Justice for my Sister’s BIPOC Sci-Fi Screenwriting Lab, where I wrote my first TV show pilot. To keep up with all that, people can sign up for my Email Newsletter here.

Orange is available through CavanKerry Press

Noel Quiñones is an Emmy and O. Henry award-winning Nuyorican writer from the Bronx. Their work has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poem-a-day, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT anthology, as well as the Michigan Quarterly Review, for which they won the 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. Their short story, “This Time and the Next” will be included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners. They have also received fellowships from Periplus, CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, the Poetry Foundation, the Watering Hole, and the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and founder of Project X, a Bronx-based spoken word poetry organization, Noel is currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center. You can follow Noel at www.noelpquinones.com.

Ada Wofford (they/them) holds MAs in both English and Library Studies. In addition to working at a rare book shop, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, the editor of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in The Blue Nib, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Autostraddle, Capable Magazine, Sundress Reads, and more. Their chapbook, I Remember Learning How to Dive, was published in 2020, part of which earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination. 

Ally Ang’s Let the Moon Wobble (Alice James Books, 2025) is a timely poetry collection rich with bold reclamations of life from systems designed to harm. Ang’s unapologetic poetic voice is inspiring; they announce their queerness with the power of community behind every word, writing, “queer as in death to cops and politicians! / May they live their every waking moment / afraid of what the people will do to them” (47). The defiance throughout Let the Moon Wobble is a call to action for all; Ang asserts that the world can change for the better if we can imagine it, manifest it, and celebrate ourselves for all that we are and all that we have been through.

Let the Moon Wobble is organized into three sections with “Invocation” proceeding them. This poem’s first line is the title of the entire collection, and each subsequent line begins with “Let…” Ang here invites readers into a type of prayer, a summoning of what we need to heal, to be safe, to connect with the best parts of ourselves:

“Let the basil plant flower.

Let the poets discombobulate.

Let the verbs noun. Let the nouns verb.

Let the grief howl.” (1)

As a poet myself, I love the line above about allowing writers to be inventive with language, to take so-called standard grammatical rules as mere suggestions. Ang is reaching for a world where every single thing, big or small, is safe to be as it needs to be: the basil plant, the moon, the grief. Upon reading this poem, I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s “Transpositions,” a short poem in which he similarly calls for a reversal of power dynamics, of what is wrongfully accepted without enough resistance. “Invocation” ends on a repeated call for the people to be free, a notion asserted throughout the collection.

One of the most touching poems of the collection for me is “June 23, 1982,” dedicated to Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man murdered by two white men who ended up not receiving any jail time. Ang starts the poem sweetly:

“Vincent shyly kissing his fiancée at the bar

egged on by his friends’ pillowing laughter

Vincent, face warm and aglow

after just two beers

Vincent, pulling a strand of her shiny black hair

off the sleeve of his coat and tucking it

into his breast pocket…” (18)

Words like pillowing and warm show that Vincent is safe, surrounded by loved ones and feeling loved. The small gesture of saving the hair strand, keeping it close to his heart, becomes more heartbreaking as we are guided towards the tragic end of the night. Ang foreshadows the darkness ahead for readers who have not skipped to the note section before proceeding to read “June 23, 1982” with the lines, “Vincent, mother’s only baby, assuring her / that this would be his last time going out” and how “it’s bad luck to say last time” (18). This poem serves as an elegiac ode to the life and goodness Vincent had, as well as a condemnation of the “good boys, / not the kind of men you send to jail” (19) and the racist and patriarchal systems designed to protect the few and enact violence on the many.

In their insistence on creativity, ingenuity, and joy, Ang employs a number of unique poetic forms as containers for sometimes heavy subject matter. For example, “Heartbreak Mad Libs” uses the form of the classic game to make space for possibility within a set script. Readers can fill in their own answers to categories such as “# of your lover’s hairs stuck in the shower drain,” “type of love you lacked in childhood,” and “the source of the light in your eyes” (37). Ang here is offering a tool for healing, for readers to walk into and through their own heartbreak, reaching hope on the other side. “The Truth Is” is a multiple choice poem, similarly giving readers, and themself as poet, space to explore and invite options. The truth does not need to be one thing, Ang seemingly asserts; it can change over time, it is different from person to person, etc. Other poem titles like “Quars Poetica” and “Owed to My Father’s Accent” are playful with craft words; ars poetica is queered, an ode is combined with reverence and due credit.

