Right from the first page of Roseanne Freed’s Your Name Is a Poem (Picture Show Press, 2024), the theme of motherhood takes over the page, as does the importance of names. This poetry collection is written from the point of view of a parent and the grief process of losing their child to cancer. Freed captures the full arc of motherhood, from the joy of naming a child to the ache of loving and letting go. Centered around a daughter named Mahalia, the poems explores motherly devotion, identity, sibling relationships, and family resilience. Throughout these poems, we readers see the mother trying to grasp any piece of her daughter in all of the memories that she has with her, starting from childbirth and as she grew older. 

The first poem, also the title poem, gives readers a first glimpse of the daughter and the power that the name Mahalia holds for the Freed: “Before you were born, / I knew you were someone special / and needed a unique name; / there are too many girls called / Jennifer, Jessica, or Jane” (Freed 1). As we continue to read, the poem “Our Time Together, Too Short” reads like a lyrical biography, tracing Mahalia’s growth from a baby to a selfless adult. Mahalia’s choice to bike to chemotherapy appointments shows readers her strength and values. The final line, “I loved her even when I didn’t love her” (Freed 5), encapsulates the various elements of parenting: unconditional love, complex emotions, and the pain of watching a child suffer. Freed includes bits of her memories with her daughter right from the moment she gave birth:

From these memories that the speaker decides to share with us, we learn about Mahalia’s experiences through the mother’s lens, the emotions she goes through and how she must keep herself together for her daughter’s sake. 

Different from the previous poems, “A Fearful Thing” shifts the voice to second person, as if Freed is speaking directly to her daughter. In doing so, Freed uses “you” to capture the last conversation that mother and daughter had together before Mahalia passes. Food tends to be a source of comfort during times of grief and struggle. The mother is holding onto this last moment by using a bowl of lentil soup, a dish that now holds such deep meaning. The first stanza of the poem illustrates the warmness of food and how it brings this family together as the speaker says, “A pot of my lentil soup, / our staple meal through the Canadian / winters of your childhood” (Freed 10). In the last stanzas of this poem, Freed writes:

The poetic voice is that of someone who has loved deeply and is now left with the unbearable silence after goodbye. A theme that stuck out to me in this poem is the simplicity of soup. Freed begins “A Fearful Thing” with the line, “Soup, I thought…” (10). This leap from diagnosis to the feeling of home, thinking of soup, encapsulates a mother’s instinct to comfort, nourish, and do something. The lentil soup, which is a staple from childhood, becomes a symbol of continuity, maternal love, and later, unspoken resentment. 

In Your Name Is a Poem, we see a pain that the daughter projects onto her mother through anger. In the poem, “A Week After She Left Us My Therapist Told Me,” the mother seeks help to grieve through her daughter’s loss, but still her daughter’s pain and range from her battle of cancer still finds ways to show up in this grieving process. This poem is shorter compared to the other ones but holds a lot of power. The poem’s length directly mirrors the emotional state of the speaker: raw, constrained, and filled with unresolved tension, each word having weight. The mother/speaker finds it difficult to experience the emotions that she has as she mentions: “If I allow myself to weep, / I hear her— // Stop making it about you” (Freed 18). Since Freed decides to add dialogue, reflecting something Mahalia might have said, the choice of words mirror an upset tone that her daughter would have expressed. Her voice echoes in this poem; even if it’s only projected through Freed, it’s now embedded so deeply that she controls her own grief.

Your Name is a Poem is touching, captivating and filled with different phases of emotions. Freed shares vulnerable moments with the reader during and after her daughter’s battle with cancer. Within this collection, we get a glimpse of what her family went through; we still feel Freed’s intense reality across 35 pages of poetry.

Your Name Is a Poem is available from Picture Show Press

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Angela Çene is a poet, raised Massachusetts by two Albanian Immigrants. She enjoys writing about the body, & how it relates to the world & our experiences. After earning her Bachelors in Writing, Literature & Publishing from Emerson College, she is currently preparing to apply to law schools. Angela enjoys traveling & finding new restaurants. 

