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We Call Upon the Author to Explain–Hattie Hayes

In this newest installment of “We Call Upon the Author,” Hattie Jean Hayes, a writer and comedian, discusses her debut chapbook, Poems [for, about, because] My Friends. Her cheeky, witty answers expose friendship as craft, lineage, heartbreak, growth, and ultimately, an immense gift. Any writer who wants to learn how to cultivate an intimate relationship with readers should spend time with Hayes’ stunning words.

Marah Hoffman: Poetry has a long and culturally rich history as a vessel for meditations on friendship. Yet, you achieve ingenuity. Poems are displayed horizontally. Stanzas sit side by side, coalescing into a whole, rather than fracturing into parts. Why did you choose poems as gifts for your friends? What is it about the form (or more specifically your unique understanding of the form) that lends itself to intimacy?

Hattie Hayes: First, thanks for this generous and perceptive view of the formal choices in the book. Preserving the structures of the poems was vital, and I’m glad you appreciated my intentional decisions! These poems are gifts, and, like any good gift, they’re all unique to the friends they’re for, about, because. I tried to make sure the form of the poems contributed, which is why you get a squarish block of text like that on a postcard in “The Lady’s Improving,” or the dual dueling stanzas in “little twin stars,” or brief diary-style entries divorced from chronology in “The Year in Pictures.”

I’m a journalist by trade, poet by habit. I’ve written a lot of fiction. I’ve written lots and lots and lots of first-person nonfiction. Poetry allows me to write with a potency I find difficult to access elsewhere. My feelings, especially about friends and friendship, are so intense. The formal constraints of a poem allow me to explore the width and depth of a particular feeling without diluting it, or stepping on myself with justifications and explanations.

MH: What inspired you to include the squares of text dispersed throughout your collection? They contain sweet images that imbue the book with a scrapbook element and, in my view, elevate your writing to a realm outside of poetry.

HH: I’m happy you asked about these “prose interludes.” Years before I started assembling this manuscript, I wrote an eighteen-page essay with the working title “An Oral History of All My Friends.” Eventually I wrote myself into a corner, and I put the essay aside. I remembered it as I was working on this collection, and decided to salvage the parts that might illuminate the poems.

The poems capture feelings. The prose interludes capture moments. In the prose parts of this book, I wanted to trace the lineage of the emotions which drive the book as a whole.

I want to give enormous credit, and much gratitude, to Veronica Bennett at Bullshit Lit, who designed the cover. That definitely contributes to the “scrapbook” feel of this collection. When I sent her my inspiration photos, they included vintage photo albums and cookbooks. Veronica also had the idea to block off the prose into squares, which I really liked. I think it helps the prose stand apart and gives it a “confessional” quality that suits the mood of the collection.

MH: The inclusion of loved ones’ names and identifying details is of frequent debate in the literary world. What is your take?

HH: I am a poet of eager embarrassment. I love writing someone a poem and saying “Hi, I wrote you a poem,” and watching their face while they read it. I love perceiving and being perceived. I love using microscopic images as a vehicle for extrasensory perception, a sort of “Oh my God I was JUST thinking about that the other day, I can’t believe you remember it too.” I love writing something, and crying, and thinking, “I hope other people also cry when they read this,” and then feeling validated if they do. I love when someone sees me too clearly for comfort. I love when I get to remove all doubt that a poem is, in fact, a gift crafted for a specific celebration.

I also love being misunderstood. I love when my closest friends read a poem I’ve written and get it dead wrong. I love sprinkling in a little mystery, and privately rejoicing when people try too hard to understand a line that’s just a movie reference. I love to write down my side of the heartbreak, my angry and vindictive narrative, and leave the other party anonymous, giving myself both the catharsis and the control.

In some cases, to be enigmatic is to invite attention. Not throwaway attention – actual attention. A close reading. However, often, people will read your work and mistake the lack of a specified subject for ambiguity. In other cases, you can invite the same sort of attentive, meaningful reading by saying exactly who the poem is about. Darren Demaree’s “Emily poems” are a great example: there is one “main character,” one subject; she has a robust mythology.

All of this is to say: in my mind, every writer should approach every project differently. There are poems in this book that don’t have names for the protection of me, or others. And then the “name” poems are an explicit gesture of appreciation and recognition, because the people I name in my poems are all people who have loved me into a better poet.

MH: Friendships can, of course, be accompanied by heartbreak. Your tender collection does not ignore rupture. Did you think about the coexistence of hope and despair while organizing your poems? If so, how did this affect structure?

HH: When thinking about heartbreak, I have primarily considered it through the lens of friendship. No one has broken my heart like my friends have. By writing about these friendships, I understand their impact on me.

There are two modalities of organization at play in this book, and together, they create a sort of arc. There are the “character chapters,” which are small groups of poems about specific people. My friend Molly is the most obvious of these; the “Molly poems” conclude the book. There’s a section which centers on Dottie, my cat, and those poems make use of her perspective to some degree. And in the front of the book, there is a sequence of poems that use my most established friendship, with my high school best friend Cassie, as the focal point. I see these as three “cores” of my understanding of friendship. They all represent this unconditional friendship that you can come back to, life after life.

And then there are more thematic chapters. Everything from “The Year in Pictures” to “You Will Find Your People” encompasses the excitement of new friendship and freedom of familiar ones. Then, exactly halfway through the book, things shift. You’ll see that “tktktk” through “A Poem That Takes Place on September 26th” delve more into heartache, in many different shapes.

MH: Poems, For, About, Because My Friends contains a lifetime of relationships. I am curious, how long did it take you to write?

HH: The oldest poems in this collection were written in late 2015, early 2016. They didn’t have a “life” in the outside world. They weren’t published. Some lived in emails to my friend Molly Bilker, who sees most, if not all, of my poems. And other poems in this collection from that time period, I shared with the people they were about. “Marriages So Far,” the first poem in this collection, is about four different people; I think all four of them read their “section.” So that was eight years before the book came out.

The first draft of the manuscript came together during the summer of 2022. I had taken a social media hiatus for six months. The day after my social media break ended, I logged on to Twitter and saw Bullshit Lit was holding a 24-hour contest for chapbook submissions. Fortuitous! I assembled a manuscript, which included my poems and the prose interludes, and that was ultimately accepted for publication in 2023.

In the weeks before the book came out, I worked to finalize the manuscript. I rearranged the poems to fit this “arc” I had in my mind, and I added in some more. “You Will Find Your People,” “Civil Engineering” and “For a Decade” were written in early 2023. I composed those poems with the manuscript in mind. In the time since the first draft came together, I’ve been aligning my writing more intentionally with the themes of friends and friendships.

MH: Do you imagine your readers as friends?

HH: I imagine my friends as readers! I know, in theory, strangers and acquaintances are reading my poetry. But when I think about someone sitting down with my book, I always imagine the face of someone I love. My friends have been such vocal champions of my work that it is a challenge to think of anyone else reading my book. But as I say in the first prose interlude in the book, I have a very willing attachment style. Many of my friendships have grown out of quiet, mutual appreciation for each other’s writing or creative projects. And I think now, having a book out, I’m going to experience a heightened version of that phenomenon. If you’re interested in reading all my thoughts on friendship, you’re likely a qualified candidate for a position as my friend.

