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!

Wolf’s Bane is available through April Gloaming

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.

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 “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:” 

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:

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.

Incidental Pollen is available from Madville Publishing

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.

Growing up in Shanghai, China, my bookshelf options were not necessarily the most diverse or international. They often consisted of translated fairytales, heavy Chinese classics, or occasional graphic novels or comics like Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Dog Man. Hence, I was never a big reader since youth—I often indulged myself with movies instead. I found most books too pedantic and too sophisticated to read. So, for a long time I didn’t love books that much, and my bookshelf was oftentimes covered in substandard blindbox dolls or yearbooks.

A big turning point in my life when it came to books was when my dad came back from a work trip in Australia. I remembered him carrying two gigantic suitcases almost twice my height and rolling them in front of me. Inside were oceans of books—from classics to children’s books, from novels to poetry. To this day, I still want to thank my dad for his efforts that led me to become a literary arts lover—because the change from a life without to a life with a diverse range of books is tremendous. I came to love the process of exploration, in which I learn the heart of another author through excavating their world creations and character sensitivities. I especially adored the aspect of excessive thinking, where a character vomits their brains out and I get to trace my finger across the convex folds until I could almost call it mine.

A lot of books have been important to me in my lifetime, both for my writing career and personal growth. The fourth grade me has written endless reimaginings of the Harry Potter series and poems have thrived on my reincarnation in Jane Eyre’s body. But my favorite books would have to be those by Amy Tan.

Diaspora and heritage is not an uncommon theme in literature. Fifth grade summer, I was handed The Joy Luck Club, a book named after a Mahjong parlor that did not make much rhythmic sense until translated to its original counterpart—喜福会; “喜”, whose meaning stretched beyond joy and “福”, whose interpretations stretched beyond luck. And yet here I was—criss-crossed and reading the Mahjong tiles clatter, bone on bone, as four women shuffle latent histories between eight palms, grasping luck that nearly slipped through the cracks. Upon my first read I was shocked by a few things: one, that words can sound as intimate as sweet-sour meat loafs served between the voices of mothers whispering across a dinner table, brimming with an accent I had always heard but never before seen in ink; two, that daughters could wade through language like a river with two shores, caught between the currents of Mandarin’s lyricism and English’s sharp edges; three, that a character in an English book could be named in Chinese, pinyin above alphabet. After this book, I read more of Amy Tan, ranging from The Kitchen’s Godwife to The Moon Lady.

Maybe enough of her books, but you probably can kind of tell that they’re impactful. Beyond Amy Tan, I also read a lot of historical fiction, my favourites being the classic All the Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, The Marriage Portrait, Pachinko and many, many more.

As I began to write poetry, I’ve also been interested in poetry-prose or prose-poetry, or basically just anything that wavers in the lines of obscurity and clear plot progressions. I still love On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, as popular as it may already be.

Now with a relatively packed day to day schedule, finding the time to read immersively is hard, and oftentimes I would resort to reading online lit mags or e-books instead of physical copies (something I feel guilty about since I love the smell of fresh ink). But I do try. Another interesting fact about me is that I love aesthetic covers and pretty titles, and often tend to buy books just for the sake of their beauty. So yes, I do judge a book by its cover. I am currently not in Shanghai so I don’t have pictures of my big, old bookshelf, but I can promise you that it is packed and very, very aesthetic.

Penny Wei is from Shanghai and Massachusetts. She has been recognized by the Longfellow House, Cafe Muse, and The National Poetry Quarterly, amongst others. Her works are up or forthcoming on Eunoia Review, Inflectionist Review, Dialogist, Aloka and elsewhere.

The more I read about time, the more I contemplate my relationship to it, and its fleeting nature, the more overwhelmed I get. I become so tangled up in my own bewilderment, I could never really imagine trying to tackle the subject of time head on in my writing. But what if you had the wisdom, unlike me, to let time’s chaotic nature liberate your writing, rather than frustrate it? That’s exactly what happens in Jackie Craven’s thrillingly original poetry collection Whish (Press 53, 2024). Rather than trying to get a grip on time, Craven embraces the contradiction and fragmentation of memory, allowing her to create poems that are funny, poignant, heartbreaking, disturbing, and always surreal.

