The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Radical Revisions: One Poem, Infinite Possibilities,” a workshop led by SG Huerta on Wednesday, September 11th, 2024, from 6:00 – 7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).
Is a poem ever truly finished? In this generative workshop, participants will start with a single poem and leave with endless revision possibilities. Though that may sound overwhelming, experimenting with radical revisions can uncover what the poem truly wants to say.
Drawing from contemporary poets such as torrin a. greathouse, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and Safia Elhillo, we will discuss and dissect the different ways a poem can be presented on the page. Participants will practice and play with erasure, line breaks, footnotes, prose poetry, formal constraints, hybrid elements, and more.
Beginning writers will learn the possibilities of poetry, while experienced writers will have a chance to see their work in a new light. Participants of all levels will leave the workshop empowered to play on the page, take the skills practiced in this workshop to other writing projects, or even begin a sequence of poems based on these revisions.
SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer from Dallas. They are the Poetry Editor of Abode Press, Nonfiction Co-Editor for ANMLY, and Marketing Co-Director for Split Lip Magazine. SG is the author of two poetry chapbooks and the forthcoming nonfiction chapbook GOOD GRIEF (fifth wheel press 2025). Their work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Honey Literary, TheOffing, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. They write about trans/literary things in their newsletter, trans poetica. Find them at sghuertawriting.com or in central Texas with their partner and cats.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to SG Huerta via Venmo: @sg-huerta-3 or CashApp: $sgh122716
In Origami Dogs (Autumn House Press, 2023), Noley Reid directly states, “I want to say the perfect thing but don’t know what that is” (44). This line sends me, and you have to read the book to judge how perfectly it encapsulates Reid’s precise balance between wisdom and realness. With a notable rhythm, the stories feel like illustrations of life events rather than contrivances.
A noticeable accomplishment in Origami Dogs is the breadth of Reid’s storytelling. Her collection contains elements of magical realism, postmodernism, the pastoral, and teen dramedy. The stories each use a purposeful point-of-view–either first, second, orthird–and there are commonalities between the settings, characters, situations, and themes. The plot movements feel inevitable rather than gimmicky. Origami Dogs reads like a collection of distinct stories that play off each other, rather than a litter of nameless puppies.
Readers will relate both to large-scale topics like teenage anxiety and first love, and to smaller scale synchronicities, like when house finches appeared at my bird feeder as I read about them in “Movement and Bone.” Reid smartly crafts images so specific that the reader can find them in real life.
Origami Dog’s dialogue is sparkling and realistic, like when Martha, a flippant nurse, interrupts an intensely dramatic scene with snarky job-related jabs. It’s easy to envision a nurse, walking in on a teenager facing up to the worst thing he’s ever done, and telling him, “If you’re gonna lose it, step out to the hall” (Reid 59). Not mean, but simply blunt. In a later story, a confidante telling an upset father to respect his daughter’s grief in a moment when he might center himself advises, “‘this is her sadness…Let it be hers’” (Reid 102). Reid captures excellent advice with such a precise thing to say.
In “Shepherd,” Reid’s language is lively and her descriptions crisp. As a poet, I love the description of a swimmer as a “finless porpoise” (31). The same narrator later writes, “I watch her and it isn’t like college, but it’s not like now either. It’s like an alternate plane, where she and I live…” (Reid 37). In context, his thought feels both accessible and personal, both knowable and paradoxical. “Shepherd” helped me understand a trauma I had been through. The story was more than simply a depiction of grief, with such a loveliness in its hills and the neighbor kid with a shitty nickname and the college sort-of-girlfriend who, in the words of Deftones’s “Street Carp,” has sharp teeth. The story is complicated, and its climax is an act of emotional honesty, putting a difficult idea into words.
As our news cycle escalates toward the apocalypse every day, it’s ironically calming to read about personal disasters–not because they’re comforting, but because they remind us that our personal lives also matter. I don’t need another Marvel movie about the world snapping closed like a clam. I need stories where a girl and her neighbor set out to find a lost lamb. As someone who has had to find and catch a lamb after dark in the pasture of Sundress’s Firefly Farms, I can honestly say it’s dramatic!