Poems [For, About, Because] My Friends is available through Bullshit Lit

Hattie Jean Hayes is a writer and comedian, originally from a small town in Missouri, who now lives in New York. Her work has appeared in The Ex-Puritan, Hell Is Real, Janus Literary, HAD, and others. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her first book of poems is Poems [for, about, because] My Friends, published by Bullshit Lit. Hattie completed a SAFTA residency in September 2022 and is working on her first novel. You can find her poetry, fiction, newsletter, and other writings at hattiehayes.com.

Marah Hoffman is a poetry and creative nonfiction writer from Reading, Pennsylvania. She is an MFA candidate, graduate teaching assistant, and Ecotone reader at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In the fall of 2022, she was the long-term writer-in-residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA). Hoffman continues to support SAFTA as Creative Director.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Now Accepting Residency Applications for Summer 2024

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is now accepting applications for short-term writing residencies in all genres—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, screenwriting, journalism, academic writing, and more—for their summer residency period which runs from May 20th, 2024 to August 18th, 2024. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to complete their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.

Each farmhouse residency costs $300/week, which includes a room of one’s own, as well as access to our communal kitchen, bathroom, office, and living space, plus wireless internet. Residencies in the Writers Coop are $150/week and include your own private dry cabin as well as access to the farmhouse amenities. Because of the low cost, we are rarely able to offer scholarships for Writers Coop residents.

Residents will stay at the SAFTA farmhouse, located on a working farm on a 45-acre wooded plot in a Tennessee “holler” perfect for hiking, birdwatching, and foraging. The farmhouse is also just 20 minutes from downtown Knoxville, an exciting and creative city that is home to a thriving arts community. SAFTA is ideal for writers looking for a rural retreat with urban amenities. 

As part of our commitment to anti-racist work, we use a reparations payment model for our farmhouse residencies which consists of the following:

  1. 3 reparations weeks of equally divided payments for Black and/or Indigenous identifying writers at $150/week
  2. 3 discounted weeks of equally divided payments for writers of color at $250/week
  3. 6 equitable weeks of equally divided payments at $300/week

Black and/or Indigenous identifying writers are also invited to apply for a $350 support grant to help cover the costs of food, travel, childcare, and/or any other needs while they are at the residency. Currently, we are able to offer two of these grants per residency period (spring/summer/fall). If you would like to donate to expand this funding, you may do so here.

For the 2024 summer residency period, SAFTA will offer the following fellowships: 

  • Palestinian Writers: one full fellowship for a Palestinian writer or writer of Palestinian descent
  • Black & Indigenous Writers Fellowship: one full fellowship for Black and/or Indigenous identifying writers
  • Writers of Color Fellowships: one full and one 50% fellowship for writers of color
  • Creekmore Bespoke Fellowship for Women 50+: one full fellowship for a woman writer who is 50 or older

The application deadline for the summer residency period is February 15, 2024. Find out more about the application process at www.sundressacademyforthearts.com.

The application fee is waived for all BIPOC identifying writers. For all fellowship applications, the application fee will also be waived for those who demonstrate financial need; please state this in your application under the financial need section.

Project Bookshelf: Kyle J. Wente

Reading was always as much of a polite way to be alone with myself as it was one of my favorite ways to connect with other people. As a kid, I used to be able to effortlessly produce excitement about reading to the point that I didn’t need a story. My Nana was deaf, and she and I would bond over her science books. I would flip through encyclopedias for hours and create my own stories in my head about the different animals or environments. When I started reading chapter books, I used to be able to consume hundreds of pages of fantasy and sci-fi in only a few days’ time. I would get lost in the oceans-deep worlds of Eragon or entries in the Halo extended universe. I loved how easily I could escape into a sleepy mountain village or an alien spaceship harnessing the energy of a star.

It wasn’t until my teen years that reading started getting difficult for me. There was pressure to move toward other hobbies. In high school, I loved all of the required readings—even when most everyone else loathed them. I remember how much The Great Gatsby floored me when I first read it. My first taste of literature felt like I was being inducted into adulthood, and I couldn’t wait. Even in high school, though, I always felt like the best reading was being withheld from me. I was so excited to go to college because of the access to books from all over the world. I went all-in on loving literature, and I forgot about the reading I used to do. In college, the pressure to conform stuck around, but instead of loathing all books, I felt like I was expected to compete with my peers in reading the most elevated text. I loved how important and powerful writers like Toni Morrison, Anton Chekhov, and Julia Alvarez felt to read that enjoyment fell on the backburner. I harbored such an elitist attitude that I felt like I was excluding people from reading rather than sharing reading with others.


It’s only recently that I’ve started to read again. My partner has been stressing that I need to rediscover what I loved about books and find a balance. Lately, I’ve been reading K.W. Jeter’s Star Wars books about Boba Fett and some short stories from a Jorge Luis Borges anthology. I’ve also started to read comics—books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus opened me up to how effective comics can be in blending a good story with communicative visuals. Nowadays, I most often admire when genre fiction and literature blend because they appeal to each others’ weaknesses. My favorite book is a hard question, but some books that I’ve been mulling over a lot lately are John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada.

Kyle J. Wente (he/him) graduated from the University of Tennessee, where he studied English and Creative Writing. He has served as Editor of Poetry for Sequoya Review in Chattanooga, TN. He loves nature, playing bass, and co-parenting his partner’s ten-year-old beagle, Marlowe Eugene.

Interview with Nnadi Samuel, Author of Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade

Book cover. Background is black hands wrapped in red chains on rough white background. Title appears in white lettering: Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade. Words Slave Trade and author's name Nnadi Samuel are in red at bottom.

Nnadi Samuel, the author of the newly released chapbook Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade, sat down with Sundress editorial intern Heather Domenicis to discuss themes such as violence, liberty, and individuality within the pages of Samuel’s book.

Heather Domenicis: Can you speak to the recurring use of militant language and imagery in this collection?

Nnadi Samuel: The collection itself speaks to a time of restraints, bondage, and gag order—achieved mostly through militancy. When the reader finds these reoccurring themes, it is more of a natural happening than a premeditated motif. The poem a “Glossary of Artilleryn Terms” is an example. As suggested by the title, we’ve survived such a barrage of hostile treatment that we coin new names for it. One line in particular attests to this: “To cherish where I’m from is to add guns to our part of speech.” It becomes part and parcel of our life’s syllabus; to attempt to purge it from our literature is to live in denial. A line from another poem from the manuscript states, “an editor tells me to tone down on grief, each time I begin a poem without birds. I would have him know, I lack the patience for soft feathered imagery, because we were raised to outpace bullets.” The conversation that birthed these lines did in fact happen and my response was the same. All this is to say we cannot shy away or turn a blind eye forever to the war which breathes fire daily in our faces—both at home and on sovereign soil.