Like the majority of the poems in Whish, “Management Has Hired Three New Seconds” is a small paragraph of prose poetry, wherein the title is actually part of the first line. “Management has hired three new seconds, but they mangle every task. One flutters through ceiling vents, one twiddles with the computer fans, one…jams the copy machine” (Craven 3). In response, “Management shrugs—adds a jiffy and a zeptohour. I slump at my desk and pretend the day is round” (Craven 3). The poem, apparently, is about “leap seconds.” The rotation of the Earth is actually often shorter than 24 hours, and the deficit builds up, so roughly every two years, three new seconds are added to the year. Craven writes, “These adjustments are imperfect and can cause technical mishaps and scheduling snafus” (65). The speaker here draws a funny comparison between convoluted, often bad management decisions and being at the mercy of time. Both are confusing, both cause headaches. Indeed, the day may as well be round. Why not?

This poem also includes Craven’s personification of time, another technique she employs throughout the book. Usually they are times of day or specific (but also vague) moments that eventually become characters, complete with their own arcs and esoteric, personal meanings to the narrator. On this, two stand out: “Half Past Yesterday” and “63:13.”

The former first appears in the poem “Half Past Yesterday Has Abandoned Me.” In this short prose poem, the narrator is left to “sulk in the rain-slicked plaza outside the computer repair shop and the delinquent hour doesn’t come…I slog through puddles, a statue learning to walk” (13). Craven seems to have a specific talent for evoking sadness and its many refractions. Here, the speaker has obviously been spurned by “the delinquent hour” (13). Given its peculiar name, maybe it represents the speaker’s inability to move on from the past, still using yesterday as a frame of reference.

We first meet 63:13 in “63:13 Shivers on the Marquee,” a prose poem in which a broken electric clock displays the time 63:13. The narrator poignantly asks “When they fix the clock, where will the broken hour go? / 63:13 blinks, plots a getaway.” 63:13’s meaning is even more elusive than Half Past Yesterday’s, but both reappear throughout Whish, hiding in a freezer, presumably killing a sister, their arcs eventually culminating and colliding in the fourth-to-last poem, Craven writes,

There’s something undeniably eerie and haunted about this poem, and that’s not just because of the presence of the ghost in it, either. If chronology, to quote Einstein (and the epigraph of Whish) is “only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” how then are we to conceive of our selves? Our past? Our griefs, our traumas? It could be a freeing idea, a joyous one even, but the tone of the poem strikes me as being resigned—which I find to be relatable and even poignant. Our illusory nature isn’t bad, and it isn’t good, it just…is. It’s a truth you can spend decades repeating to yourself; to have the wisdom and poetic skill to actually evoke its emotional truth is something few writers ever possess.

This almost hidden storyline is just a glimpse into a truly dazzling masterwork. Some of the best poems in Whish are the ones that break from the prose poetry format. In “Someone Should Do Something About The Clock At City Hall,” a clock breaking down unleashes dinosaurs on an urban landscape: “Soon megalodons will swim into the harbor / and swallow the paddleboats…Pterodactyls collide with flights / from Baltimore” (16). It’s a poem packed with chaotic juxtapositions and great lines. “My Misery Sleeps Through the Sunrise” is a perfect poem for our times in which “Glaciers weep, pathogens carouse, / and in Martha’s Vineyard, manatees / was ashore” (44). And then, in a series of poems throughout the book, there is a deeply unsettling story about a Human Clock, a character held against her will, her speech broken and her skin literally left out to dry. All this in only 60 pages. The only thing to do with a collection like Whish is to dive in with open arms and enjoy the submersion, even when it feels overwhelming, like drowning. Maybe I should do the same thing with time.

Whish is available from Press 53

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, and Emerson Green Mag and has 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.