The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Love Hurts: Writing the Break-up Poem,” a workshop led by Amie Whittemore on Wednesday, February 11th 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).
While poetry has a reputation for expressing adoration, it’s also wonderful for expelling the bad energy broken love leaves behind. In this generative class, we’ll look at examples of breakup poems that demonstrate that breakups are as multifaceted as relationships: the sad breakup poem, the angry breakup poem, the regretful breakup poem. Through these poems, we can come to better understand our roles in these relationships that have ended and begin to find peace. After looking at some example poems, there will be time for writers to generate their own breakup poem(s), with individual lines shared in the chat, as time allows.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Amie Whittemore Venmo: @Amie-Whittemore
Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center, 2025). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is a creative writing and yoga instructor. Learn more at amiewhittemore.com.
Every once in a while, a book comes along that changes everything for you, that throws open the door of possibility, breaks off the hinges, and demolishes the doorframe altogether, leaving a gaping hole in the Wall of What You Thought Was Possible. To my list, I definitively can now add Emilio Carrero’s Autobiography of the [Undead] (Calamari Press, 2025).
The project of the book starts out simply. He writes,
“I had wanted to write about who I was, who
I’d been, in the service of an author I might become…
I thought that autobiographyinc. guaranteed a way to write about the past, the necessary means
I took to corral my wants∞ into a printed grave.” (Carrero, 7)
What ensues is a book that is part poetry, epistolary memoir, collage, and philosophical treatise.
One noticeable aspect of the book is the quick proliferation of citations. The main text of Autobiography is about 120 pages long; flipping to the back of the book, you’ll find an additional 30 pages of citations. They range from the Iliad to Pornhub, Donald Trump to Justin Torres. Carrero also cites old work of his own, personal letters, conversations with others, and conversations with himself. All told, the number adds up to just over 700 citations. On page 40, we get a thrilling passage that provides an answer as to why Carrero employs this strategy.
Carrero continually refers to the book as a “graveyard,” a place where spirits wander about and epitaphs still ring true. He rejects traditional autobiography as a “burial plot”—a conceit that assumes authority over and a rigid definition of the past, identity, trauma, and language. Carrero’s project is something far more dynamic, an attempt to both disentangle those terms and more fully experience the richness of their inextricability. By composing whole sections of his book from citations—but uprooting them entirely from their original context, and filling them with words of his own—he is subverting the practice of citation and its supposed stability. His work becomes a mosaic of sources and origins that, in the end, is something all his own. Which sounds a lot like selfhood, doesn’t it?
My favorite portions of the book are the ones that, at first, appear more straightforward, simply Carrero’s prose. But he breaks these open too, offering multiple ways of reading and endless combinations of interpretation. Whole paragraphs are struck through, though embedded within these are sentences that are not. For example:
“Years later, I would realized that I was [and always have been] unrecognizable to [you] too. With a belt in [your] hand, [you] had asked me: ‘Quieres otro?’ Do you want another one? Another beating? [Maybe this memory is wrong, misleading, always incomplete.] Maybe [you] had thought I was [your] son, my uncle, who [you] used to beat mercilessly into the carpet floor.” (Carrero, 35)
Upon reading, I asked myself: Why does Carrero cross out his own interpretation of events? Why does he leave the evidence of their consideration? In keeping with the theme of the [undead], it’s clear how he draws attention to the ways that the past, and our emotional entanglements with it, cannot be erased. Or, if they can, the ways that they persist, or change. What does remain unchanged is the trauma itself. I haven’t read a better representation of memory.
Carrero turns other sections that would be prosaic into verse. There are letters that are actually redacted, and we are left with only snippets of text coming through. Take this moment:
“but I also think it can ground us in certain ways of thinking, making the writing stale, desperate,
overcooked. I came across this quote from William James the other day who said: A great many
people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudice. I love this and I
think this applies to creative writing. Or at least it does to me. There have been too many times
to count where I thought I was being creative when I was simply rearranging my preconceived
ideas about creativity .