On the other hand, Reid also confronts social stigmas. In “Sick Days,” Reid writes about a young, queer-curious character, Sean, whose mother worries about him in a way that unravels the relationships around her. When his mother tells him not to wear a dress, his sister Amelia defends his preferred dress completely:
“So we can’t be ourselves,” I say.
She removes her hands. “Just be your best selves for a little while.”
“What does a dress have to do with whether Sean is his best self or not?” I say.
“A lot,” says Sean.
“You know what I mean,” says Mom. “It can make people,” and now she lowers her voice, “especially men, uncomfortable.”
I respond loudly: “That sounds like their problem.” (Reid 127)
The narrator, Amelia, knows that his violation of gender norms is his best self. My queer heart burst for Amelia at this moment. And yet, Amelia isn’t perfect. Reid explores how all the characters navigate society plagued by fatphobia and transphobia. There are real slights, imagined slights, and mistakes made. Since no one is a paragon, all of them feel human. And no one feels irredeemable.
In Origami Dogs, Noley Reid builds a world where cause and effect are more than simply plot motivators. Read this book if you love animals, character development, the midwest, and/or good language. I don’t know what the perfect thing to say is, but Origami Dogs comes close.
Joey Gould, who served as Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent > Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys. Joey is grateful to Erin Elizabeth Smith & Sundress Academy for the Arts for their support of their work.
Another Way to Split Water (YesYes Books, 2022) is the first full-length poetry collection by Canadian-born, Scotland-based poet Alycia Pirmohamed, but reads as if it could be her fourth or fifth. The writing is self-assured, mature, and has a clear vision; for a collection so concerned with splitting, halving, and parting, it’s one of the most cohesive collections of poetry I have read in recent years. Anytime I thought a poem had abandoned the central themes, the writing would soon reveal itself to be yet another bejeweled piece of the overall stunning mosaic. Though the poetry is ever shifting and changing, like the many rivers we encounter throughout Another Way to Split Water, Pirmohamed’s vision always remains simultaneously fixed in place.
The first half of the collection is abstract and ethereal, with poems that behave like meandering whirlpools. The imagery floats in and out of realms that are mine to realms that are not mine, from tangible and empirical realms to thoughts only heard between dreams. Images of “stippled moons,” “glaucous blooms,” and an array of ghosts weave in and out of Pirmohamed’s poetry like creatures rustling along the tree line, in a way unseen but fully known by the music of their presence.
Nature is an ever-present character throughout both halves of the collection, with Pirmohamed effortlessly shifting between mystic and scientist. She deftly demonstrates that not only is it possible, but it is absolutely necessary for one to see the world from both perspectives if they are to ever make anything out of the inscrutable image that being human presents us with.
A good example can be found in two poems that appear next to one another in the collection: “I Want the Kind of Permanence in a Birdwatcher’s Catalogue” and “Hinge.” In the former, Pirmohamed speaks of reading her morning prayers off of her cracked phone screen, and the crack splitting the text, “Forgi/ve me” (11). This experience of fragmentation sends her to “an alternate universe/a parallel world,” where she begins to feel as fragmented as the text on her screen; when she finally roots herself back upon the earth she desires
“the permanence of a birdwatcher’s catalogue
each line of pigment an absolute, a trail of ink
never slipping beyond its typeset world.” (Pirmohamed 11)
Like the ornithologists that have blessed the birds with their “official” names, locked away in a dead language, the poet yearns for that same legacy, one that’s all the more ironic given the way all languages change overtime, forever shifting like rivers. In “Hinge,” Pirmohamed writes, “I want to lean my neck toward/a thing until I, too, become ism,/scientific and named into truth” (12). In fact, there’s a large effort currently going on to rename many species of birds due to the history surrounding their names—no ink is indelible, and no category is an island. Fully aware of this, Pirmohamed effortlessly flows from “bismillah” to “phototropism” in the span of a few lines, demonstrating how it’s all part of the same tapestry.
In a later poem, “House of Prayer” Pirmohamed writes, “Alhamdulillah glints beyond language” (67)—this is exactly what I believe the poet is striving for as well, to write in a manner that “glints beyond language,” beyond the very building blocks that facilitate the idea in the first place. Islamic imagery permeates the text but at no time feels overly religious or preachy. Instead, Pirmohamed taps into the mysticism present in all forms of religion, in all forms of hope. Her knowledge of the natural world is deeply impressive, and she never shies away from using names and terms that few encounter outside of a textbook, yet it never feels stuffy or over intellectual. She conjures the impossible by manipulating layers of complexity into forms that are somehow both easily recognizable and completely novel.
