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!

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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

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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.

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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

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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, 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.

If you want to know who I am, look at my bookshelf. It’s stacked with stories that explore where and how women fit in our world, particularly through the lens of Southern culture and complicated love. I was born and raised in the South, so I’ve always been drawn to books that understand the heaviness and beauty of that inheritance. The sweet tea, the unspoken rules, and the expectations. The contradictions of being a Southern woman, soft-spoken but sharp, raised to be strong yet always remain passive in society, echo in so many of the stories I love most.

Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina lives at the heart of my collection. It’s raw, aching, and rooted in the dirt and pain of South Carolina. It tells the kind of truth that Southern women often whisper behind closed doors, and it always brought me a strange sense of nostalgia and an urge to retaliate. This book showed me what true heartbreak and hopelessness mean and where to go after.

My next pick is admittedly a bit sappy, but it will always remain on my bookshelf. The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks tells a story of enduring love, societal pressure, and a Southern landscape that continues to resonate. This book is definitely a comfort read, and the one that reminds me that softness doesn’t always mean weakness. I find myself returning to The Notebook for a taste of true love and Southern charm.

Then there’s The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It might not be Southern, but Gloria Gilbert is one of those women who refuses to settle, even as the world tries to drown her in expectations. That tug-of-war between self and society feels familiar, like something Southern girls inherit through more than just words.

Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing has everything my kind of book has. Love, mystery, societal pressure, classism, curiosity: it’s a story about nature, loneliness, and survival. Kya’s life is shaped by the Southern wilderness, as well as by the social hierarchies that attempt to confine her.

And finally, Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors is the newest addition, but one that resonates deeply. While it’s more cosmopolitan in setting, the emotional unraveling of a young woman trying to figure out how much of herself she’s allowed to be feels incredibly familiar.

My bookshelf tells stories of women who don’t fit neatly into the roles society hands them, especially Southern women who carry the weight of tradition and the fire of rebellion. These books remind me that we are allowed to be messy, bold, hurt, hopeful, and everything in between.

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Savannah Roach (she/her) is a senior at the University of Tennessee, where she majors in English with a concentration in technical communication and minors in advertising and public relations. She is a travel enthusiast, bookworm, amateur baker, and nature lover. While she enjoys books of all kinds, she’s especially drawn to the haunting beauty and rich atmosphere of Southern Gothic literature. With a great love for Knoxville, she looks forward to serving the writing community in this position. 

Katy Nguyen: “Drive” is the first poem of this collection. How did you go about deciding this?

Rachel Neve-Midbar: I don’t remember exactly when I chose “Drive” as the first poem for the collection. It was during one of the later reshufflings just before publication. “Drive” was one of the more controversial poems in the collection. Many of my early readers found something in it that didn’t speak to them. It’s an off-kilter poem, at once both representing personal and political conflict. The first poem(s) in any collection should help the reader know how to read the collection. I don’t think I was considering this at the onset, but I think subconsciously I understood that that “off-kilterness” was what I wanted this collection to convey: that no matter where we stand in this conflicted land, we are all in the wrong. And until there is not just peace, but real understanding, forgiveness, and sharing from both sides, we will never attain the stability we all long for.

KN: Besides the title being a line from the late Mahmoud Darwish, is there another reason or meaning behind the salaam of birds to you?

RNM: Over the years, this collection, like all first collections, had many titles. In 2016, I took myself on a writing retreat in Tinos, Greece. I took along several books, including Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah. I love Darwish (and many other Palestinian poets) because so much of the imagery is born in the same land, and the longings also echo what is in my heart. I came across “Sonnet VI” in the collection. The poem is a call to end violence. The last two lines of the sonnet read:

A bit of weakness in metaphor is enough for tomorrow.
For the berries to ripen on the fence, and for the sword to break under dew

The poet understands that his metaphors aren’t really working. How can a few drops of water in nature destroy a sword of metal? Still, he gives us the metaphors anyway. I understand this kind of magical realism. How many times, when I have spoken to people about real peace in Israel/ Palestine, have I encountered rolled eyes and guffaws? I always answer that “I am a poet. My world is dream.” A quote from this sonnet made its way into the coda of the collection, “Salaam of Birds:”

What’s the name of the place your footsteps tattooed on the ground,
a heavenly ground for the salaam of the birds, near echo?

Originally, that piece was called “Dear Marvin,” but when it was picked up at the Georgia Review, the editors there worked with me to perfect the piece. Through revision, the title of the piece changed to “Salaam of Birds,” to quote the sonnet. I then realized that that was the perfect title for the whole collection, that prayer for peace reminds me of a flock of cranes in the sky, and the quote became the epigraph.