Okay, I should say stuff about me. I’m actually in a PhD program now, which is why I am back
in Florida. It’s for creative writing. I like the city I am in, Tallahasse — it’s a very lush and hilly
town , which I have never lived in before[,] . There are towering old oak trees with Spanish moss
hanging from them. It’s all very gothic looking.” (Carrero, 111)
The simplicity of this sentence, couched in a stupefyingly complex work of erasure, is intoxicating to me. I can see that town in my mind, smell its oak trees. It comes towards the end of the book, where Carrero is moving towards hard earned peace. Throughout Autobiography, he is continually working through the way colonialism has impacted identity and desire on a personal level. With the help of Wittgenstein, he demands “an accounting with [and beyond] all three [four] cultures [that I / come from]—[W]hite, Mexican, Indian [Black, Taino, Hispanic]” (Carrero, 84). He rejects one label after another, rejecting legibility all together, evoking the Foucauldian axiom that the ability to truly know someone requires an exertion of control over them, is its own type of violence. The radical idea Carrero’s work seems to suggest is: what if even attempting to know the self, to make yourself legible, is a form of self-harm? He writes, “I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face[lessness],” (Carrero, 84). Maybe it is, at least with existing labels and genres, fraught as they are with hierarchy.
This extends even to artistic expression. Carrero confesses later on, “[as I] was actually paid for my labor, I found myself / shying away from the thing I had been working [so hard] toward” (Carrero, 119). By all accounts, it appears that Autobiography of the [Undead] is this thing, or at least, an honest, heartrending, and dazzling attempt. Which is to say, it was a labor of love. But not a love that seeks to protect, or domineer, or even know: this is the kind of love that accepts the unbridled, the unresolved, and lets the [undead] speak.
Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge magazine, Emerson Green Mag, and won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf was one of the first books I read that I physically could not put down. I felt like an archeologist that had just discovered something completely new. Here I was, sixteen, holding pure gold, from thousands of feet in the ground, in my own two hands. I felt like Woolf was writing to me, specifically. She seemed to know my secrets, my desires, my thoughts, from deep down in the depths of my soul. Reading A Room of One’s Own felt like a drug, I was now hooked, and I would now chase my way through every other book trying to get the high this one gave me.
I would like to accredit Virginia Woolf to my love of reading, but that would be a lie. While Virginia Woolf sparked my obsession with books, my love and hate relationship with goodreads, and my god-complex on Instagram, I was secretly a book junkie long before it was cool.
My mother read to me before I was even born. Sitting in the bottom of her belly, with no way to form a single thought, I somehow listened to my mother, sitting in a rocking chair, reading me books upon books. Although Pat the Bunny is a long ways away from A Room of One’s Own, these tiny stories entering my tiny developing mind paved the way for my imagination to grow.
I first picked up The Hunger Games in third grade. Somehow, overnight, I had graduated from Magic Tree House to dystopian fiction that may have been a bit too vulgar for my little brain to comprehend. Regardless, the book about a teenager defying the system created a tiny sliver of hope in myself, one that I at the time, I had not realized I already had inside of me.
I could not imagine my life without reading. I know this sounds cliche and stupid, books are everywhere, you read everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you’re scrolling on tiktok, watching tv, or out in public, reading is everywhere. It surrounds us, consumes us. You, behind the screen, are reading right now. Yet I cling to this ability like I will lose it. Reading is so precious to me, and something I find myself overlooking the importance of.
Long story short, or maybe short story long depending on your attention span, that’s how I ended up writing this and you ended up reading this. My basic story of, “I love books so I am going to go into publishing” might seem the same as everyone’s, but to me, my goal in life is to help others find the book they will become passionate about, consumed by, live by, and love by. I want to be able to help authors put their work, their heart, their soul out there. I want to help preserve them on paper, through pages, and sew them into history. And I can’t wait to get started.
Brianna “Bree” Eaton (she/her) is sophomore studying English with a concentration in Publishing and Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee, where she also serves on the Phoenix Magazine Staff. Born and raised in East Tennessee, she enjoys all things neo-applachian, cryptic, and feminist. When she isn’t doing school work, editing, writing, or running circles around campus, she can be found reading, re-watching episodes of the X-Files, or planning last minute trips to new (or familiar) cities.
Despite being a voracious reader as a child, I cannot pinpoint the exact moment in my teenage years when I began to view reading as a chore rather than a delight. My memories from my earlier years are a bit blurred, but I vividly remember my father taking me out to the local library every week after school. At our run-down library, I would pick as many books as I wanted and vow to myself that I would finish them before our next trip (I would go into tunnel vision as soon as I arrived home, and finish most books within a day or two).