Entering the second half of the collection is a bit like going over a waterfall: we’re still on the same river but the current feels different. Suddenly the poetry becomes more immediate, more intense. To start the section, “Welcome” begins as if addressing the reader: “You know better than to feel welcome at anything resembling a border” (Pirmohamed 47). From here, the journey begins to feel more personal; the mystical imagery and references to nature are still present but things are more grounded and as a result, more consequential. This wonderful shift in atmosphere does a terrific job pacing of the book. Every poem, every word in this collection, feels absolutely necessary.
The ending of Another Way to Split Water resembles the closing of a loop, resembles a river split, halved, then curved to be made whole anew. Primohamed provides another way to think about how we as individuals fit into this river, each of us a drop, particles behaving as a wave; even when we split, we fall back into a single body.
This is a collection that deserves multiple reads and is sure to reward you in multiple ways. This is a collection that deserves to be meditated on, poured over like the poet’s own morning prayers. This is a collection that I could easily write another thousand words on, but in short, this is a collection that deserves a place on your bookshelf.
By all accounts Ada Wofford is a witch, that’s according to an NPR poll surveying their neighbors (it was never aired due to runtime). They’ve earned advanced degrees in Literature and Library Magic from Rochester and Wisconsin respectively, though they refuse to rest on such pedestrian laurels. They catalog rare books and the such at Between the Covers Rare Books, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in several places such as Autostraddle, The Blue Nib, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and their chapbook I Remember Learning How to Dive was published in 2020 and earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination. Lastly, some people say that they’re the one who actually wrote the YA novel Loops of Willow available at Losgann Press. When away from their books, Ada can be found divining bottle caps and attending to their paper garden.
As a child, everyone thought I would be the homebody of my siblings. I existed almost exclusively with my nose in a book or competing in some sort of local sporting event. The worst punishment for childhood mischief that I could imagine was losing reading privileges. (Often, what I was getting in trouble for was reading—when I ought to have been sleeping.) I preferred climbing trees and hanging out with the horses to social commitments and struggled to fit in with my peers. When I heard on the radio that my favorite author had passed away, I was so distraught that my father turned around and took me back home that day instead of taking me to school.
It came as a shock, then, when I spent eighth grade obsessing over scholarship applications for a boarding high school 3,000 miles away from home. California to New Hampshire at fourteen. I had never been further east than Billings, Montana. I became rather gifted at sleeping on airplanes.
That began a habit of travel, exploration, and collecting experiences. A summer program in Virginia. A summer working in Montana. Books were always my escape, but I learned to appreciate this incredible world we inhabit as well. My undergraduate years took me to Maryland, England, Czechia, back to California, and Montana again. Graduate school to Illinois. I realized just last week that my cat turns three this 4th of July, and has already moved with me four times, across multiple state lines. No different countries for him though (yet).
A dream that has stayed with me through all of this is to someday provide the little kid sitting behind the classroom at recess with a book half as big as they are in their lap the same solace I found—and still find—in the written word. The dream has morphed, reshaped, softened, and solidified over the years, but has never felt so real and attainable as in the last two years. Achieving my MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing was so much more than getting a degree. It was validation, was a step in the door, was a glorious capitulation and commitment to my craft. I feel like I am standing on a precipice of opportunity now. No longer chasing it, but arrived, teetering, on the edge.
These next few months, my internship here at Sundress Publications will be accompanied by applying to PhD programs and residencies, and editing the novel I wrote for my thesis.
Nic Job is a queer writer with their MFA from DePaul University and a constant curiosity for the world—cultures, places, people, and themself. They are a human who loves humans, and all of their tangled-up ordinariness. Their fiction, non-fiction, and poetry is published in Club Plum, Defunct Magazine, Spare Parts Literary, and other magazines.
Matthew Johnson’s comforting collection is a warm evening spent with family, chattering and laughing gutturally as aunts and uncles recount stories you’ve likely heard more than once before.