HD: The titles of the poems heavily bleed into the poems themselves or assign context to the text, especially in “Praise for the Inner Lining of my Morphing Apparel” and “There is a Gnawing Need for Sugar.” How and when do you generate titles?

NS: Yes! I love the spillover blessing that comes with the scenery in poems like these.
Sometimes, it is what gives rise to the poem. Other times, it is the nucleus/core around which the poem revolves. Either way, the titles of my poems have always been directly connected to the actual poems, so much so that you can substitute one for the other and still not lose out totally in its meaning and all that it has to say. In writing a poem, the titling starts almost immediately as the writing. Often, it happens right in the middle of it, and I am struck by one bright sentence which sums up the whole experience.

HD: Regarding “Praise for the Inner Lining of my Morphing Apparel,” can you elaborate on the significance of the “exit dress” and its role in the narrative?

NS: In most African countries, mode of dressing has been and still is one subtle way to profile and enslave individuals against their wish. This unfortunately has also slipped into the religious sectors, which are meant to be the soul of humanity. For example, in the line “I: asphalt glory. Color riot, in ways that put coffins out of fashion,” I am thinking of the numerous victims that tried to be different but ended up in a body bag (coffin)—perhaps, more beautiful and appreciated only in death. The one way to exercise freedom here is through rebellion, cut from same fabric as the dress: regaling oneself unabashedly in whatever manner one feels the most comfortable in. In between the inner lining of this dress is where they find closure, where they feel seen and heard. It is their long-sought door to liberty.

HD: Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade reflects on personal traumas as well as a broader, collective trauma. How do you navigate this intersection in your poetry?

NS: I started out wanting only to account for personal and remote trauma within my reach—things I could in a way control. However, I discovered that in speaking about my personal hurt, I couldn’t ignore the larger sense of it felt across borders. I cannot tell a story of an assaulted cousin back home without the same experience being applicable to yet another Black person outside the country—baton for baton, or even worse. Both experiences are intertwined, irrespective of clime, and I felt the need to address with the title. Here, I began with some close-to-home issues and lent that voice to account for an overall collective grief. It rains everywhere, you know.

HD: Alongside trauma, resilience is also a recurring theme. Do you believe poetry itself plays a part in your own resilience?

NS: I pride myself as having always been resilient in whatever field I find myself. However, encountering poetry unlocked a level of resilience which I never thought I could attain. I watch myself in recent times, stretching to my limit and springing back to shape even stronger. I have become more bendable. Being a poet does this to you. This doggedness has transformed my life and spills into my poems as a currency for changing the narrative and systemic bias.

HD: Many of these poems contain vivid and at times gory bodily imagery. How does the body inspire your work?

NS: The body is one of the most fragile, delicate parts of us. Whatever harm comes to us first encounters the body, before pain is felt across all organs. It bears the damage for all our battle scars, trauma—seen or hidden. Therefore, it is ours to own, love, and cherish. Sometimes, it is the only place we seek asylum. The body imagery in my work seeks to connect the individual to the hurt and make sense of the wound on a more physical level. Our traumas are mostly internal, hidden and unaccounted. The body is a signpost, a showroom that tells these tales in bold blood.

HD: Some of these poems, such as “Nebulous Strike in Minnesota” and “Poems Like This Refuse Sound, My Cramp Bears Music Enough” contain multi-generational family stories and broken families, too. How do you think about inheritance in your poetry?

NS: I come from a very dysfunctional society with so many familial battles, sibling-inflicted scars, and bad blood. While some of this is self-created, some is inherited. When we pose together for a family photo, it all seems a façade. There are so many cases of trauma fought within, which never sees the light of the day. Without institutional ways to address these wounds, the hurt spirals down to yet another family and forms a multi-generational history of broken homes. I think about inheritance as the curse (be it good or bad) we put a face to and live off until our death. That albatross on the neck that just wouldn’t let go.

HD: There are a few mentions of religion in this collection. Can you speak to religious influences in your work?

NS: I grew up in a very religious home and have witnessed both the beauty and beast in religion. Two case studies here give an insight. When I alluded to “christening” a colleague’s daughter in the poem “Schwa: in a Sound Where All Consonants Means Loss,” I was referencing the potency of my religion. And then in “Poems Like This Refuse Sound,” the line “Sorrow playing Jesus, playing Lazarus cheap for those buying it—” condemns the pontification of this same religion by men of God who know of this familial trauma and instead of preaching against it, turns sorrow to sweet sermon. There is so much to unpack here, which I am exploring in a body of work titled Biblical Invasion, that might end up being my third chapbook in 2024. Fingers crossed for that one.

HD: Which poem(s) in this collection is/are closest to your heart?

NS: I deeply connect to all the poems in this collection, especially “Schwa: in a Sound Where All Consonants Means Loss.” However, the poem “A Boy Ago” seems the closest to my heart, majorly for its nostalgic effect and childhood memories.

Download your free copy of Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade!

Nnadi Samuel (he/him/his) holds a BA in English & Literature from the University of Benin. His works have been previously published or are forthcoming in Suburban Review, The Seventh Wave, Native Skin, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West, FIYAH, Fantasy Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, The Deadlands, Commonwealth Writers, Jaggery, Foglifter, The Capilano Review, Lolwe, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the 2020 Canadian Open Drawer Contest, the 2021 Miracle Monocle Award for Ambitious Student Writers, the 2021 Penrose Poetry Prize, the 2021 Lakefly Poetry Contest, the 2021 International Human Rights Art Festival Award New York, and the 2022 Angela C. Mankiewicz Poetry Contest. He was the second prize winner of the 2022 The Bird in Your Hands Contest and the bronze winner for the 2022 Creative Future Writer’s Award. He also received an honorable mention for the 2022 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest and the 2021 Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize. He is the author of Reopening of Wounds. He tweets at @Samuelsamba10.

Heather Domenicis (she/her) is an Upper Manhattan based writer and editor moonlighting at a tech startup. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from The New School and her words appear in Hobart, JAKE, and [sub]liminal. Born in a jail, she is writing a memoir about all that comes with that. She sometimes tweets @heatherlynnd11.

An Interview with Michael Meyerhofer, Author of What To Do If You’re Buried Alive

Following the republishing of his book What To Do If You’re Buried Alive this past month, Michael Meyehofer spoke with Doubleback Books editorial intern Camelia Heins about the choice behind the title along with reasons behind his references to religion, connections to the Midwest, and the use of comedy. 

Camelia Heins: Your title really hooks people in and the title itself is the name of one of your poems. What inspired you to name this collection of works What To Do If You’re Buried Alive? Why did this poem specifically stand out to be the name of the entire collection? 

Michael Meyerhofer: The original version of that poem was about three pages long and was inspired by research I did on actual people throughout the ages who’ve been inadvertently buried alive but lived to tell the tale. Gradually, though, I whittled it down until it ended up as the fairly short poem it is now. Since that one already felt like an allegory for dealing with depression—or, really, any kind of struggle that feels overwhelming and insurmountable, but probably actually isn’t—and a lot of my poems can have a bit of darkness or sardonic humor in them, it seemed like a fitting title poem for the collection.