When I entered secondary school, although I stopped visiting my town’s local library, I would almost religiously visit my school’s library after school and during lunchtime. In English class, we would start every lesson by sitting in silence and reading our own books for approximately 10 minutes; when I tell you that everyone hated these reading sessions, I mean that everyone hated it. However, while my peers were gladly shoving their books into their bags after our ‘silent reading time’, I was once scolded by my teacher for not putting my book down after the designated 10 minutes! Looking back, I can’t fault 12-year-old Nafisa. 10 minutes is an unreasonably short amount of time to read, especially when we are being encouraged to do so in the first place.
I do not know how old I was when I stopped reading for enjoyment, but I can say that years later, when I was 17 years old, I decided to finally pick up a book again. At first, I just downloaded the Kindle app on my phone and decided to read a couple of books to pass the time. However, within weeks, I had ordered so many books to my house, as if I was trying to catch up to the words that I had missed in those handful of years. My parents would (and still do) constantly tease me, saying that if I was going to spend all my money on something, it might as well be books rather than anything else. Soon, I left for university. Every year that I moved back to London to study after spending the summer with my family, there would be no less than three bags that were jam-packed with books following me to my flat, alongside the other bits and bobs necessary to live independently, of course. It was definitely an enormous struggle to fit everything into one small car, but somehow we made it work.
During my final year at university, I had zero clue regarding what I wanted to pursue as a career. My friends around me had solid goals and careers in mind. Yet, whenever I was asked what I planned to do with my degree, I would try to steer the conversation away from myself. During a careers consultation with my university, I vented all my frustrations. I recall the career advisor simply smiling at me and asking me what I enjoyed. And then the realisation hit me. I enjoy getting lost in a good book; I enjoy losing myself in the plot and connecting with the characters and their struggles; I enjoy getting into passionate discussions with my friends about the books we’re reading, almost as much as I enjoy recommending them books and vice versa. This was my light bulb moment.
I realised I wanted to contribute to the stories and words that were to be shared with the world. My books had provided me with so much, both as a child and as an adult: they provided joy and laughter, as well as escapism. Books teach us morals and lessons; they encourage us to open our minds to differing perspectives. I will forever be glad that I was so dreadfully bored at 17, that I finally picked up a book again.
Stories have given me plenty, and I would like to help other readers feel as I have. After my careers consultation, I wanted to support writers in any way I could, so they could share their works and ideas with the world. I cannot conjure a number to reflect how many stories have genuinely touched me, but I am sure the number is in the hundreds. I’m eager to support writers with their works, with the hope that readers will feel the same connection to the words on the page that I have felt time and again, and will undoubtedly continue to feel.
Nafisa Hussain holds a BSc in Anthropology and Sociology from Brunel University London, where she primarily focused her work on race issues in the UK. She has published articles, including a book review, for the Hillingdon Herald Newspaper, and volunteers for the Books2Africa charity.
It’s the first instalment of We Call Upon the Author to Explain for 2026, and we couldn’t pick a better way to start. This month we spoke to S.G. Huerta about their fantastic nonfiction collection GOOD GRIEF out from fifth wheel press. The collection explores issues of racism, queerphobia, assault, and yes, a good deal of grief. But through all the darkness, Huerta finds a way to write with wit and warmth. It’s a lovely and thoughtful collection and we’re so excited they agreed to answer some of our questions.
Ada Wofford: The writer Anne Lamott talks about writing as a way of understanding ourselves and helping us discover the truth within ourselves. How did writing this book help you better understand yourself?
S.G. Huerta: As I was writing the different pieces in GOOD GRIEF, I didn’t yet conceive of the whole thing as a cohesive manuscript. While workshopping the pieces at Roots Wounds Words, I realized there was a common thread of grief pulling the whole thing together. Writing this book helped me understand how integral grief had become in my life, for better or worse. I also realized how empowering writing about trauma can be.
AW: In children’s literature, books are often discussed as being either mirrors or windows; a way for a child to see themselves or for them to see and understand others. The confessional memoir form can function in the same way. In choosing to write and publish this work, were your expectations for it to serve as a mirror, a window, or both? Can you speak about the importance of that and if you could, say a bit about the type of response you’ve received?
SH: I’d say both. While writing, especially some of the more difficult experiences in my life, I was writing as proof of survival, of how far I’ve come. I hope my writing connects with others who have experienced trauma, complicated grief, bipolar disorder, or any of the other themes I write about.