Far from New York State (NYQ Books, 2023) begins with meditations on living both in the state and city and lamentations on violence. Johnson writes, “I’m new here, / And New York is killing me too; / There’s not a soul willing to call my name” (29). On the next pages he writes, “Young black people, jailed, gunned down, or drugged up / Are reincarnated in rhyme and storytelling” (Johnson 29). These snippets, different as they may be, are excellent examples of Johnson’s masterful curation. Each poem in this collection creates the narrative environment of New York State and Johnson is successful on each page.
Allusions are prevalent throughout Johnson’s work. The speaker is enthralled by and constantly refers to various figures, Jim Boeheim, Paul Robeson, Reggie Miller, Larry Bird, and more. The speaker admits that these figures were critical to their experiences and development. When this moment of intimacy is taken into stride and the speaker’s trust in themself and the reader is established, the collection’s gradual build-up accelerates into suggestive, shyly revealed moments of youth. The two sides are not heterogenous. Johnson’s descriptions of the speaker and of the admired figures seem to melt into one another, painting everyone in a similar shade of risque.
Each poem whips the reader through a new story, new people, new scenes, and yet the ride is smooth and steady as Johnson’s transitions and attention to detail cushion the potholes of New York State. “Wrinkles have softened the face, but not the f-words, Which are still flung like one-liners in his young, nightclub age,” writes Johnson (19). “And come over here honey,” he writes later—“You ain’t about to leave here / Without me whispering / Something nasty in your ear” (Johnson 31). These pieces are a sample of the thematic consistency found in Far from New York State.
Music, often paired with the speaker’s narrative as an African American, is a major theme in Far from New York State. Whether it be an allusion, or the background of a nightclub or other scene, Johnson’s descriptions of Jazz feel so tender and real, we can almost hear it playing softly in the distance. He elegantly weaves together race, sorrow, and culture in “Mamma Sings the Prison Blues.” Johnson writes:
The wails of a mother, Whose child had just been locked away, Ring out like drunken night gunfire, And are the kind of sound That echoes in neighborhood heads for days…. (27)
In homage to a mother and this tragic moment, Johnson carefully crafts a collage or photo album of memories. While the title is enough to garner empathy, the inclusion of the neighborhood also adds to the feeling of community and tragedy, leaving us to truly mourn with everyone else. In just a few lines, Johnson has turned a poem relatively free of specificity into one full of character, unmistakably belonging to the speaker’s community and culture.
In “Listening to Illmatic” Johnson says,
Young black people, jailed, gunned down, or drugged up, Are reincarnated in rhyme and storytelling, But it’s only in here, in the grooves of music and my makeshift, bathroom studio, And not out there, where the world is not yours, But is always sadder. (30)
Johnson intentionally avoids subtlety in this poem. His diction is direct and lyrical at the same time, leaving the reader with no choice but to revel the magnificence of Far from New York State.
Far from New York State is a cozy, ambitious collection in which the author’s purpose is clear: to introduce us to the quiet metropolistic traditions of New York State. Johnson takes us through it slowly, as though the reader is a great-niece or nephew from another state. The distance the author keeps between the speaker and reader twists the point of view curiously, leaving us wondering what our role as reader may be. Johnson presents with a surprising level of detachment. His matter-of-fact tone, even while writing on emotional topics, forces the reader to listen, and listen closely. The brisk pacing truly makes the reader feel as though they are being whisked through New York State, completely unfamiliar with the less-than luxurious landscapes and pressing nosiness, yet, at the same time, acutely aware of it.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Denise Ervin. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, August 18th 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!
Denise R. Ervin is a creative writer hewn from the streets, classrooms, and boardrooms of Detroit. She has spent two decades as a teaching artist, performing poetry around the country, and leading workshops for the likes of Midnight & Indigo and Room Project. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in AADUNA, Harbinger Asylum, Third Wednesday Magazine, and others. Most recently, she was selected as a Graduate Fellow by The Watering Hole and a semifinalist for America’s Next Great Author. She also serves at Literary Arts Director for SAFTA and manages a youth writing program in her hometown.
While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here. Donations this month will go to support our 2024 Light Bill Microgrant.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Chronic Poets Society,” a workshop led by Christa Fairbrother on Wednesday, August 14th, 2024, from 6:00 – 7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).