In the penultimate poem, “You Deserve the World,” Ang writes,

“The world has ended before,

and before and before, and for some, there was

no after. We have watched its rind cracking open

like a freshly-broken heart, and each time

            we build and rebuild.” (61)

I see echoes here of Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, The World Goes On, and of the afro-futurist notion that the apocalypse has already happened. Despite this reality, Ang is a part of the survival; they are a part of the continued living, full of desire, hope, joy, culture, energy, and strength. The title phrase “you deserve the world” is an affirmation that we have every right to live, to be our full selves, and to enjoy a safe world, including all of its pleasures, treasures, and wonders.

Let the Moon Wobble is a brilliant debut collection I encourage all readers of contemporary poetry to get their hands on. Ang’s words act as an invitation to incite joy, a decree of justice, a celebration of queerness, and a mastering of poetic voice amidst a large variety of form. In “The Moon, Abstracted,” Ang writes, “From Palestine / to West Papua, from Puerto Rico / to Hawai’i, from Congo to Sudan, / from the river to the sea. / …  / May every / oppressed tongue know the taste / of water, honey, freedom, freedom” (10). I firmly stand with Ang in this call for freedom, safety, and nourishment for all. As Ang invokes, may we see this come to fruition in our lifetimes.

Let the Moon Wobble is available from Alice James Books

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Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is Cofounder and Managing Editor at Two Cardinals Literary. At Sundress Publications, she serves as Assistant Chapbook Editor. Livia has been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA in poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. 

Gee follows a trail of breadcrumb memories back through her adolescence and into her childhood, arriving at an explanation for her conversion to Catholicism in adulthood. With the precision of an academic historian, Gee sifts through her past as she contemplates where her pull to the divine originated:

“It’s hard not to wonder if there was a single moment that set me on my way to becoming a person of faith. This calling surprised me with its suddenness and vigor, and then with how quickly it became an anchor in our lives…My conversion, which was always a process and never a point in time, felt new and familiar, an aspiring toward a more expansive self, but one I ultimately recognized.” (Gee 50)

This “ultimate recognition” of a new aspect of the self becomes a North Star in Gee’s journey through Catholic conversion. 

So, too, does the Church community that she names as the main reason she stays in her parish, despite the long and bureaucratic road to official conversion. The people in her church validate a long-overlooked part of herself: “Perhaps I finally recognized my spirituality once I could see it in others, in the same way I recognize myself in the features and gestures of my daughters” (Gee 71). This observation is one of many moments in this collection linking Gee’s conversion process to an exploration of family and what we pass down to our children. As an adoptee from Taiwan, Gee felt constant pressure from her Cantonese parents to show her gratitude by erasing her own desires – especially any related to learning about her birth family. Instead, she attempted to piece together her identity through the heritage her parents relayed to her inconsistently, in scraps of “smoke” and “paper”.

Torn between a desire for her child to assimilate seamlessly into America and a need to keep Chinese traditions alive, Gee’s mother served as the curator of a new kind of family history. Gee detailed her tenuous position:

“My mom is Chinese until she is not. She must do figures in her head in Cantonese; she must eat rice with every meal, fearfully appease ancestors, and call my husband American, but never herself and never me. Until she visits China after forty-five years of living in America and is told that her clothes and hair and speech and posture are all unmistakably foreign. Until she is interviewed by an adoption agency and must, against all her Chinese sensibilities, express her longing for a child.” (Gee 55)