AW: In “Crash & Burn” you use the phrase, “Disordered moods and processes and writings.” I took it to mean that there are processes for dealing with mental health and processes for writing, can you speak about how these processes are linked for you?
SH: I love your interpretation of that line! I spent a lot of time thinking about the different labels and terms for bipolar disorder, like mood disorder. On that same thread, I thought about how the way I process anything, and my process for doing most things, may seem disordered. My writing is very much a part of me, and if I have this disorder, surely my writing is disordered too.
AW: Can you talk about your use of blank space in the book, particularly in “I Text My Partner i love being beholden to the delicate feelings of white ppl! At Least Once A Week”?
SH: I have to shout out my Roots Wounds Words cohort for this suggestion again! I think having the different quotes on otherwise blank pages makes the reader sit with the words much like I did.
AW: In “How to Survive a Depressive Episode in the Aftermath of Your Dad’s Suicide” you use the phrase “Only alive on the page” in a way that could mean both your father and you as a writer. This connects to the end of the final essay in which you write, “I recognize me pen in hand, scrawling anything and everything into another notebook. Creating signs of life.” This may connect to the first question a bit but in the context of these two moments in the book, can you speak a bit about how writing gives you life and allows you to create life?
SH: I love this question, it reminds me of the poem “Arte Poética” by Vicente Huidobro, where he says poets give and take life. Writing about my dad keeps him alive for me. It can also revive some memories that only he and I shared. It can be powerful, too, to omit some things and keep them from staying alive. Nonfiction writers are always discerning what does and doesn’t deserve space, or, to keep the metaphor going, life on the page.
AW: While the title GOOD GRIEF is a well-known idiom, in the context of the book it makes me think of the term much more literally; that there is some grief that is good for us. Is this how you intended the title to be understood and what are your thoughts on that concept, that some forms or causes of grief can be good for us?
SH: I wanted the title to be multifaceted in the ways you mentioned. I believe grief should be destigmatized and talked about more, especially complicated grief. I also wanted the title to feel a bit ironic, like a “laugh so you don’t cry” situation. I hope that the piñata on the wonderful cover nat raum designed achieves this too.
AW: And finally, is there anything else you’d like readers to know, either about this work or about a new or forthcoming work?
SH: My debut poetry collection Burns will be out in January with Sundress Publications!
SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer and organizer. They are a Roots Wounds Words Fellow and Tin House alum. They are the author of the nonfiction chapbook GOOD GRIEF (fifth wheel press 2025) and their debut poetry collection Burns is out with Sundress Publications as of January 2026. SG’s work has appeared in HoneyLiterary, The Offing, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. Find them at sghuertawriting.com, or in Tejas with their partner and cats, working towards liberation for oppressed peoples everywhere. They encourage you to find tangible ways to support Palestinian liberation.
Screenshot
Ada Wofford (they/them) holds advanced degrees in English and Library Studies. In addition to working at a rare book shop, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in The Blue Nib, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Autostraddle, Capable Magazine, Sundress Reads, and more. Their chapbook, I Remember Learning How to Dive, was published in 2020, from which a selection earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Moon Meridian Novella Award Winner, M.S. Gardner’s Wolf’s Bane (April Gloaming, 2025) toes the line between renowned fable and grotesque reality in a captivating account of one woman’s past, the secrets she holds, and those she uncovers. Gardner spellbinds readers with clever nuances, haunting imagery, and the unspooling of mystery’s threads in an estate in hot, humid Osyka, Mississippi.
Six months before the novella’s start, Gardner’s protagonist, Penny, flees back to Seattle straight after her grandma’s funeral, leaving behind her a trail of guilty excuses; but even she can’t run forever. At the behest of her grandma’s lawyer, Penny reluctantly returns to Osyka to clear out the house. The process is far from seamless, however, and the more of her grandparents’ belongings she sorts through, the harder it is to ignore the memories nipping at her heels.
The wolf still lurks in the shadows after all these years, the echoes of its presence as dogged as itself. Walking through a minefield of a dark past, Penny dodges the triggers as she clears the estate of any trace of its deceased owners, but a sealed letter from her grandma and the irritatingly persistent presence of Duncan, her childhood friend, bring things to a head. The wolf has always stalked her, but for the first time, Penny can no longer dodge it. She must face it, once and for all.