CH: You section off the book into two sections, “Scars” and “Tattoos.” I think these words are particularly interesting, especially with how tattoos themselves can be seen as scars or as art. What is the significance behind sectioning off the book this way? Can you explain your reasoning behind choosing these two words? 

MM: To be honest, I actually have to credit my late friend and mentor, Jon Tribble, for that! Many years ago, I was at critical mass in terms of having way too many poems that I was trying to fit into manuscripts, and he kindly volunteered to take a look at what I had. It was his idea to arrange the manuscript in two sections, with “Scars” and “Tattoos” used to distinguish between formative events and later, more deliberate choices. I eventually added what became the title poem and tweaked a few small things, but overall, it’s still as he arranged it. Jon was a kind, brilliant man, and like hundreds of poets out there, I owe him a lot!

CH: Many of your poems include some sort of unexpected twist or may catch people off guard. What influences can you attribute this style to? What kind of impact do you intend to make with these twists in your poems? 

MM: I’m sure I’m far from the first person to say this, but I feel like there’s a lot of similarity between poems and Zen koans. I’ve always loved how koans end on a twist that makes sense in a way that’s wild and transcendent but can’t really be articulated—the way they tug our brains in directions we didn’t even know were possible. For most of my writing life, poetry has been an exercise in teaching myself to stop white-knuckling whatever story or meaning I’m trying to get across and just trusting the piece to end itself.

CH: It’s clear your work contains a touch of comedy and satire, seen in poems like “My Mother Sent Me” and “Dear Submitter.” Can you talk about how you use comedy and satire and what kind of effect these elements have on your work? 

MM: There’s something transcendent and almost spiritual about humor—how it can let the air out of the worst tragedy and remind us in an instant that there’s a touch of absurdity in all our struggles and grief. Some of that might also come from growing up in Iowa, a state that’s beautiful but also rather stark and isolating, where deadpan humor is a must for getting through harsh winters surrounded by icy roads and fallow fields.

CH: You make quite a few religious references in your work, mentioning Catholic school, confessions, and more. Are you religious? How does your own religious background, whether positive or negative, influence your work? 

MM: I grew up in a pretty religious small town and attended a Catholic school—I was even an altar boy, and spent many hours in a white robe seated at the impaled feet of a graphically carved Christ! As you might imagine, I was also dreadfully emo, pondering mortality and suffering from a very young age (inspired, I’m sure, by all the time I spent in hospitals because of birth defects and health problems). So I was fascinated by religious stories because they were the first places I went looking for answers. Later, I took every religion and philosophy class I could in college (I’m the annoying guy who could sweep the Bible category in Jeopardy). Ultimately, I came to realize that my religious interpretations weren’t Catholic so much as Zen Buddhist, and to really chafe at the sense of bashful shame and unnecessary guilt that seemed to permeate a lot of those early lessons—but those feelings and religious iconography will always be with me, I’m sure.

CH: As someone with a connection to the Midwest, I found it interesting and personal that you included many connections to the Midwest region and suburban/rural life. The poem “Suburbia” particularly stood out to me. How do you think a non-urban, more suburban/rural background shapes your work? What’s the appeal of focusing on suburban or rural life? 

MM: I’ve lived in cities (of various sizes) for pretty much all my adult life, and I’ve come to see California as my home these last 9 or so years—but if you cracked my skull open, you’d probably still find a lone farmhouse surrounded by fields and tree-covered hills. The beautiful starkness of the Midwest has always seemed to me to be the perfect illustration of what it means to be human—there are people who love us, sure, but ultimately we’re on our own, so you’d better start figuring stuff out.

CH: I love your poem “Strata,” especially the imagery of lying on someone’s grave to understand the universe. I just have to ask, have you ever done that? And whether you did or didn’t, what was your reasoning behind choosing to use an image like this? 

MM: Thank you! Yes, I have done that, actually. I don’t recall where the idea came from, but I’ve more or less always had the sense that if you want to reach any kind of understanding, you have to keep your lens clear and cast off as many inhibitions and taboos as you possibly can. That might be why I’ve always had a great deal of respect for spirituality and curiosity but almost none for ritual and dogma. I think irreverence can be an amazing artistic, spiritual, and intellectual tool, so long as it’s sincere and not just performative.

CH: Outside of your poetry work, I notice you also write fantasy novels. How would you say the idea of fantasy plays a role in your poems, if any? 

MM: I’m a terrific nerd in real life! I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, so for me, there’s not that much difference between a poem, a novel, a short story, etc.—just slightly different attempts at the same thing. There are countless ways that I think fiction has helped my poetry, and vice versa—from imagery and storytelling to maybe a bit more awareness of how something actually sounds to the reader. Both sides also feed into my nerdiness too. When I’m not reading or writing, one of my favorite things is to watch documentaries about science, history, religion, etc. In fact, I love lifting weights (probably another thing tied to my childhood) and will often exercise while playing videos in the background on physics, mythology, and strategic analysis of battlefield tactics used a thousand years ago—it all gets thrown into the blender that is my brain for later use.

What To Do If You’re Buried Alive is available to download for free from Doubleback Books

Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five poetry books, six poetry chapbooks, and two fantasy trilogies. He has won the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Prize, the Whirling Prize, and other honors. He earned his B.A. from the University of Iowa and his M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He grew up in Iowa where he learned the value of reading novels, lifting weights, and not getting his hopes up. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review and lives in Fresno, California. For more information and at least one embarrassing childhood photo, visit www.troublewithhammers.com.

Camelia Heins (she/her) is an undergraduate student studying English & Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Born and raised in Orange County, California, Camelia has been active in her community through service, engagement, and both creative and journalistic writing. She enjoys reading and writing poetry, listening to several of her Spotify playlists, collecting plants, and playing with her cat, Moira.

Sundress Reads: Review of World

Ana Luísa Amaral erases borders in World (New Directions 2023), translated from the original Portuguese and published posthumously. Amaral’s scope is vast, ranging from refugees traversing the Mediterranean to ants trekking across blades of grass. She inspects the global and the minute, the wild and civilized, all with cool intellect, attentiveness, and wonder. These poems are especially poignant with the context of her passing from cancer in 2022. As a cancer survivor myself, I consider where my focus should be with each page-turn, how to make the most of my life, and what my understanding of the world really is.

From the first page, Amaral seemingly reads my mind: “Is it good? you will ask” (3), implying a categorical moral compass for my worldview. Good and bad. Right and wrong. The rest of this poem, “About the world,” consists of her reply, primarily inviting me to be observant, to take ownership of my life, and find the answer myself. Lines such as, “Notice my hat, an invented halo,” Pay attention to my eyes, / closed,” and “What does it taste of” (Amaral 3) center around the senses. Amaral further encourages me to look at life without assumption or motive. In doing that, I realize the world is full of grace, seduction, and joy—more than I ever could have imagined.