Gee’s writing shines in these heartwrenching remembrances of her parents. She later describes one of her mother’s favorite stories: of how, during the famine caused by the Cultural Revolution in China, her mother (around age 10 at the time) cried when she had no fish to eat for dinner. Gee’s grandmother threatened to leave the home, and Gee’s mother promised to never complain again. Gee describes how her mother, re-traumatized, told this story compulsively and frenetically, in a “flood” through which a young Gee held steady. Gee inherited her mother’s trauma, internalizing as a child that “good mothers threatened their children…to keep their daughters from wanting what they cannot have” (Gee 123). Gee reckons with the lofty expectations placed upon her from a young age through her parents also wanting what they could not have: a biological child that they tried to conceive in vain for over a decade. She “…sometimes imagine[s] [her] parents sitting down to a meal they have waited fourteen years for, starved beyond hunger and unable to believe their agony will finally end” (Gee 156). Emotional and physical hunger are evocatively rendered across time and space – from the liturgies of takeout from her grandfather’s restaurant to the stress associated with feeding an entire extended family. Unmet hunger as a representation of generational immigrant trauma is one of the most memorable, and powerful, motifs of this collection.

As an adult, Gee makes sense of the trauma in a monumental loss of culture, an enormous grief of immigration, through the language of Catholicism. Specifically, the ritual of initiation welcomes one’s new self into the Catholic church, honoring the struggles of separating from what is familiar in order to return with a deeper knowledge of the self (Michael Meade; Gee 99). She writes: “My family’s immigration is a kind of incomplete initiation—unending separation compounded with the absence of a society to return to” (Gee 99). In translating her family’s generational trauma into a newly intelligible language, Gee guides the reader through her parallel journeys of healing and conversion.

I was, and am, stunned by the tenderness Gee writes with, and holds for those who have hurt her. We Carry Smoke and Paper invites us to look more closely at the ashes we have been handed, thank those who placed them in our palms, and decide, ultimately, what we would like to keep.

Order your copy today!

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Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.

This month our editorial intern Marian Kohng interviews Tyler Hurula on her poetry collection Too Pretty for Plain Coffee. The collection explores themes of self-love, polyamory, queerness, and never apologizing for being too much. It’s a heartwarming collection and the perfect read for these frigid winter days.

Marian Kohng: What is the significance of the recurring theme of coffee and its role compared to tea and wine?

Tyler Hurula: I grew up in the Mormon church, where coffee was prohibited. Coffee has since become an indulgence, and every time I drink coffee it almost feels like I’m getting away with something. I live for seasonal coffee flavors, and adding something fun to make it extra indulgent. The title Too Pretty for Plain Coffee came from visiting a friend. I was curling my hair and getting frustrated with how much time I was taking to get ready to head out for the day, and told my friend I needed coffee. They offered to make me coffee, and I jokingly told them “I’m too pretty for plain coffee” and it just stuck. Wine also feels indulgent to me. Almost like dressing up drinking, because in my head wine is what you drink if you’re trying to be fancy about it. In the book, a partner is the one drinking tea. They don’t need it to be fancified or add extra flavors or special milk, but they see and love me for all the ways I’m “extra.”

MK: What is your process of deciding how to format certain poems and the intentionality of them to convey your message, such as in “Are You Just Being Nice, or Are We In Love?” and “One More”?

TH: Playing with the format of the poems in Too Pretty for Plain Coffee was so much fun for me. Previously, I struggled with formatting, and was determined to step out of my comfort stanzas with this book. “Are You Just Being Nice, or Are We In Love” is written as a multiple-choice quiz because of the sapphic nature of the relationship. In my experience connecting with other queer folks, a common experience in sapphic dating is wondering if someone is actually into you, or if they’re just being nice. It was my idea of not wanting to assume romantic intent, and almost a callback to slipping someone a note in elementary school saying, “Do you like me? Check yes or no.”

In “One More” I was expressing the loss of a relationship, and playing with the tension in perseverating on what would happen if there was just ‘one more’ kiss or loving gesture. Would that change anything? Would that person come back? Would they realize they missed out? It was me trying to hold onto this relationship and this person, even though they left. The repetition of “one more” in varying shades of gray are meant to represent the fading feelings as time passes. Even after those feelings have faded, something can trigger them again and revive them. I’ve often reflected on different “lasts”, and how/if things would be different if we knew it was the last time we got to kiss someone, or talk to someone on the phone, or share a meal with someone. If only I got to kiss that person one more time, would it have felt final? Could I get closure?