Gardner’s imagery is a masterpiece of shrewd descriptions and unshakeable connotations, immersing the reader in the growing mystery. Phrases such as: “shook her like a dog with a rat in its mouth” (Gardner 11) and “as Death had dragged away his sin-bloated soul” (Gardner 12) set a grisly tone early on.
Most fascinating, however, is Gardner’s use of a mundane piece of furniture, an old recliner, as a focal object which the characters move around both physically and mentally as the plot progresses. The recliner, belonging to Penny’s grandfather, is described as “a hideous mud-brown eyesore” (Gardner 11), and later, “an ugly shit-brown monstrosity, like a huge fat toad from a fairy tale, waiting in the forest to devour little girls who strayed from the path” (20). The descriptions foreshadow a monstrous conclusion through their negative connotations, drenching the reader with unease and the equal morbid desire to read on and find out the truth.
The integration of the recliner is seamless if not a core pillar of the plot. There stands the reader, alongside Grandma Connie at first, then Penny. The reader ignores the recliner when the women do, skirting around it like a large elephant that is at once impossible to ignore yet remains largely unacknowledged until Penny confronts it during her own catharsis.
Gardner carries us to the climax with delicate nuances and a confidence in the reader’s intuition, her writing strengthened by every detail she bestows upon us. With strong allusions to the Little Red Riding Hood fable, Gardner uses parallels of innocence and depravity—Penny’s childhood Red Riding Hood costume, handmade by her grandma, and her grandpa’s copy of the Barely Legal (61) magazine, which has a woman crudely dressed up in a red cape—to nudge the reader towards a horrifying conclusion.
Characterization is another of the book’s striking strengths. Penny, for instance, harbors intriguing dichotomies—a woman who is simultaneously clinical and volatile, a psychiatrist whose implied past childhood sexual abuse still looms over her. Gardner utilizes these inherent contrasts to wind the tension tighter in a raw exploration of trauma and its echoes into adulthood.
The dynamic between Penny and Duncan adds an interesting layer to Penny’s individual characterization. Conflict escalates when Duncan thoughtlessly sits in the recliner. In a frank portrayal of triggers, Penny’s responses grow increasingly frantic as she asks Duncan to get out of the chair, and the reader, who had thus far skirted around the recliner with Penny finally confronts its truth. Duncan embodies both past and present. His embodiment of the past informs Penny’s initial aloofness towards him—likely due to her unwillingness to associate with a traumatic part of her life—while his embodiment of the present inspires his role as a catharsis partner, playing a part in Penny’s healing by absorbing the shockwaves of her grief and righteous rage and later helping her destroy the figuritive wolf.
In a heart-wrenching nod to the inner child within Penny’s psyche, the reader witnesses the softness in her yearning for normalcy and care and feels the relief as acutely as she does when Duncan offers some of it:
“…she had to admit there was something homey, comforting, sitting in the kitchen, watching him cook, being tended to, served—the feeling of being safe and warm, like a child with no knowledge of good and evil” (Gardner 82).
Gardner’s mastery of her characters and subtext particularly shines through Penny’s dynamic with two deceased people: her grandparents. Through particular behaviors towards her grandparents’ separate belongings, the reader forms a vivid image of her relationship with each, one of resentment and hate vs. one of love and care:
“Clothes—pants, shirts, a suit, jackets, underwear, socks—were balled up and shoved into bags, along with shoes and boots, destined to be thrown away.” (41) vs. “Grandma’s room took more time. As Penny removed the clothes from their hangers, she folded each item before placing it in a bag” (42).
Wolf’s Bane dazzles with impeccable tension, witty prose—“dust bunnies as big as rabbits” (Gardner 32)—and side characters who are just as memorable. Readers venture through the dark forest and come out on the other side having killed the wolf with Penny. With a blend of fabulism and dark reality, Gardner wields the reader’s attention with an agility so mesmerizing, the reader is regretful to see the book end!
Tassneem Abdulwahab (she/her) is an aspiring writer and editor with a BA (Hons) Creative and Professional Writing from UWE Bristol. With a strong interest in culture, history, and psychology and a love for fiction, her writing often draws on one or more of these threads to tell character-centric stories. Trained in oil painting, she recently exhibited and sold two portrait paintings in February 2025. In her free time, you can find her buying more books (no, seriously—she owns three editions of Little Women), snapping pictures of the little details, or sitting at her easel!