KN: Your collection experiments with structure and formatting. Would you say structure and formatting come to you easily, or are they something you revisit? 

RNM: I try to let each poem find its own form. I know there are poets who specialize in certain forms: the prose poem or the Haibun, but I believe that each poem finds its own form. I revise a lot, allowing the poem to change and develop over time and to eventually find its form. It’s the tension between form and structure and music and meaning that, to me, is the most exciting aspect of poetry as an art form. 

KN: Even further, how and when do you decide to end a poem?

RNM: I don’t think the poets “decide” when to end a poem; the poem decides its own end, and it is usually found in revision as we hone and pare back the poem into its shape. 

The poems come. We, the poets, are merely the midwives.

KN: Several of your poems touch upon an intimacy that is expressed through togetherness and physical touch. What is the value of these sentiments and gestures in poetry? 

RNM: Poems that emanate in the physical, in the body—embodied poems—are a large part of what I teach and what I write. There is an inherent intimacy that comes when the images and metaphors of a poem are born in the body. In this book, I wanted to bring in that intimacy, that sense of touch between human beings in their many relationships because ultimately the only solution to human conflicts will be to see each other in our bodies—all human—all fallible. All dreaming that same dream of peace.

KN: Given our current reality, your collection also alludes to violence. How did you navigate the tension of such violence in your poems?

RNM: As I read through this collection in 2025, a collection of poems that were born from the Second Intifada through about 2014 and the Gazan War we experienced that summer, I feel like there is a naivety—even in the poems that express violence. We did live through violence in Israel/Palestine in those years, but nothing like the heartbreaking violence the people in the region are experiencing today. 

In order to write these poems, the violence had to be re-experienced through the writing. The only way to do that was to break the violence down, to give it over to the reader slowly and carefully and always from the human body, to understand that even those who commit violence on every side are also human. This is perhaps best represented in the poem “After Dyce’s Jacob and Rachel.” This is a poem that links the ancient story of the first meeting between star-crossed lovers: Jacob who was running away from his birthright to carry on a nation and the love of his life, Rachel, conflated with the story of an incident from September 9, 2003 when a young woman went the night before her wedding to have a cup of coffee with her father and both were killed in a suicide bombing. In the poem, I refer to the suicide bomber as “a boy”

a boy
oiled into a heavy
suicide vest, the throb 
of his heart exposed 
in the black bomb
under his coat, fast he hits
the button, and then nothing,

With very short lines and only the smallest hint of description, and by placing that description within the boy’s deep body, the reader can feel empathy for the bomber even as he commits an act of violence. It’s the only way the poem can work. Without labeling or name-calling, stepping out of the political and allowing the losses that pile up after a violent act to speak for themselves. Not only were the bride and her father killed, but the boy too. In violence, in war, in hatred, everybody loses. 

KN: With this poetry collection, readers become especially aware of the role and burden of a witness. Why must there be more poems of witnessing? 

RNM: Today, in these shockingly terrible times, we are all being called on to witness. The question becomes who can witness? Do we need to be inside Gaza today to write about what is going on there? Do we need to be standing on the streets of New York City when some innocent person is being scooped off the street and shoved into an unmarked car? Is it enough if we read about these things and simply feel them deeply? Who has the “right” to witness? As long as atrocities occur, as long as there are human beings who are unsafe, we must all do what we can to witness. And poetry is often the place to bring that witness to bear.

KN: There is a restless, constantly alert undertone throughout your poetry. Would you say uncertainty or anxiety has impacted your poetic voice in any way? 

RNM: This is such an interesting question. I always worry that the voice in my poems is sort of pounding my reader over the head. I’m not sure if anxiety impacts my voice or if writing about an anxious, dangerous, or upsetting moment wouldn’t bring that voice to the poem. In a collection where I am writing about the breakup of my marriage while surrounded by the more global events of life in Israel/Palestine, it’s not surprising that what comes through is poetry that conveys something unsettled. It makes sense. 

KN: Readers come across the Hebrew language in this collection. Was this linguistic decision something you always had in mind? 

RNM: I think anyone—everyone—who lives between two languages, all people who are bilingual and using two or more languages in their everyday life tend to code switch in their head. That code switching is my inner music and, though sometimes it causes all words to disappear completely, usually it means that I tend to use whatever word in whichever language makes the most sense in the moment. My kids and I called it Hebrish (the melding of English and Hebrew) and it was our everyday language at home. It is so common to do this in Jewish communities that whole dialects (Yiddish and Landino) have been born of the mix of Hebrew with other languages. Allowing Hebrew, whether as prayer or everyday language into my poems is simply the way I think—the music of my heart.