MK: Tell me more about the role of lipstick in your poems and the message behind intentional lipstick prints versus unintentional lipstick smudges?

TH: The more I’ve gotten to be comfortable in my own self, the more I’ve let myself love the things I love. Bright pink lipstick is one of those things and has become a staple for me. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy finding lipsticks that don’t leave residue or stains, and even the best ones still aren’t perfect. When you do start stepping into your full self more, not everyone is going to like it, and some people are going to miss the versions of you they imagined you might stay as. I am going to wear the lipstick, and I am going to be myself regardless of who likes it or doesn’t, and sometimes I might get lipstick on something I shouldn’t, or I might be too loud, or too direct, or too messy, but I’m choosing myself regardless.

MK: What did you wish to deliver through the personification in your poems, whether it is the personification of periods, anniversary cards, or being too much, and how do they relate to love for oneself?

TH: In the opening poem of the book, “I’ve Only Been Told I’m Hard to Read by People I Don’t Like,” there is a line that says, “I personified my ‘too much’ in a poem to separate myself from the reason people have left me.” Personification is one of my favorite ways to engage in poetry. Sometimes things are just too close to be able to see clearly, especially when there is a judgement attached to them. In my poem “I AM TOO MUCH FOR MOST”, I do personify my “too much” and I was able to decide how my ‘too much’ shows up in the world. I made it something outside of myself, which allowed me to learn how to love it.

I talk about polyamory in this book, which has a lot of stigma around it. In “Polyamory from the Perspective of an Anniversary Card” I’m able to address many of the negative comments I’ve gotten for being polyamorous in a way that felt accessible and not focused on any specific person. I wanted to be able to reach people that may have these negative ideas and beliefs about polyamory in a way that wasn’t accusatory, but invited them into my perspective.

As an AFAB person, I grew up being taught not to talk about my period. It is a “gross” and personal thing. I want to de-stigmatize talking about our bodies and what better way to do that than to give my period its own voice? We have so much to gain from talking about these types of things that are “taboo” or things we’re supposed to keep to ourselves like periods, polyamory, and queerness.

MK: Can you speak to me about the juxtaposition between the feelings of love and heartbreak in “Schrödinger’s Heart” and the role of this juxtaposition throughout the whole collection?

TH: “Schrödinger’s Heart” is about dating as a polyamorous person, which can be complicated when you’re breaking up with one person but still totally in love with someone else. Having those big feelings is a lot, especially when trying to navigate them at the same time. In my poem “I Can’t Love Anyone Into Loving Me,” I realize that by loving and caring about people, I could be a tender magician, even if some of those people choose not to love me back. When you date more people, there is more of a potential for heartbreak. I think choosing to love in spite of that is a really brave thing.

MK: What did you wish to convey by redacting certain parts of the letters in “Erasure Poem from a Card I Found in my Underwear Drawer” and “Letters to Ex-Lovers, Ending in One for Myself”?

TH: “Erasure Poem from a Card I Found in my Underwear Drawer” was so fun to play with. It is in direct conversation with the poem “While Cleaning Out My Underwear Drawer I Wondered When all my Underwear Became Period Underwear.” I’ve learned that I am not for everyone, and not everyone is going to love me and that’s okay. Sometimes we do just survive someone and learn more about ourselves on the other end. I think sometimes people survive us as well—even when we don’t mean to cause harm. In the past, I’ve chosen to be in relationships that don’t serve me because I want so badly to be loved. “Letters to Ex-Lovers, Ending in One for Myself” is a reminder that I will always be in a relationship with myself, and I get to choose what that looks like, and I don’t just want to survive myself.

MK: Can you speak about how you decided to structure the collection overall and start with the first poem, “I’ve Only Been Told I’m Hard to Read by People I Don’t Like,” and end it with the last poem, “Self Portrait as Someone to Love”?