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Alexa White. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, January 25th, 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!
Alexa White is a mixed-race, neurodivergent writer and graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned her BA in creative writing and studio art. Alexa lives in Knoxville, her semi-hometown, and is the Creative Director and Assistant Editor at Sundress. She takes delight in backroads, quarries, and the last few seconds of sunset and redefines her bedtime nightly.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “REVOLT!: Past as Prologue,” a workshop led by Henry Hicks IV on Wednesday, January 14th 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).
“REVOLT!: Past as Prologue” will be a generative workshop for writers of all levels working in prose. We will engage with texts such as Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell, and “Venus In Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman to examine the role of history and historical memory in bolstering our art as writers and our actions as changemakers.
In REVOLT!, participants will be asked to bring in an example of a historic moment of uprising. Together, we will examine and analyze these histories while being prompted to generate our own pieces of literary, narrative, or speculative prose that engages, builds upon, or inherits this history of rebellion. REVOLT! will urge participants to envision themselves as agents of change locally, nationally, and globally—and to support them in using their writing as a tool for envisioning and enacting resistance work today.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Henry Hicks Venmo: @heser1 or CashApp: $heser1
Henry Hicks IV (he/him) is an American writer and organizer. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, Mother Jones, Teen Vogue, In These Times, The Drift, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. He is a current graduate student at the University of Oxford. He holds a B.A. from Oberlin College in creative writing and comparative American studies. His writing has been supported by Lambda Literary, Tin House, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Oxford Writers’ House, and The Porch. He can be found online at henryhicksiv.com.
This event is brought to you by a grant provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission.
I fell in love with poetry in elementary school. I attended a progressive school called Children’s Community School, where I was encouraged to choose books that genuinely interested me for homework, rather than the teachers assigning books. This freedom allowed me to connect with literature on a personal level from a very young age—something I now recognize as rare and something I’m incredibly grateful for. Some of my earliest favorites were Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, and Out of my Mind by Saran M. Draper. My third grade teacher, an avid poetry reader, played a key role in nurturing my passion for the genre. I began writing poetry in fifth grade and haven’t stopped since.
In high school, my passion for reading grew, especially as I started taking creative writing workshops (where I fell in love with the pantoum and ghazal poetry forms). I became particularly interested in speculative fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction, and literary fiction—genres that continue to inspire me alongside poetry. At Vassar College, where I study English with a focus in creative writing, I’ve been fortunate to take courses that stretch my thinking, including Fragment as a Form of Knowledge, Disability in Literature, and Popular Women Writers. These courses introduced me to works that now live on my prized Goodreads “favorites” shelf—Fun Home being a standout. I also serve as Editor-in-Chief of The Vassar Review and have written for our campus newspaper, The Miscellany News, and our fashion magazine, Contrast.
I’m thrilled about the opportunity to intern for Sundress Publications and immerse myself in the world of nonprofit literary publishing. My previous experience as an editorial intern with Abrams Publishing and working with a fiction editor on mystery/thriller novels has prepared me well for this new endeavor. I’m eager to learn from and contribute to Sundress’s projects and team. Again, as someone very (and shamelessly) obsessed with Goodreads, I’d love to connect and swap book recommendations—just say the word!
Emma Goss is a senior English major with minors in Film and Linguistic Anthropology. A passionate reader, she prefers to always be juggling a poetry collection, a literary fiction novel, and an audiobook. Emma is especially drawn to poetry rooted in nature symbolism and metaphor. Some of her favorite collections include The Tradition by Jericho Brown, War of the Foxes by Richard Siken, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, and Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson. Her poetry has been published in Pangyrus Magazine and by the Princeton Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Poetry Contest. Originally from Los Angeles, she spends her time hiking local trails or browsing the poetry shelves at Barnes & Noble Studio City when not at Vassar.
Ellen Austin-Li, in her latest collection, Incidental Pollen (Madville Publishing, 2025), delivers an emotionally rich collection of poems devoted to the tensions between grief, trauma, and memory. With dazzling metaphors and an acute sense of imagery, Austin-Li asserts herself as a poetic prowess capable of tackling complex poetic forms while navigating dual timelines and narratives encompassing a lifetime. Runner up for the 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, this collection anchors itself to what we all long to confront: familial love and reckoning with pain.