The first section of World, “Almost eclogues,” plays with macro and micro realms of nature. The tradition of short, pastoral poetry goes back to Ancient Greece and Amaral’s work satisfyingly continues centuries of classical bucolics with a contemporary style. The “Almost eclogues” are akin to persona poems but are more expansive in allusion and meaning, including flash references to Milton, Dickinson, and Bishop in “The peacock,” “The bee,” and “The fish,” respectively. In “The ant: peregrinatio,” the small, familiar insect is a complex female character with emotions. The ant walks far from her home (unlike other ants), as she must provide nourishment for her community. Always on the lookout for danger in her difficult life, she soon finds food in a moment of bliss:

“she arches her body and stands like a statue:

before her lies

pure seduction:

a teeny-tiny seed

that she is now carrying, so bravely

and delicately:

a future meal for her family and friends,

pilgrims, like her,

of the almost-nothing

her people.” (Amaral 9)

Amaral gifts this ant with personal narrative and personality through the use of adjectives and interiority. Additionally, the story grows to a global scale in the last few lines. The diction of “pilgrim” and “her people” invite me to consider who this ant might represent. Is this a woman delivering sustenance for her impoverished family? Where have they traveled from and why are they in a position of near-nothingness? Perhaps reality weighs on her each night when she goes to sleep, scrambling for solutions for the next day. In just a few words, a seemingly simple poem expands to a vast cultural context of mass global migration and the depth every person carries every day.

Even more, Amaral’s natural subjects in “Almost eclogues” curiously balance optimism and existential dread as they reflect on existence. In “The peacock: on flying and usefulness,” the awkward flyer’s “fan is a reminder of paradise” (Amaral 25), even though it’s a paradise lost. While it’s a bittersweet moment, the peafowl still falls for his colors and bravado despite the lack of utility in his dramatic feathers. I can’t help but cheer on the peacock, who’s only doing what’s necessary to survive. Amaral further emphasizes this point by bringing a prolific scientific mind into the conversation, noting how

“Darwin knew,

even though he didn’t write poetry,

that beauty is just that:

useless, with no apparent reason

to sustain it.” (25)

This peacock simply wants to mate so as to continue his line, yet Amaral textures the narrative. She doesn’t invent falsehoods to entertain readers, instead guiding our attention to places previously overlooked. Seemingly pessimistic, the peacock recognizes his poor flying ability; on the other hand, he knows of paradise and beauty—both worth fighting for, no matter how imperfect. Amaral, therein, promotes a shift in focus, asking: reader, can you embrace the world, no matter how unexpected?

For the ant, the peacock, and countless other fauna from World, Amaral does not suggest pursuing survival without care for others; the desire to live unites all living beings, no matter how different in appearance or belief. She also considers what is left behind: what has humanity inherited from history? And when each of the nearly eight billion people on Earth dies, what will be left for future generations of all species? A large epistemological pondering is brilliantly made metaphor in “Sunflower.” In this brief poem, Amaral asks,

“if a sunflower alighted

on this piece of paper

and tore it

what would be left,

the sun in the sky—

stock-still—

or the paper

stunned and

dizzy?” (31)

Within nine lines, Amaral advocates for a total embracing of light, to metaphorically stare at the sun and be curious about the unknown. While far, the sun keeps us alive and should not be deemed distant. World reminds us of the preciousness of life, and to embrace interior and private worlds (truths) as equally as the shared planet (interconnectedness). For Amaral, to live is a marvel, a miracle.

World is available at New Directions Publishing

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She won Breakwater Review‘s 2022 Peseroff Prize and earned a 2022-2023 Poetry Fellowship from The Writers’ Room of Boston. Her writing has found homes in Gasher, Solstice Lit, Thrush, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Emerson College, where she now teaches writing and literature. She is a cancer survivor.

Lyric Essentials: Kara Dorris Reads Molly McCully Brown

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Kara Dorris joins us to discuss the work of Molly McCully Brown, video games as a source of inspiration for titles, metaphor, and disability poetics. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?

Kara Dorris: When choosing which poems to read from Brown’s The Virgina State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, I decided to pick the first poem, a proem, titled “Central Virginia Training Center.” This poem does the work of a great first poem by setting up a personal connection and reaching towards the broader, universal truth of disability as a social construction. “New Knowledge for the Dark” takes on the persona of an inmate and explores the abuse, the dehumanizing that has occurred in many psychiatric institutions around the country. In contrast, “Without a Mind” takes on the persona of a worker making their rounds, showing an ingrained ableism, a seemingly integrated presumption that disability is punishment for sin and a waste of a life. Each poem is compelling, revealing yet another injustice, and I can’t recommend this collection enough.

RW: Your collection, HitBox, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2024. What does this collection explore and what was your writing process like?

KD: HitBox feels very different from my previous two collections—it feels angrier, less ready to accept what we are told by so-called authority figures yet hopeful that empathy, inclusiveness, and equality will triumph. As I wrote these poems over the past few years, I didn’t really consider it as a “book” or think to connect the poems consciously. But when it came time to arrange a manuscript, I noticed the violence, I noticed the questioning and the hitting occurring within the poems. I struggled with a unifying theme—beyond punches and feminist anger. Then I came across the term “hit box” used in video games and lightning struck. A hit box is the space around an avatar that registers when a punch lands, or when your avatar scores a hit and the connecting points. This hit box seemed the perfect metaphor for the “hits” the world throws our way, that knock us off our axis. Plus, I am constantly annoyed at the skimpy, over-sexualization of female video game characters, so a cohesive, angry, and hopeful book was born.

Kara Dorris reads “New Knowledge for the Dark” by Molly McCully Brown

RW: When was the first time you read Brown’s work? Why did it stand out to you? How has their writing inspired your own?

KD: This is Brown’s first poetry collection, and I think the title is what really drew me in at first: The Virgina State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Since then, I have also read her essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body. Writing the disabled experience is challenging; oftentimes, disabled writers are considered too narrow or too personal or as trying to elicit pity. Oftentimes when disability is portrayed it focuses on the individual disability or impairment, not the social construction of disability that makes it hard to navigate through this world. Wonderfully, Brown’s collection shows disability as personal, but does not neglect the social stereotypes that create the larger experience of disability. Partly personal/speculative/what if—Brown wonders if she had been born just a few decades earlier, would she have ended up in this place? In this place where women were institutionalized forcibly sterilized, where patients were really inmates without rights or dignity. The poems are also part historical research—Brown embodies the voices that had no voice. Through persona poems—from wards and warders—we understand the helplessness of the inmates and ableist mindsets of those who assumed they knew what is best for the disabled population. I find this poetry collection fits into ideas of crip aesthetics, which shows that disability is socially constructed and celebrates differences; it shows the long history of forced institutionalization, even positioning us into locations such as the Blind Room and the Infirmary, inviting readers to walk through these doorways with the speakers, to never forget our harmful, ableist past. 

Kara Dorris reads “Without a Mind” by Molly McCully Brown

RW: Who else have you been reading lately, and who else has been inspiring you in your own craft?

KD: I think we should all read more disabled poets: Sheila Black, Stephanie Heit, Petra Kuppers, Rusty Morrison, Jillian Wiese, and torrin a. greathouse. All these poets have inspired my writing and the way I write about disability. Growing up no one mentioned disability, even though I was born with a genetic bone disorder. In graduate school, I was never offered a disability studies class or a literature class that interrogated disability representation. For a long time, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe my experiences, to put words to the socially constructed ideas of shame revolving around disability. These poets helped me find these words, and I will always be grateful. 