TH: I started with “I’ve Only Been Told I’m Hard to Read by People I Don’t Like” because I felt like it was a good introduction to me. This whole book is about being too much—whether it’s because I’m queer, polyamorous, bisexual, a woman, etc. I wanted to explore what being “too much” looks like for me specifically, and how it manifests in my life. I wanted it to be earnest and endearing. I think parts of that poem are funny. I wanted the poem to be an invitation and a plea to see me.

The book was originally called “The Polyamory Breakup Bible,” but when I put all my poems together and read through it, I realized it was more of a love letter to myself and the parts of myself I’ve been told are “too much.” The poems in the beginning of the book are more about how other people see me. Many of the poems in the middle of the book focus on other people—they’re breakup poems, yearning poems, love poems. The end of the book is about my relationship with myself and learning to embrace all parts of me. I wanted to begin and end with myself because ultimately, I’m the only person who is stuck with me, and I’m not here to perform for anyone but myself.

MK: What is the main message you want readers to take away from your collection when experiencing the different shades of love for oneself and others?

TH: There are so many ways to love and be in relationships with ourselves and our family, friends, romantic partners, and everyone in between. Too Pretty for Plain Coffee is an invitation to explore the parts of ourselves that have been deemed unworthy, either internally or externally, and challenge them. What if the thing I’ve been told to hate about myself was actually one of the most loving and endearing things about me? What if this thing I’ve been told makes me unlovable is what someone loves most about me? Is it something I can learn to love about myself? Choosing to love and celebrate ourselves and the people in our communities is one of the most radical and brave things we can do in a world that thrives and profits from hate and division.

Too Pretty for Plain Coffee is available through Wayfarer Press & Magazine

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Tyler Hurula (she/they), also known as the Pretty Pink Poet, is a poet and explorer based in Denver, Colorado. She started writing poetry at the beginning of the pandemic because she decided she needed a hobby and saw Megan Falley’s workshop “Poems That Don’t Suck” and decided to give it a try. They have since fallen in love with poetry and strive to build and grow a poetry community in the Denver Metro area. She strives to be the most queer and polyamorous person they can be and much of her poetry reflects these themes.

Their first full-length poetry collection is published through Wayfarer Books, released in April 2025. They have a poetry chapbook published with Querencia Press titled Love Me Louder and have multiple poems published in Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Fiery Scribe Review, South Broadway Press, Last Leaves Magazine, and more. Her poems have been nominated for the 2023 Best of the Net award, and the 2023 Pushcart Prize.

They host a monthly queer poetry open mic night, and facilitate poetry writing workshops.

Marian Kohng (she/her/hers) is a proud Korean American and an Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications and a Traffic Copy Editor at a local news station in Tucson, AZ. She also has a Bachelor’s in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and a Master’s in Marketing. She loves to get lost in a good book and will read just about anything, including the back of the shampoo bottle.

LIZZY: The Elizabeth Keckley Story, from bondage to becoming America’s first couturière (2025) threads fact and fiction into a genre-bending ode to the perseverance of African Americans. Evelyn G. Nuyda, formerly writing under the penname C. Georgina C., conducts readers’ attention with a maestro’s precision, contrasting gravity and levity in a delicate, honest balance. With genuine characters and undeniable history, Nuyda’s retelling of Elizabeth Keckley’s story shimmers like the finest silk, demanding attention elegantly and proving wholly worthy of it.

A summer day in 1932 Harlem witnesses the silent unveiling of buried history at the hands of Reverend Stansil. Finding a book tucked in the late church founder Reverend William Crowdy’s attic, Stansil discovers the story of a woman obscured by history’s biased hands, a story beginning nearly one hundred and fifteen years to his day.

In February of 1818, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Elizabeth’s first breaths tie her to a cruel life of bondage. Born to Agnes Hobbs, her enslaved mother, and Master Burwell, her biological father, Elizabeth enters a life predetermined for her. In an unforgiving world, persevering love and daring hope soothe Elizabeth’s heart; and so begins her long journey, from a young enslaved girl in Virginia to the free couturière of the First Lady.