How can you find the energy to write about chronic illness while living in a chronic body? How does anyone else manage this, either? Throughout this workshop, participants will look at the poets Camisha Jones, Gwyneth Lewis, and Valerie Witte, whose form and content are vastly different from each other. However, they’re each creating works centered on the body despite their own health challenges.
Then, participants will do a multi-part mindfulness activity to both center yourself and expand your thoughts to add depth to your work. You can reuse the exercise anytime you need to feel better in the moment and as a generative activity to create new work. We’ll share works that spring from this exercise and talk about how to stay connected to your craft even on the worst days.
Christa Fairbrother, MA, is currently the poet laureate of Gulfport, Florida. Her chronic illness-focused poetry has appeared in Knee Brace Press, Medical Literary Messenger, Pleiades, and Réapparition Journal, as well as being nominated for a Pushcart prize. She’s had residencies with the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Bethany Arts Community, and her chapbook, Chronically Walking, was a finalist for the Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize. During the day she helps people deepen their sense of embodiment through aqua yoga, and her book Water Yoga (Singing Dragon, 2022) won medals from the Nautilus Book Awards and the Florida Writers Association.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Christa Fairbrother via Venmo: @cfairbro (Phone #: (727) 418-7623) or CashApp: $christa@christafairbrotherwrites.com
Ahead of the release of her full-length poetry collection Back to Alabama, Sundress intern Whitney Cooper spoke with Valerie A. Smith on spirtuality, Black lineages, and returning to the South.
Whitney Cooper: How does Back to Alabama’s compilation inform its thematic movements?
Valerie A. Smith: When I began compiling Back to Alabama several years ago, the original manuscript contained more than eighty pages in various recognizable sections: Black history, family history, spirituality, and closeness to nature. Because these represent facets of who I am as a human being, it was challenging to separate the poems into distinct sections. After a 2020 virtual visit by Jericho Brown to our poetry workshop at GSU, I began to thread the endings of one poem with the beginnings or themes of the next. Much later, after teaching Jesse Graves’ Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, I pared the manuscript down to poems that I am most confident about. This made the poems much easier to distinguish. In the first section, I introduce myself through family history and situate myself in the Black experience. I end the first section with Alice Walker in Eatonton, Georgia and move to the second section with “The Sugar Shack” and other iconic representations of Black culture. This section ends with Chadwick Boseman’s death, which invokes the precious lives of Black men in America. Therefore, I could see the next section beginning with Anthony Hill, an Air Force veteran with mental health issues killed by a police officer. This contemplation only moves us into the spiritual journey, and finally seeking to be grounded in the nature that surrounds us.
WC: In “Holy City: Charleston, SC”, the speaker balances ideas such as “battling malaria” with “the massus and the missus.” How do lines like this thread this collection together with—or drive them apart from—the ideas of the Back to Africa movement?
VAS: “Holy City” was a tough poem for me to write. After having visited the city many times, learning something new about Black history each time, I began to feel conflicted. Making Charleston the speaker was the most impactful way for me to reconcile vacationing in the largest slave port of North America. Like many African Americans, I may never actually step foot on African soil. But knowing that Africa is in the very soil of places like Charleston is a very small consolation.
WC: How does religious faith and spirituality, especially Southern Christian faith, shape the more secular corners of the collection?
VAS: I often say that God gave me Jesus then poetry because I need them both. As a practicing Christian, one whose faith was born and raised in Catholic school and the American Baptist churches of New Jersey, I had a deep personal spirituality before I moved to the South. Just as my faith has strengthened and matured here in Atlanta, so too has my love for music, movies, nature, and the pursuit of justice.
WC: How do the lives of Harriet Tubman, Giancarlo Esposito, Whitney Houston, and other figures influence your formal choices in the poems about them?
VAS: I do have an affinity for tercets and quatrains. The three-line stanza is a very tight argument in a much smaller room. The stanza reads fast, but the white space slows it down. That is how I feel about the Harriet Tubman and Giancarlo Esposito poems. I wrote “Harriet Tubman” for my sister, a caseworker in the juvenile justice system and drew similarities in their vocations. Tercets work for “Giancarlo” as scenes in honor of his prolific acting career. For Whitney, I needed alternate left- and right-justified lines to show a conversation because it seems she was never able to be herself, by herself. I wanted the staggered stanzas of “Miles Davis” to show a fractured incantation and conversation between the trumpeter, his wives, and his instrument.