I’ve always been drawn to instruction manuals. Aside from reading chapter books in elementary school, I was pulling how-to guides and building manuals off the shelves, because I was always fascinated by the idea of creating something through careful consumption. I would read books about taking care of animals like bunnies and making crafts, because I really love personalizing everything I own! I used to volunteer to organize the classroom bookshelves during recess, not because I was particularly neat, but because I loved the logic of categorization, which is something I still do today with my book notes!

My reading tastes have expanded since then, but that early love of structure and process never left me. In middle school, I fell head over heels for Tom Sawyer. I loved his free-spirited adventures and go-lucky optimism, as compared to Huck Finn’s solemn disposition (which was justified). In high school, I read many of John Steinbeck’s books, so I challenged myself to read East of Eden for English class, finding it one of the driest things I’d ever encountered. Years later however, I still think about that book constantly. I also read The Kite Runner, which didn’t fully resonate with me at the time in terms of writing style (it is still one of the saddest books I’ve read aside from A Thousand Splendid Suns), but has profoundly shaped what I want to write about now.

My current reading habits reflect this evolution. I’m voracious about memoirs, feminist theory, author diaries, and literary novels. My favorite nonfiction book is The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, and my favorite novel is Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, which is a book that changed how I think about searching for meaning in an often overwhelming and pretentious world.

What drew me to editing rather than purely creative writing was the collaborative process. Writing can be solitary, but editing is inherently relational. You’re working with someone to help them tell their story better, clearer, more powerfully. There’s something beautiful about that partnership, and about learning from other writers while helping shape their work.

I’ve spent time working with literary magazines, most recently focused on flash fiction and short poetry, but I’ve realized my heart is in longer-form work. I want to help bring full-length books, chapbooks, and novellas into the world. That’s what drew me to Sundress Publications! As a nonprofit press committed to amplifying diverse voices and creating space for work that might not fit traditional publishing models, Sundress aligns perfectly with where I want to grow as an editor!

I’m also passionate about amplifying perspectives from women, asexual voices, and religious backgrounds, which are communities whose stories deserve more space in contemporary literature. My editorial interests center on literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction exploring history, technology, media studies, feminism, and literature itself.

When I’m not working on manuscripts, you can find me indoor climbing, drawing, learning Japanese, or adding to my ever-growing collection of shoujo and josei manga. I recently started a blog about women’s comics and just wrapped up a manga archival project that I hope to continue later in life!

I’m thrilled to join the Sundress team and can’t wait to learn from this incredible community of writers, editors, and book lovers. Here’s to making wonderful books together!

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

Spanning decades and relationships, dream worlds and memories and therapy sessions, Jill Khoury’s soaring, elegiac collection earthwork (Switchback Books, 2024) invites readers into the volatile and immersive experience of grieving someone both beloved and dangerous. In Khoury’s case, that person is her mother, to whom this collection is dedicated. Through three sections, the speaker reckons with her childhood, adulthood, and the aftermath of her mother’s death. The collection is grounded in her mental return to this figure, both mythically large and emaciated in her mental and physical illness, still looming over the speaker’s days, nights, and conception of herself.

The collection begins with a prelude entitled night cultivars, in which the speaker as a child immediately demonstrates her lyric and material superpower: that of unceasing observation, dismissed by her mother. The speaker describes how, 

Quickly, the speaker gives the reader a medley of snippets illustrating fraught exchanges with her mother and the instability of their relationship. She remembers her mother in vignettes of mental decay: she flushes her meds, ceases to eat, doesn’t want her daughter to come visit her even as she says: “my mother’s whisper i would never do anything to hurt you / but this like so many of her communiques is a secret wrapped in a half-truth” (Khoury 5). 

Even in the anger sparked from this neglect, the speaker’s care for her mother transforms, but does not cease: in one poem she burns her mother’s old clothes; the next, she remarks on how, 

This angry tenderness and ebbing and flowing despair sucks the reader into the speaker’s complex, fearless voice with abandon.