KN: In putting together this collection, did Salaam of Birds go through many changes? (For instance, reading aloud, editing, sharing the poems?)

RNM: This collection began in the middle of my MFA at Pacific University. In a low-residency program, we were required to send a number of poems, revisions, and book reviews to our mentor once a month. I had been keeping the poems I was writing about my life in Israel/Palestine to myself. Then, in the second month in the second semester of the program, I hadn’t written enough “other” poems, and I included one of the poems I had written about my life. Kaboom. I was working with the poet David St. John. He immediately wrote back and asked me if I had more like that poem. I easily took another 20 poems off my desk and sent them along. The next thing I knew, I had won the 2013 Clockwork Prize from Tebot Bach and I had a chapbook coming out with a very respected publisher. The poems in that chapbook, What the Light Reveals, became the basis for the whole collection. An early version of Salaam was my graduation thesis at Pacific under the watchful eye of Marvin Bell (z”l). More poems were written. I got divorced and moved to the desert. The collection changed titles and the poems within many, many times. I took online workshops, worked on poems with friends, revised and revised. But it wasn’t until I had already started my PhD at USC that the collection won the 2018 Patricia Bibby Prize from my original publisher, Tebot Bach. Even post-acceptance, the collection continued to change and develop, again with the help of David St. John and my cohort at USC. Many years and many changes, so much love and attention went into this collection. I think that is a big part of its strength.

KN: The coda of this collection is a series of powerful, moving letters. Can you speak a little more on why you chose to end the collection with them? Conversation and correspondence appear to be a prevalent theme here. 

RNM: I wrote the coda during that trip to Greece, 2016. I took 10 days off work and booked a little cabin 8 steps from the water in a mostly deserted bay called Agios Romanos on the island of Tinos. I knew I needed to finally sit with the manuscript and begin to prepare it for submission. On the plane, I read through the poems and realized I had nothing written about the Gaza war in 2014, a war in which my son wore a soldier’s uniform, though he was still in his training. I had taken books with me: Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish, and more. I spent the days swimming across the bay, listening to poems on YouTube as I walked up and down the beach. I was completely alone, and still I couldn’t find a way into the work. Nothing, nothing helped. 

Finally, I thought to go back to that summer in another way—to read through the correspondence I shared with my mentor during the summer of 2014, the incomparable Marvin Bell (z”l). None of the letters in the coda match the actual letters I shared with Marvin. He was a tremendously caring teacher, and during the war, he wrote to me just about every day. Just re-reading them allowed me to revisit those days, what I was thinking and feeling and how my attitudes about terrorism and defense—war—were changing. There was nothing brought directly from those emails into “Salaam of Birds,” but the idea to write about that inner change in an epistolary format seemed a good one. After that, the writing just spilled onto the page. The title here too changed when I read Darwish’s “Sonnet VI” that appears in his book The Butterfly’s Burden in Fady Joudah’s translation. Joudah brilliantly left the line “salaam of birds,” allowing a transliterated word, keeping that gorgeous multi-syllabic Arabic word for peace. I knew that was not only the title of the piece, but the permanent title of the whole collection, as the whole book ultimately is a prayer for peace.

KN: Finally, despite the heavy themes of your poetry, there is still beautiful imagery and hope and survival. Your words convey how life can, still, and even must go on. Was this one overarching theme you hoped to achieve?

RNM: Thank you so much for this compliment. The desert taught me this lesson. Most of this collection was written next to a rhythmic stream called “Ein Mabua” in the Judean Desert. In the middle of dunes, in every direction, was a natural spring that would start and stop. Next to the spring was an aqueduct from the Roman Era, built in the year 7 CE. There are only about 100 rhythmic streams in the world. It occurs through very certain manifestations of underground pools and limestone pipes. The first time I saw the entire pool drain and then a few minutes later replenish itself, I thought it must be man-made. Beyond the pool is a waterfall that starts and stops. Birds fly in and out of the greenery that grows near the waterfall. When the water stops and the river empties, the fish dive under the rocks until the flow returns. And it’s a miracle each time it does: the sound of the water first, and then just a glimpse of the flow, and then the trickle at the waterfall, and then suddenly the river flowing full force over the rocks and the water falling like a shower. Birds and flowers and butterflies. And all of this in the midst of the burning desert. A real oasis. That is where this book was written—within an oasis, inside that hope.

Download your free copy of Salaam of Birds today

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Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach, 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014, winner of The Clockwork Prize) and Thought and New Language in the Menstrual Poem (Palgrave MacMillan, upcoming). Rachel is co-editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia, 2023). She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to translate Holocaust poet Abba Kovner. Rachel is also the Poetry Editor at Calul Journal. More at rachelnevemidbar.com.