WC: The poems in Back to Alabama have a strong sense of physicality yet are at the same time imbued with images commonly associated with death: can you speak more to this juxtaposition?
VAS: I will invoke the title poem here. I began writing “Back to Alabama” to illustrate my family’s participation in the movement of African Americans from the South to the North during the 1930s-1950s, and the next generation’s subsequent return. In the midst of writing this poem, my nephew died here in the South, and I wrote the final lines, “here we go back to Alabama.” The Black body, even the one in which my spirit and soul live, is endangered in this country. “The Sugar Shack” speaks to our beauty while “Legion” and “Queen & Slim” speak to our peril. Even our pursuit of God has a physical component illustrated in “The Other Nine” and “Exodus.”
WC: Celebrities and historical figures, especially Black women, often feel as or even more familiar to the speaker than even the speaker’s loved ones. What drives this sense of familiarity?
VAS: That is an interesting question because I was forty years old before I truly recognized that my grandmother’s name was Curlie Blue. The history of Black people in America is fraught with family separation, misinformation, and secrecy. There is so much that I still don’t know about my own family. But when Alice Walker celebrated her 75th birthday, it was like seeing an ancestor. And when I remember that Whitney Houston is from my home state, that her rendition of “The National Anthem” was played before my basketball games, and that I prayed desperately for her health and the return of her voice, that feeling of familiarity is understandable.
WC: Tell me more about the importance of balancing multiple identities through these poems, especially as they pertain to Southern Black culture and religion.
VAS: It is important for me to learn more about my family history, especially as it pertains to the South. My ancestral lands are in Alabama, I attended the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and I have lived my adult life with my husband and children in the Atlanta area for twenty-five years. While most of my family live in the North, my closest friends and extended family of faith, many of whom have similar stories of migration, live right here in Atlanta. I hope my poems demonstrate my personal journey to recognize God’s hand wherever I am.
WC: How do the natural images and themes, especially in the last section, tie in with the rest of the collection?
VAS: The natural images and themes represent another facet of who I am as a human being on this earth. I wrote my first poem, “The Sound of Sunshine, and the Sound of Rain” in the fourth grade. I love to take walks and gentle hikes in nature. At times when life is stressful and hard on my soul, nature reminds me of my place in this infinite universe and how blessed by God I am to have the senses and the mind to experience it. I hope this section is as refreshing to others as each poem was for me to write.
WC: “Silence is what I know: how to be/quiet with my eyes open.” What does it mean to know silence, and what does this knowledge bring to Back to Alabama?
VAS: Sometimes silence seems awkward and uncomfortable, but silence and temporal distance is often necessary for me to process tough subjects. Instead of adding to the chaos of the world around me, my own silence allows me to breathe and be fully aware. I don’t have my head in the sand in Back to Alabama; I do my best to confront the noise and search for peace.
Valerie A. Smith is a poet and creative nonfiction writer with a PhD in English from Georgia State University. She earned her masters at Kennesaw State University where she is currently a lecturer. She is a 2022 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar and Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Wayne Literary Review, Spectrum Literary Journal, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Oyster River Pages, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Solstice Literary Magazine, Auburn Avenue, and South 85. Above all, she values spending quality time with her family.
Whitney Cooper holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University, where they served as editor-in-chief of Jelly Bucket, the graduate literary journal run by the university. They also work as a reader for Atlanta Review. A clerical error was made while earning their bachelor’s degree, and they have been passionate about poetry ever since. Their poetry appears in Glassworks Magazine, Stillpoint Literary Magazine, Calliope, Right Hand Pointing, and SHARK REEF. They live in Metro Atlanta with their partner, cat, and miniature schnauzer mix.
Kristen Staby Rembold’s The Harvesters (FutureCycle Press, 2023) delivers all of the beauty of the pastoral without sentimentality. Captured in smaller moments, the collection widely deals with the complexities of nostalgia, especially as it pertains to rural life. Rembold’s writing fully encapsulates farm life, resulting in stunning imagery like that in “Conversion”: “Across the grass, the surface of threadleaf / flowers, teased by the / breeze, / becomes a surface of sparkling. / Come, golden sunbeam, red-tailed / hawk flying, deep October sky” (68). However, simple beauty doesn’t often paint the whole picture. The people in The Harvesters are real men, women, and children living full, and sometimes brutal, lives. Their livelihood cultivates not only food, but a way of life.