The speaker, understandably, seeks an escape away from the all-encompassing presence of her mother, and finds it in her dreams. A motif that permeates this collection is the phrase “all aspects of the dream are aspects of the dreamer”; four poems spanning the collection bear this same title. Early on in earthwork, the speaker remembers one such dream about her mother’s mental and physical deterioration in spine-crawlingly visceral detail: “my mother is perched on the couch dying properly wrapped / like a molebeast in a baby blue blanket” (Khoury 18). She is jolted back to the present when “[her] therapist asks [her] what does dying properly mean” Khoury (18). As the daughter of a palliative care physician, I was struck by moments like these that paralleled end-of-life care. The speaker’s therapist, here, asks the foundational question of palliative care: how does one die well? And in exploring someone’s values at the end of their life, the question very quickly becomes, how does one live well? Khoury delves into this query from multiple vantage points in this collection, leaving no lead unturned as she studies her chronic illness, mental health, and survivorship of abuse along with her complicated relationship with her mother.

Through all this pain and mourning, the speaker has moments that elucidate an awareness of their own resilience – the strength needed to continue living with, and in spite of, her trauma. Khoury counters a fight brewing with her mother, who compares her garden to kindling, by asserting,  “i know something about surviving fire” (39). The dream motif continues as the speaker chooses to enter her mother’s bedroom in a dream, reminding herself: “it is important to remember / i choose this in dreams you are the chooser / you have the control” (Khoury 52). Her dreams, like her poetry, like her garden, become her sanctuaries, and in this the speaker illuminates a myriad of sites of refuge from the harm she’s experienced. 

In Part Three, Khoury wrenches the reader from graphic descriptions of the past to an immediately more factual tone in the present. The section’s opening poem begins, “i delivered the eulogy / otherwise she would not have had a eulogy” (47). She continues to describe, with a clear numbness of immediate grief, the barebones of transpired events: her mother’s clothes were “bagged donated / to a rural church” (Khoury 48); she leaves a voicemail matter-of-factly informing her mother that she “tried to end [herself] / with antipsychotics / & alcohol” (Khoury 49). Pivotally, too, in Part Three the speaker meets her past self instead of becoming her in memory. Rather than absorbing the self-loathing and hurt her younger self was forced to endure, the speaker bids her own goodbyes to her mother and, “[takes] the knife from [her] belt to extract / the image of the child who sits in [her] mother’s lap” (Khoury 63).

This book is not just about grief or trauma, but also where this long-lasting pain settles to live within our bodies. Khoury repeatedly reckons with what it means to relive your past with such vividness that it becomes difficult to differentiate where your memories end and the present begins. Like many memories of trauma, they sometimes cease to be memories at all, and become just a different kind of embodied experience re-lived intermittently. As the speaker describes in the present-tense an afternoon lying beside her mother on a beach, she interrupts her speech to chastise and remind herself:

By beginning to create some form of distance between her past and current self, the speaker shows us how she is able to come home to her present body.

The collection’s title, earthwork, betrays one of the speaker’s central coping strategies; noticing and nurturing the earth, a place she understands when nothing else makes sense. After a suicide attempt, she relates the difficulty in returning back to school:

Khoury makes sense of her turbulent world with natural imagery, as she seeks for an escape in her suicidality and encounters a different spiritual response: “i ask god to erase me please / he wants me to macerate these herbs instead / light stratifies into color” (56-57). Nature and gardens, here, become sites of creation to rival the speaker’s instinct towards self-hate and destruction. One of Khoury’s most astounding poetic talents is her ability to turn a violent verb like “macerate” to something reclamatory in the space of just a few lines. Nature rebuilds when it is destroyed, and herbs, macerated, have even more of a capacity to heal in their transformed state. 

In earthwork, Jillian Khoury dives into complex and living trauma, both experienced and inherited. Through it all, she retains tenderness for the mother who both raised her and harmed her, bending over backwards to attempt to understand her in memory as she did in life. This collection’s generous meditations on generational trauma will stay with me long after closing its pale-blue cover; at turns gentle, rageful, and vastly melancholic. Khoury encapsulated this range of the mixed bag we inherit from those who have loved and harmed us as she remembers her mother: “she hands me a box of her favorite earrings / some of these are tarnished” (8).

earthwork is available from Switchback Books

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

Ahead of the release of his e-chapbook, Quantum Entanglements with Notes on Loss, Abdulrazaq Salihu spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern, Marian Kohng, about his work. Salihu discussed the connection between physical science and spiritual loss, how grief isolates yet undeniably connects one to everything outside of themself, and the importance of empty space to his work, whether in music or poetry.