Katy Nguyen is a University of California, Irvine graduate. She enjoys reading and writing about the little things, music, and peoplehood. In her spare time, she likes to peruse around stationery shops and add more pens to her growing collection.

Aiyana Masla wrote her first full-length poetry collection, The Underdream (Conerstone Press, 2025), during and after her struggle with Tuberculosis, to which she almost lost her life. The Underdream is a precious celebration of the sort of triumph that settles into the bones, that is punctuated by lines like “I have to taste the ocean again, I still have to do/big more generous with joy”( Masla 26). And while The Underdream is a book of struggle, it is not a battle cry, it is not boastful.

The Underdream is a recommitment to a life, a life of miracles, such as “oranges in February…dipping my fingers into fleeting/ethereal honey” (Masla 27). Masla writes toward this dedication through quiet revelation and vivid imagery. In “Dew & Dirt” Masla writes, 

Here, Masla invokes life, a life of bounty, and communion with loved ones, of time that is not measured with an unrelenting hand. Her poems often unfurl like spells with repeated lines: “I am not ready,” “I will not,” “I want one more” (Masla 26). She invokes a life heavy with fruit, flower, longing, and color; “marigold,” “husky purple,” “yellow shimmer,” “winded pink,” “spring cream lavendered” and “persimmon yawn” (Masla 19, 18, 33, 38, 64). Though what she speaks of is ordinary, the language she uses to conjure everyday color, the beauty of being with ones you love, of wishing for a body that is healthy and whole, drips with juice, with flower, with the glitter and grit of desire, giving each poem a sheen of mysticism and magic. 

The Underdream is a book of quiet holiness, of soft glory, of embodied worship. Aiyana Masla moves into a place familial and liminal, touched by dream, honeyed by grief. Broken into three sections: Night, Between Rooms, and Thaw, The Underdream moves between hospital rooms and gardens. Masla takes her time in each place, her eyes trained to see the almost infinitesimal as valuable and worth noticing. In “Savored” she writes: 

Masla’s book is full of such “small ceremonies,” the measuring of precious ritual, and reminds us of the art of living a life of careful attention and awe. In “Savored,” she writes of pulling over near an empty soccer field, the “pink day fading.” And it is in this simple moment of stillness that a ceremony of noticing occurs, a moment is transformed and marked, stained by pollen, and is made memorable. 

Masla deftly weaves jubilation and desolation. She names this emotion, “griefjoy,” in her poem, “Letter from my Lungs to My Legs” (Masla 28). She writes of  “panging, irridescient,” the pain of sirens and needles, yet ends with a wish to be “winged and whole…To concave the sky into clean sound fingerprints of sleep” (Masla 28, 29). With her, we too, move through pain, through joy, through ecstasy, into clean air, to breathe and to sleep. 

It is rare to find a book so complete in spirit, of prayer, and spell, and yet so grounded in the physical. Much of the movement of the book is of the sort done from a bed, or in a state of dreaming, lying in the tall grasses, or on a blanket, “half-asleep under a purple sweater” (Masla 13). Masla writes:  

One is reminded that this is a book of convalescence, and the title itself, The Underdream, implies both spirit and earth, how dreams can lie with us, that they are not just lofty things, but that which stays with us in the bed, that which follows us into both “soil and sky” (Masla 58). 

At the end of The Underdream, in “Returned,” Masla states, 

“Hey,

I can learn

imperfect holiness.

I can learn this

dappled afternoon.” (Masla 66)

And longer after reading the book, we find our afternoons more dappled with sunlight. At the end, I couldn’t help but repeat Masla’s last lines out loud, “I have never been / so thankful” (Masla, 66 ). The Underdream is a collection of poetry of light that lingers, a book of afterglow. 

The Underdream is available from Cornerstone Press

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Hannah Yerington is the author of the chapbook Sheologies, published by Minerva Rising Press in 2023. Her first full-length poetry collection, Garlic Moon, is forthcoming with Monkfish Book in Fall 2026/Winter 2027. Some of her awards and recognitions include being a finalist for The Peseroff Prize, one of the winners of the 2024 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest, and a winner of the Minerva Rising Dare to Be Chapbook Contest. She is the director of The Bolinas Poetry Camp for Girls and received an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her work can be found in Lilith, Porkbelly Press, Prism, Room Magazine, Half Mystic Press, Hey Alma, and Cascadia Daily News. She writes about Jewish magic, teenage prophet babes, and plant ancestors. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her imp puppy, Poe, her priestess kitten, Tala, and her warrior-chef husband, Kris.  Find her on Instagram @hannahyerington.