Read more from this interview at our Patreon

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body— which was published in the United States in June 2020 by Persea Books, and released in the United Kingdom in March of 2021 by Faber & Faber— and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020).

Purchase Places I’ve Taken My Body

Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press, as well as HitBox forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2024). She has also published five chapbooks: Elective Affinities (dancing girl press, 2011), Night Ride Home (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Sonnets from Vada’s Beauty Parlor & Chainsaw Repair (dancing girl press, 2018), Untitled Film Still Museum (CW Books, 2019), and Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, RHINO, Tinderbox, Tupelo Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Harpur Palate, Cutbank, Hayden Ferry Review, and Crazyhorse, among others as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Waxwing, Breath and Shadow, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com

Purchase When the Body is a Guardrail

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in HAD, The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

Project Bookshelf: Halsey Hyer

A watercolor drawing of two orange milk crates filled with books. There is a wooden board on top of the crates also shelving books, only filling half of the board with an ornate bookend. The names and titles appearing on the text are from top-right to bottom left: Lorde, de la Paz, Duhamel, Satir, Weir-Soley, The Shell Game, Morrison, Wade, Pendas, Barnett, Harvey, Fleischmann, Oliver, Gongaware, Rankine, Florida, Pennsylvania, Beatty, Burroughs, We Want It All, Wen, Sharif, de Lima, Wang, Sargeson, Lamb, Goldman, Moore. The artist's signature reads: MENDING BENDER

This is a dedication to everyone who has ever helped me move all of my books and move all of my books and move all of my books and move all of my books.

Here is a watercolor depiction of the bookshelf of my heart, featuring names of people and places who’ve helped me curate my own shelves as I explore the worlds of words.

A best friend once said something like this to me: You might as well be married if you mix books; undoing something like that is worse than legal divorce. 

Between my partner and I, our home is host to over a thousand books, sprawling on makeshift milk crate shelves with boards I’ve hoarded for projects I haven’t thought up yet. Yes, our books are all mixed up. Not only are they mixed up, they aren’t even organized, ha!

I’ve heard a rumor that a thousand books make a library, and five hundred makes the essence of a library. I’ve never been happier to co-create an intimacy founded on curation, collection, sharing, and trust. 

Our shelves hold many, though here are the top hits: Audre Lorde, Marcus Rediker, T. Fleischmann, Jackie Wang, Ursula K. Le Guin, David Graeber, Philip K Dick, Kim Phillips-Fein, Virginia Satir, Lucas de Lima, Claudia Rankine, Augusten Burroughs, and—since fourteen, I’ve moved over twenty times. I lost almost everything twice. I retained a few things: my instruments, my books. This is one way of saying I haven’t always had a library. I’ve clung to books ever since I knew they were a tool into worlds otherwise unknown. 

Another way of saying is I have always had my copy of Alan Moore’s Watchmen—speculative science fiction depicting a world where the U.S. won the war in Vietnam and Nixon remains in office. Vigilantism becomes necessary because the government has, in an unsurprising succession of events, failed the public through the murder of The Comedian, a government-sponsored superhero.

I read Watchmen on the clock at the job whose paycheck I used to buy the book in the first place. I worked alone in a sizeable red-and-white department store, and we’d be dead for hours. No one would come to check on me. They’d ping me on the walkie, and I’d feign how dirty the soda machine hookups were as my fingers stuck to the pages of Alan Moore.  

I decided to begin collecting books seven years ago because Toi Derricotte’s The Undertaker’s Daughter and Aaron Smith’s Blue On Blue Ground grabbed me by the shirt and demanded that I have a reason to live and that reason’s name was poetry.

I forget often that my fingers stick to the pages of a book when everything else slips through them. 

A white non-binary person with short spiked brown hair is mid-sentence holding a microphone, arms and legs crossed. They have tattoos on their arms and legs, piercings on their face, many rings on their fingers, and a watch on their right wrist. They’re wearing black lipstick and a black and floral party dress with bedazzled fishnets. They are sitting on an orange barstool with their arms and legs crossed holding a microphone in mid-sentence. There is one empty orange barstool to their right and one to their left. There is a large wall of books behind them and a door to the right of the frame.

Halsey Hyer (they/them) is the author forthcoming full-length hybrid collection, Divorce Garter (Main Street Rag, 2024). Their microchapbook of micropoems, Everything Becomes Bananas (Rinky Dink Press, 2022), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023, and their debut chapbook, [deadname] (Anhinga Press, 2022), won the 2022 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Based in Pittsburgh, PA they’re a collective member of The Big Idea Bookstore and the 2022-2024 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow in Chatham University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Find out more on their website—www.halseyhyer.org.

Sundress Publications is Open for Full-Length Prose Manuscripts

Sundress Publications is open for submissions of full-length prose manuscripts in all genres. All authors are welcome to submit manuscripts during our reading period, which runs from December 1, 2023 – February 29, 2024. Sundress is particularly interested in prose collections that value genre hybridization, especially speculative memoir; strange or fractured narratives; flash fiction; experimental work; or work with strong attention to lyricism and language. These collections may be short stories, novellas, essays, memoir, or a mixture thereof.

We are looking for manuscripts of 125-165 double-spaced pages of prose; front matter is not included toward the page count. Individual stories may have been previously published in anthologies, chapbooks, print journals, online journals, etc., but cannot have appeared in any full-length collection, including self-published collections. Manuscripts translated from another language will not be accepted. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but we ask that authors notify us immediately if their work has been accepted elsewhere.

From December 1st to 14th, submissions to this open reading period are free for the first submission for any and all writers. Beginning December 15th, the reading fee is $15 per manuscript, though the fee will be waived for all writers of color and entrants who purchase or pre-order any Sundress title. Authors may submit as many manuscripts as they would like, provided that each is accompanied by a separate reading fee or purchase/pre-order. Entrants can place book orders or pay submission fees in our store.

All manuscripts will be read by members of our editorial and reader board, and we will choose one manuscript for publication in 2024. We strive to further our commitment to inclusion and seek to encounter as many unique and important voices as possible. We are actively seeking collections from writers of color, trans and nonbinary writers, writers with disabilities, and others whose voices are under-represented in literary publishing. Selected manuscripts will be offered a standard publication contract, which includes 25 copies of the published book as well as any additional copies at cost.

To submit, send us a 20-35 page sample of the manuscript (DOC, DOCX, or PDF); the sample should include the author’s name and an acknowledgements page. The sample may include one story/essay or a number of shorter pieces. After our initial selection process, semi-finalists will be asked to send the full manuscript in the spring.

Submit your manuscript samples to us here.

Please note that we are unable to accept manuscripts from authors who reside outside of the USA or Canada as we are unable to adequately support books in international markets.

Any questions or concerns, as well as withdrawal notifications, can be sent sundresscontest@gmail.com.