Marian Kohng: What did you wish to convey when connecting the various theories of the universe with human emotions?

Abdulrazaq Salihu: I wanted to insist that grief is not small, not private, and not confined to the body that holds it. The language of physics, quantum entanglement, dark matter, and parallel universes gave me a vocabulary large enough to hold the magnitude of loss I was carrying. When someone dies, especially violently, the rupture feels cosmic. It rearranges gravity. It bends time. It changes how light enters the room. By aligning human emotion with theories of the universe, I was trying to say: what happens inside us is as real and consequential as what happens in the stars. Science and grief are both attempts to explain absence. Both ask: what remains when what we love disappears? In that sense, mourning is a form of physics because we are constantly measuring distances between who we were and who we have become after loss.

MK: Can you speak about the titles of your poems and the significance of them being the first thing readers see?

AS: Titles are thresholds. They are the first consent a reader gives a poem. I take them seriously because I want the reader to arrive already unsettled, already thinking, already leaning forward. Many of my titles function almost like philosophical propositions or prayer lines: “At the Laboratory, I Gave a Stranger My Faith” and “He Understood Qada’a Wal Qadr.” They ask the reader to slow down, to breathe differently, to accept that logic and belief, science and spirituality, will coexist without apology. The titles do not explain the poems; they prepare the nervous system for what is coming. In a book about loss, titles are also acts of care. They tell the reader: this grief has language, structure, and intention. You are not walking into chaos; you are walking into a carefully held silence and I think because titles are really the first thing the readers see, it’s the first determinant of impression, so if I can win with a title, I have won with the entire work.

MK: What is the role of music and silence and the juxtaposition between them?

AS: Music and silence are siblings in my work. Music is what we reach for when language fails; silence is what remains when even music collapses. In poems like “All the Things I Love, the Sands Have Covered with Memory,” music becomes a kind of inheritance. Voices of fathers, radios, communal songs. In Silence is a Ghost, silence becomes presence, something that follows you, occupies rooms, presses against the body. Music for me goes beyond songs, every syllable, punctuation, space, pause and rhythm constitutes what I regard as music, because it flickers the rhythm of the heart. I am interested in the moment when music stops and you are left alone with what you feel. In grief, silence is never empty. It is crowded with memory, regret, prayer, unfinished conversations. I use music to soften the entry into loss, and silence to show its aftermath.

MK: Can you speak about the intention behind the blanks and brackets in your poems?

AS: The blanks and brackets are where language admits defeat. They mark what cannot be safely spoken, what is culturally unsayable, what is too violent, too intimate, or too sacred to be named directly. In “Phantasmagoria with my Country Women as Stardust and Night Song,” the interruptions are not aesthetic tricks, they are ethical pauses. They give the reader space to breathe, to fill in meaning with their own grief, their own memory. Loss fractures speech. These gaps are faithful to that fracture. Sometimes, the most honest line in a poem is the one that refuses to exist.

MK: What part does a sense of belonging play in grief and healing?

AS: Belonging is really both wound and medicine. To belong deeply to a language, a family, a town like Sarkin Pawa means that loss does not happen alone. It reverberates. It’s really Ubuntu, that I am because you are, because we are. When someone dies, the community feels it in their bones, in their rituals, in their silences. Healing, for me, is not forgetting; it is remembering together. Language becomes a home when physical places are no longer safe. Family becomes a shelter even when it is fragile. Grief isolates, but belonging insists you do not carry this alone and that’s what belonging does. 

MK: Can you speak about the Greek mythology in “Thanatos Learns to Love Family Loosely”?

AS: Greek mythology allowed me to externalize grief, to give death a body, a personality, a seat at the table. Thanatos is not just death; he is death learning tenderness, restraint, love. By bringing gods like Hypnos, Nyx, Erebus into a domestic space, I was collapsing the distance between myth and everyday mourning. The first Greek character I learnt about was Medusa, from my sister, it was empathetic and fascinating what her story did to me, I felt she deserved so much better than the cruel world offered her so I read more myths and that was the start. It was my way of asking: what if death is not only cruel, but confused? What if even death has to learn how to leave gently?