Nuyda’s characters pop off the page like brocade, rich and alive, with a tenacity that is incredibly human. Their dynamic nature captures readers’ hearts with grace, connecting them across time and place. Of the most prominent characterizations is unsurprisingly Elizabeth’s. Her endurance in a world vying to break her is boldly captured in her persistence to appreciate beauty amidst the monstrosites and dismissals:

“Where she saw drapery too faded for its place in a proper Southern parlor, I saw silk that still gleamed softly in the right light. Where she saw fabric meant to be discarded, I saw the makings of a gown.” (Nuyda, 66)

In injecting the narrative with Elizabeth’s artistic noticings, Nuyda cements her characterization as a dressmaker long before she ever becomes one. As she finally achieves her dream, the reader arrives with her at her destination with complete faith.

Another glowing aspect of the book is the relationships between characters; whether harsh or tender, the dynamics seize the reader’s attention with a mix of realism and dramatic aptitude. The dynamic between Elizabeth—or “Lizzy” as her mother’s husband, George Hobbs, affectionately called her—and her parents, Agnes and George, is one as delicate and intricate as lace. There’s a staggering awareness of the harshness of servitude, contrasted with her mother’s beauty and bravery and George’s tenderness and unwavering love through the forced separation of their family.

From stolen moments where Agnes risked her life to teach Lizzy how to read—“Every stolen moment was spent with my mother quietly guiding my hands across pages of the books she had kept hidden; books she had learned from, even before I was born…” (Nuyda, 26)—to the bittersweet, short-lived reunion of George and his family—“In one swift, unforgiving breath, it became the last time I would see my father, the last time his lips would brush my forehead, the last time I would feel his warmth” (39)—every emotion is heightened and cleverly utilized to reflect the world the characters live in as much as their own dynamics.

Though fleeting on the page, the secondary characters are equally memorable. Albert, an eleven year old enslaved boy, charms readers with his artistry and prevailing innocence. Others like Little Joe and his mother seize readers’ hearts with the heartaching polarity of maternal love in the face of a callous dealing separating him from her:

“There was something about the way she dressed him that caught my breath, something that spoke of loss before the first breath…His boots were battered, worn to near ruin, but she had polished them until they shone like the morning. And the laces, though frayed at the ends,were tied with the kind of care that made them whole again, made them worthy of him, worthy of the beautiful boy he was.” (Nuyda, 44)

Through an equally humanistic portrayal of the Lincolns, Nuyda reinvents historical political figures, delving into their grief and their joy, and it is through that method that she bridges the perceived gap, portraying unity in its rawest form. Matters of race blanch in the face of the human experience as Lizzy holds a grieving Mary Lincoln, as Abraham Lincoln plays with goats.  

Despite the historical focus of the book, it is not lacking in relatability. The themes around fashion within offer both introspective and societal commentary on the power of clothes and their role in society, especially for women. In the same vein, Nuyda utilizes dressmaking as a gateway to probing at women’s complex lives in the tangled web of history, race, and freedom.

With its first person narration, LIZZY (2025) embodies the spirit of a memoir packaged in the cloth of historical fiction, immersing readers in a story so honest, it radiates with the authenticity of a true autobiography. Nuyda’s dressmaking expertise and research shine through the book’s fashion nuances, underscoring the frank storytelling with undeniable notes of beauty and wisdom that linger beyond the last page. Now being adapted into a play, readers can expect LIZZY ’s theatrical debut in LA in Spring 2026.

Find out more about LIZZY on the official website

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Tassneem Abdulwahab (she/her) is an aspiring writer and editor with a BA (Hons) Creative and Professional Writing from UWE Bristol. With a strong interest in culture, history, and psychology and a love for fiction, her writing often draws on one or more of these threads to tell character-centric stories. Trained in oil painting, she exhibited and sold two portrait paintings in February 2025. In her free time, you can find her buying more books (no, seriously—she owns four editions of Little Women), snapping pictures of the little details, or sitting at her easel.