An Interview with José Angel Araguz, Author of Ruin & Want

Before the debut of his lyrical memoir, Ruin & Want, José Angel Araguz spoke with Sundress Publications’ editorial intern Izzy Astuto about artistic expression and the traumatic events that shaped him.

Izzy Astuto: How did you decide to first introduce L through the eyes of the narrator at the time girlfriend?

José Angel Araguz: This decision came via feedback from poet and dear friend Rivka Clifton, who noted that the project needed an entry point into what was at stake. Seeing it now that the project is completed, it was a great suggestion.

I see it as a moment of crisis similar to the sense of crisis in the rest of the project, a moment where different roles and kinds of masking I performed in my relationships clashed. In this moment of friction, all I had were questions I couldn’t take the time to answer because of the damage control I had to play, with my at the time girlfriend, with the image I had of myself that I fought to maintain.

IA: Can you speak more about how you chose the specific experiences throughout to create this narrative?

JAA: This book started as my creative dissertation during my time earning a Ph.D. in creative writing and comparative literature from the University of Cincinnati. My focus was on Latinx/e poetics and hybrid forms, which had me indulging my fascination for writing forms. This timing would have the first draft of the book circa 2017. I had tried often to write about these experiences, the relationship with L in particular, but often found myself fraught with indecision and inarticulation. Some part of me wouldn’t allow myself to say it clearly—there was a sense of shame, guilt, responsibility, etc. that kept me starting over only to end up thwarted again.

As a lapsed Catholic, I believe I just wanted to self-flagellate (which makes for terrible reading, haha). When I began working on what would become the first draft, I was struck by the idea of fragmentation and juxtaposition as formal means to bring together various narratives. From there, I worked out that while the relationship with L would be the focus, it could also be used as a lens to engage with the ways the harm from being involved with L had played out in me. So, instead of shame and self-flagellation, the goal became naming what happened and acknowledging it as a part of my history, a part of myself, for better or worse.

One of the other sources of thwarting was the fear that by writing about it I would vilify L in an unfair way. Lines were crossed, yes, and naming them is enough; vilifying someone, especially in creative nonfiction, however, implies that there is a hero to that villain. What I felt/feel having survived that relationship and its effects is complicated, for sure, but I don’t feel like a hero. I feel like a ruin, so many scraps of identity, none of them cohering.

Only now, 23 years later, do I feel I am doing the work to bring these pieces together. By doing the work to name what happened I had to get over myself. An example of that is in the use of the word survivor, that for the longest time I wouldn’t let myself see myself as that. I also wouldn’t let myself call what L did to me predatory. Yet, after being an educator for a number of years and engaging in that space where learning happens, I couldn’t ignore the thought that arose that L was in the same position I was and made the choices she made.

I can’t imagine crossing the same lines with any of my students, can’t imagine betraying the trust of being looked at for help and resources and building, and twisting it into something selfish and harmful.

Reflecting and dwelling on the complexities of thoughts like this forced me to see how the story of L wasn’t just the story of L, but also the story of my youth being stunted; was also the story of my family as authority figures that helped me survive but also harmed me through their homophobia; was also the story of my confused, misguided young self that went through early relationships in college and after that was marked by efforts to dismantle toxic masculinity within me while also trying to live up to toxic masculinity’s idea of what makes a man; was also the story of a white woman doing harm to a brown boy, the racial and power imbalance something that follows me to this day; was also the story of dismantling not just toxic masculinity in its social forms but also in their academic and literary forms, how someone like e.e. cummings is beloved yet when you read deep into his work and biography you learn he was cringe; was also the story of a man having an eating disorder, something that gets discredited due to the same toxic heteronormative gender binary people use to discredit men who have experienced sexual abuse.

Really, in a way, the 2017 draft was the outpouring of material, and the time since then to publication has been organizing, editing, and discovering the story from the ruins, so to speak.

IA: When did the almost syncopated format of this book come to be?

JAA: Syncopated—what a great word! That feels right. As you can tell from above, the living/writing of this book was messy! From the start I wanted this to be a distinct reading experience, one marked by fragmentation and juxtaposition. I wanted the reading experience to be like walking across an old wood floor, each passage a step inviting creaks and give. That’s what it felt like writing it, like I was up at a time no one else was and didn’t want to disturb anyone or draw attention to myself.

At one point in the memoir, I talk about trying to write of L and looking over my shoulder anxiously. Part of how this effect was created was formally through the lack of essay titles and the brevity of passages. I also approached this effect conceptually. A number of early drafts had me printing out the manuscript in a “shrunken” form (four pages per page) and cutting those pages up so that the manuscript looked like a deck of tarot cards. I then shuffled and reshuffled, literally, inviting chance to help guide the mix of narratives.

IA: Can you talk about chapter five, the abandoned manuscript, and why you came back to it for this book? Why was it abandoned?

JAA: Hadn’t thought about it as abandoned but that’s a good word for it. As if my list earlier, re:the stories that connected to the story of L, wasn’t expansive enough, from the start I intuited that these devil riffs I had in my files were related. I had started working on the devil riffs in 2011 after reading Luc Ferry’s A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living. In it, he referenced the idea of “diabolos” or “the who who divides.” I remember writing that down in my notebook and thinking about it every once in a while, riffing on ideas of division and duality in free writes. The more I wrote, the more I felt that I wasn’t writing about religion directly, instead taking the devil on as a lens, how we humanize the devil and project onto them everything from our misdeeds to an idealized swagger and power.

So, the breakthrough of using one narrative as a lens with which to approach other narratives was practiced with the devil first. When I began working on what would be the first draft of this book, the devil riffs naturally came to mind as an element to put in play, at the time as foil, at other times as confidant. It was around this time, too, that the moment happened where the word devil was confused for double—a natural moment in conversation that made it into the world of the book. Every draft of this book had these devil riffs (I keep calling them riffs as they never felt like poems but more that they borrow from philosophy and aphorism) scattered throughout.

They always stood out to folks who read the manuscript, the reactions a mix of confusion and amusement. The idea of bringing them all together under one title came late in the process, and was born after reading an article about books that don’t exist. As I read it, it occurred to me that the devil riffs were their own book within a book, so I tried a draft with it. Once I saw them all together, I was inspired to add some further riffing, turning out what you see in the final version.

This move allowed the role of the devil to be clear while also engaging with the ambiguity in the way that I envisioned. This book within a book allowed for a different voice from the main speaker of the manuscript. This shift also allowed the devil voice to address a “you” which is both me and the reader of the book, which is eerie (I hope). Suddenly the devil is not just the usual projections and excuses (the devil made me do it) but also devil as conscience, devil as speaking in a more assertive register than the speaker elsewhere.

Note, too, that the devil says things that L turns out to have said, and also riffs against some of the speaker’s own words. Here, again, the idea of the double. The play of “Devil or nothing” was one of the final things to be written. I suppose that the manuscript is abandoned in order to enact the “nothing” half of it.

IA: Were there any parts of this that felt uniquely difficult to write about?