MK: What message were you delivering by focusing on the human body in “At the Laboratory, I Gave a Stranger My Faith…”?

AS: The body is where belief becomes real. In that poem, the laboratory is not just scientific, it is spiritual. I wanted to explore what happens when faith is placed in another person’s hands, when destiny (Qada’a wal Qadr) is examined under fluorescent lights. The poem insists that science does not negate belief; it sharpens it. The body becomes a site of trust, vulnerability, and surrender. To offer your body or your faith is to accept uncertainty. That acceptance is not weakness; it is devotion, it’s a sacred promise. 

MK: How did you decide the tone of the last poem compared to the first?

AS: The first poem is communal, outward-facing, almost declarative. It introduces empathy as an act of survival. The last poem is quieter, heavier, more reflective. It understands that empathy does not save everyone, but it saves something; memory, dignity, witness. The book begins by reaching outward and ends by sitting still. That arc mirrors grief itself. You start by screaming; you end by listening.

MK: Can you speak about the mirroring of nature with emotions of loss?

AS: Nature does not mourn politely. It floods and withers. By personifying nature, I was refusing to sanitize grief. The earth reacts the way bodies do. Rivers carry absence. Night expands. Light hesitates. Loss is ecological, it disrupts systems. When a father dies, the weather changes inside a home. Nature becomes a language that does not lie and I’m a witness to all of this grief and climate change in moods.

MK: What does quantum entanglement mean in terms of grief and acceptance?

AS: Quantum entanglement suggests that once two particles are connected, distance no longer matters. That idea saved me. It allowed me to believe that death does not sever relationship, it rearranges it. In grief, acceptance does not mean letting go. It means learning a new physics of love. The dead are not gone; they are elsewhere, still influencing us, still shaping our movements. We remain entangled. Acceptance, then, is not closure. It is continuity without certainty. It is learning how to live knowing that love does not end, it only changes form.

Download your copy for free on the Sundress website!

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Abdulrazaq Salihu is a Nigerian poet and member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. He won the Splendor of Dawn Poetry Contest, BPKW Poetry Contest, Poetry Archive Poetry Contest, Masks Literary Magazine Poetry Award, Nigerian Prize for Teen Authors (Poetry), Hilltop Creative Writing Award, and others.

He has received fellowships and residencies from Imodeye Writers Enclave Writers Residency, SPRINg and elsewhere. His poetry is published/forthcoming in Uncanny, Bacopa, Consequence, South Florida poetry, Eunoia review, strange horizons, Unstamatic, Bracken, Poetry Quarter(ly), Rogue, B*k, Jupiter review, black moon magazine, Angime, Grub Street mag and elsewhere. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu, and his Instagram is @Abdulrazaq._salihu. He is the author of Constellations (polar sphere, 2022) and hiccups (polar sphere, 2022). 

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

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Bleah Patterson. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, February 22nd, 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!

Starting this month, we are excited to present themed Xfits! February’s theme is “Let it Out!” While the format of Xfit will remain the same, participants will focus their drafts around catharsis: what is making you feel angry or stifled? What do you need to get off your chest and down on paper?

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

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

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

This event is brought to you by a grant provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission.

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,

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.

The abstract passage, taken from a text by French linguist/philosopher Jacques Derrida, includes Carrero’s own words liberally inserted within via brackets, a technique that is used throughout the entire book. Here he addresses assumptions about autobiography and rejects them, specifically the need of an author to “[…bury (or cite) themselves, to say what they mean]…But the sign[ifier] [undead] possesses the characteristic of being readable [wanting more than autobiography’s^inc. burial plot^©]” (Carrero, 40). This is, essentially, the animating emotion behind Autobiography. To write about the past is to cite your own history, but a citation implies a settled origin. Something finished. Done. Dead, even. But what if the past cannot be moved on from? Can it really ever be? What if it is unresolved, and its implications and sensations linger? This is what Carrero calls the [undead]—those moments, or people, or memories, that haunt you. Even if they are in the past, they have not passed on, much like a ghost with unfinished business.

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:

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.

Autobiography of the [Undead] is available from Calamari Press

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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. 

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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.