Dropping readers in a space and keeping them there through to the end of the collection, Rembold offers a profound sense of place. Abandoned barns, empty stairwells, and unkempt fields set the stage early on. Images of fields and farmland abound, and we get to know families, friends, and communities via their land. Though not listed on a specific map, the collection tells distinct stories. In “Thanatopsis,” the land simultaneously feels like a cemetery and a sanctuary. Rembold writes,
“There’s testimony in barn skeletons,
sagging fences that sing in the wind
coming cool off the ridge,
midday
shining off silos, glare of corrugated
roofs, the telephone wires.” (18)
The roots of the relationship between people and earth run deep: there are no people without the land and no land without the people.
The Harvesters cultivates a deep relationship with all kinds of work, especially among women workers. “Scissors and Thread” lists their many tasks—“Seeding, growing, canning, cleaning, / cooking, sewing, quilting, children”—but this work does not fix everything (Rembold 37). In fact, this poem’s speaker looks up to a woman, perhaps a family member, imploring her to “lift [her] brow, stop / for one moment, stop and see [them]” (Rembold 37). While these women toil to survive, it can come at its own cost. In many cases, however, work is not only the best choice, but the only choice.
Many of Rembold’s poems address history, enriching these places in new meaning. “Historic Churchyard” tells of an abandoned church whose grounds are mysteriously kept up. Though their identity is unknown, the person clearing the vines and keeping the church walls clean is “someone whose remembrance / has become observance, like God’s vigilance, / prayer as a kind of seeing” (Rembold 25). The poem forges the familiar connection between someone and somewhere, using the setting to shed light on the people. In “Searching for an Artifact Beneath Composting Leave,” for example, the person is doing the digging rather than being what is dug up. Found artifacts, like an old hook or chain, call an unnamed child back to a time well beyond his memory. It speaks to the youth’s yet undefined purpose, using a place’s history to illuminate meaning in life.
The Harvesters celebrates and illuminates the rural space, including the bonds between people and their neighbors. In “Troubles,” a group of women work on their neighbor’s farms whenever the circumstances call them. Whether their “friend’s illness, a son’s unhappy marriage, / [or] a father’s syncope” prevented someone from being able to care for their own land, these women would always step in, working in tandem and without complaint (Rembold 38). Though not explicitly stated, it stands to reason that these absent neighbors would do the same for them. These poems often reflect on absences, helping the speaker appreciate the temporary lights shone on her life by others.
Haunting and dreamy, the poem’s closing section deals heavily with ideas of past vs. present and youth vs age. In this section, it feels as though the people and the land reminisce together. “Late Visit” examines the passage of time as it relates to a daughter who has left home years ago, only to return later. The poem opens and closes with the memory of the house Irish Setters, and the poem sits in the contrast between the past and present. Against the woman’s memories of a bright, loving, dog-filled house, her mother’s house is now dull, silent, and ghostly. Grief and loss plague the land of The Harvesters; nostalgia seems to light up the past and darken the present. These growing pains appear as specters, yet there is nothing unnatural here: the ghosts of the past make up yet another part of life.
Who are The Harvesters? They are farmers, homemakers, carpenters, and more. This collection is their namesake, and it pays its deepest respects to the land, its people, and the experiences in between. The pendulum between beauty and devastation transforms the relationships between people and place. It is not often we know precisely who we read about, but we understand the bonds they have with those around them. This results in a cyclical relationship, where people become a part of the land, land becomes part of the people, and from this, poetry is born.
Whitney Cooper holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University, where they served as editor-in-chief of Jelly Bucket, the graduate literary journal run by the university. They also work as a reader for Atlanta Review. A clerical error was made while earning their bachelor’s degree, and they have been passionate about poetry ever since. Their poetry appears in Glassworks Magazine, Stillpoint Literary Magazine, and others. They live in metro Atlanta with their wife, cat, and miniature schnauzer mix.
Knoxville, TN — The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Z Eihausen. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, July 21st 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!
Z Eihausen (she/her) holds a BA in English from the University of Tennessee. She also likes bees.