JAA: All of it, haha! I mean, what I’ve shared so far about the process of writing this book I hope shows the lengths I was willing to go both in terms of writing craft but also personal growth as well. I knew I had my work cut out for me when my dissertation committee (all white cis-het males) responded to the book by calling it “sexy.” Soon as I heard that response, I realized that I had written it all wrong. My goal hadn’t been to write some Henry Miller-esque text that exalted in toxic heteronormativity, and yet, that was what I had written. Through my formal education, it was all I knew how to write. It was yet another lesson of trusting myself to write from my authentic self rather than some perceived, white idea of literariness.

This has always been the struggle, to write the thing in the way only I can write it. Academia and creative writing are very white spaces. I mean, I’ve shared that my focus for the Ph.D. were Latinx/e poetics and hybrid forms, but I ended up fielding questions about T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the translations of Richard Howard—none of which were on my reading lists or were written about in my exams. I specifically dived into my studies to ground myself in Latinx/e traditions and yet here I was having to talk about the frkn Wasteland and Whitman. That’s what I mean by calling these spaces white. It’s an influence so pervasive that marginalized writers have to actively dismantle and seek out other traditions. The other aspect that felt distinctly difficult to write about was my queerness as it relates to my family.

Only now that the project is done am I able to see the implications of what I named in this project, specifically the homophobia inherit not just in my family but in Latinx/e culture in general. It’s something I teach about—how Latinidad is an imperfect concept and needs to be regarded as living and in need of critique as well as efforts toward restorative justice for its inherent anti-Blackness and homophobia—but in the same way that I wouldn’t let myself see myself as a survivor, I haven’t been able to see myself as affected by it. Only recently have I allowed myself to own my queerness, and with the positive of acceptance necessarily comes the acknowledgment of what kept me from accepting myself.

IA: Can you speak more on the juxtaposition of sex and violence in this book?

JAA: What’s that Tolstoy quote? “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s not enough to say I grew up in a dysfunctional family as every family dysfunctions differently.

I grew up with the United States version of toxic masculinity fed to me through TV and school, but I also inherited machismo through my family. I was raised by two strong women, my mom and my tia, who through their love and hard work helped keep me alive, and yet, even without the presence of a man in the house, machismo crept through the sexualized, gendered teasing I’d receive and the gendered expectations of what a man should be. That’s the insidious nature of patriarchal violence; we pass it on unintentionally if we’re not careful.

There’s also the violence of systemic oppression, of growing up below the poverty line, of living with the fear of border patrol and INS. I knew I didn’t want to perpetuate toxic stereotypes of the male gaze but more the violence and harm people cause each other through ignorance and despite good intentions (along with bad intentions). There’s also the violence of an eating disorder, a condition of self-harm tinged and/or urged on, in some part, by sexual desire, the need to be attractive.

I name all this to say that some of what I’m interrogating here is the ways in which sex and violence imply each other. That it’s not a simple thing. The first night L touched me physically didn’t have to happen; and when it did happen, there was the intimacy of sex as well as the intrusion of violence, of crossed lines. I guess I’m saying the book is messy because life is which is something I don’t want to have to say, mainly because it’s what scholars say to excuse and justify Eliot’s Wasteland.

IA: Considering the narrator’s struggles with family and identity, how did you approach queerness and forming communities in Ruin & Want?

JAA: I’m noting that there’s a theme in my responses, that of unpacking and de-obfuscating what the story/stories of this manuscript were. As I spoke of earlier, my queerness wasn’t part of the original mix, not really. I did try to include some vague gestures toward queerness early on, but it fell flat. Not until I was able to acknowledge within myself that I am queer was I able to own the experiences and the relevant narratives. A lot of the block for myself—both in my life and on the page—was formed by violence. I spoke earlier of the homophobia in my family and the Latinx/e community, but there were also harmful interactions with supposed friends, would- be partners. Lots of blurred lines and toxic denial and judgment.

When Sundress Publications picked up the manuscript, that acceptance led to a whole other chunk of the book coming into being. Literally, SP’s acceptance gave me permission to accept myself. There were countless times when I almost shelved this manuscript for good. I would have these thoughts in my head: Does the world need another man writing about his sex life Does the world need a man taking up space talking about his survival of sexual abuse when there are more dire, more legitimate cases of abuse that need to be discussed?

The publishing world as well as academia give you plenty of opportunity for self-erasure. If not careful, you can edit yourself and your manuscript out of existence. It was only after I took the time to realize what the story was that I was telling—that it was a queer narrative, that I was a survivor—and let myself see myself in those terms, and see my family, and see L—only because of all that work was I able to keep going and see this manuscript through.

The acceptance by Sundress sparked a deeper revision. It also let me know community was out there. I want to give a shout-out as well to Elizabeth J. Colen who gave an encouraging response to the manuscript early on. Meant the world to me. Another thing about community: so much of the road to writing to the end of this book has been realizing not just that I’ve been queer this whole time, but that I’ve been creating community along the way. I have another poet and dear friend, Temple Loveli, who recently encouraged me not to discredit my queerness.

For the longest time I thought in terms of not wanting to take up space, that even if I was queer, I didn’t belong, that there were others more deserving of that space than me. See again how we can erase ourselves long before anyone can try to erase us? I hadn’t thought of my family erasing me in this way, that whenever they were homophobic I just took it as cultural, the way of the world, but that my unease in those moments was a sign of being erased, of something being wrong, which there was socially, but also that there was something wrong happening personally to me.

IA: Why did you name the last section “epilogue,” rather than an eighth chapter?

JAA: I wanted to mark a shift in tone and perspective, that the narrative whirlwind was dying down and some sense of closure for the reader (if not the speaker) was in sight. Also, I feel like the I in this section is more assertive, doing the work to make clear connections across narratives, less of letting the reader do the work.

IA: How did you decide to end the book with another poet’s words? In this case, with Yeats?

JAA: I have Samantha Edmonds (Associate Prose Editor at Sundress Publications) to thank for that ending. In some of the later drafts, the epilogue section was a little too on the nose, a lot of underscoring my intentions in the book rather than letting them ring and resonate. When she pointed out the image in the Yeats reference as a possible ending, it felt right.

There’s also that quote about all of us being in the gutter only some of us are looking at the stars—there’s some of that in that last line. Also the feeling that the reading experience of this book is a “blur” of memory and narrative that leaves us looking at the “stars.” That starts as things romanticized but also, as the devil tells us in the book, they are things that are “dead inside” as well. That mix of darkness and light, hope and nihilism, pues, that’s where I live.

Ruin & Want is available to order on the Sundress website.

José Angel Araguz, PhD is the author most recently of Rotura (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). His poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, The Acentos Review, and Oxidant | Engine, among other places. He serves as an Assistant Professor at Suffolk University, where he is the Editor-in-Chief of Salamander, and is also a faculty member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. He blogs and reviews books at The Friday Influence

Izzy Astuto (he/they) is a writer currently majoring in Creative Writing at Emerson College. When not in Boston for college, they live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His work has previously been published by Hearth and Coffin, Sage Cigarettes, and Renesme Literary, amongst others. When not writing, he can often be found watching movies and crocheting.