Incidental Pollen is full of ripe metaphors that contribute to an overarching narrative of trauma. Bees (alluding to the title and titular poem) resurface again and again, each time emphasizing a different part of the extended metaphor. For example, the hive is reiterated in “Robber Bees:” “dead bodies were piled beside the hive—worse, they had stolen the honey. All that was sweet—gone” (58). Honey is stressed in “The Black Velvet Heels:”
“Stockings I peeled off at night—
the seduction. Bees swarming
my honey. And I could dance
in them. Oh, I could dance” (25).
Austin-Li has picked a perfect metaphor to use as scaffolding for the collection. She draws upon its domain generously, referring to the queen bee, the honey, the hive, and destruction.
The poetic form is brave in this collection. “Rendezvous at Round Lake” is a pantoum, wherein the second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third of the next. This pattern is used strategically to call attention to the danger inherent in nature. The repetitions of lines like “I call my friend of gold” and “we are carved ancient as a glacier” emphasize memory and time, another dual-theme of the collection (36). Several palindrome poems are included as well, such as “Loss Palindrome” (45) and “Portrait in Green” (5). A singular prose poem, “Reunion,” clarifies Austin-Li’s narrative on page 52, where the speaker longs for the deceased. This prose poem is greatly awaited, and gives readers concrete details, without any of the ambiguity that often comes with more abstract free verse poems. Austin-Li’s grappling with grief is sharp and poignant here. Additionally, “Undertakers” employs repeating rhyming refrains that allow the poem to transcend into a hypnotic calling rather than just a poem: “The bodies of the dead are carried… / laid away from the hive, unburied” (59). The rhyming of “carried” and “unburied” highlights death and refocuses the poem, undoubtedly, on grief.
Austin-Li allows herself to indulge in micro-themed poems as well. These were my favorites. In “Hidden,” she pulls from a lexicon of neurobiology to illustrate the potency of closeness:
“I know if I pulled too close
you would use your ink to hide
yourself in a cloud and jet away.” (35)
She uses words like “limbic borders” and “synapses” to contort language towards the unfamiliar. The narrator speaks of an octopus in an aquarium here, seemingly a random component of the poem, but nevertheless, Austin-Li is able to weave this language into the rest of the collection.
This most heartbreaking and original element of this collection is its narrative. The speaker has lost not only her father but her sister’s son. In a series of poems, grief and memory become omnipotent themes as it relates to their deaths. “Mountain Song (for My Nephew),” for example, calls for memory to imprint itself on time: “The poem I must write to fix you on the page” (55). The loss of both Austin-Li’s nephew and father linger in nearly every poem within the second section of the collection. She grappled with memory’s uncertainty in preserving the dead.
Although the collection is tethered to themes of memory, trauma, and grief most, other themes emerge as well. Austin-Li centers fertility in “If a Woman’s Eggs Had No Expiration Date.” She traverses the globe, from Ohio to Boston to Ireland, allowing for travel to emerge as a subtle motif. Lastly, Austin-Li engages with politics in “Smoke” by discussing America’s current political climate and alluding to systemic racism. There is truly a little bit of everything in this collection.
What Austin-Li does best is offer hope. She provides the notion that “There is no memory, only instinct,” allowing readers to console themselves with the knowledge that memory will be enough. The dead have no choice but to carry on within us (64). I was most struck by one of the penultimate poems, “To Recapture Faith,” in which Austin-Li concludes: “Radiance seems a relic of my imagination, / show me again, owl, how to catch / the glimmer in the underbrush” (75). I found myself returning again and again to this line after finishing the collection, as that is exactly what Austin-Li does. Offers readers a way in reach to reach the glimmer in the underbrush.
Emma Goss is a senior English major with minors in Film and Linguistic Anthropology. A passionate reader, she prefers to always be juggling a poetry collection, a literary fiction novel, and an audiobook. Emma is especially drawn to poetry rooted in nature symbolism and metaphor. Some of her favorite collections include The Tradition by Jericho Brown, War of the Foxes by Richard Siken, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, and Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson. Her poetry has been published in Pangyrus Magazine and by the Princeton Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Poetry Contest. Originally from Los Angeles, she spends her time hiking local trails or browsing the poetry shelves at Barnes & Noble Studio City when not at Vassar.
