Category: Admin

Sundress Reads: Review of The Death Spiral

How do reflections of a past humanity co-exist with the present, or grow into our future? Author and professor Sara Giragosian asks this question between the lines of her poetry collection, The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). By evoking visceral convergences, repetitions, and breakdowns of organic matter, Girgosian situates America in the Anthropocene—not just as a space of mass extinction and climate change, but also as a point of political upheaval, colonialization, and cultural erasure.

Nomadically waltzing between seedpods, crosswinds, rock membranes and raptors (both extinct and living), The Death Spiral recognizes the Paleolithic and present as migratory states rather than time periods. In this malleable temporality, love and death become ingesting and ingested things that creep into us all, causing us to ask of our surroundings, “If there are cracks in the world where spirits pass through, slow this scene—let me live in the still / when you hover in mid-air to drink the honeysuckle in.” You will find this stillness at the closure of the collection, after forming a truer understanding of the fossilized and forgotten—the echoes of national mistakes Giragosian amplifies with words that rip and free.

The Death Spiral is divided into three sections, each with its own balance of urgency and upliftment. In the first section, “Emergency Procedures,” Girgosian brings awareness to the exile of the Yup’ik (the earth’s first climate refugees), the deep traces of systematic racism present in the US Law Enforcement Oath of Honor, and her great-grandmother’s story as a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Amongst these considerations, Giragosian presents family history as a victim to colonialism, terror as a person with favorites, and God as a force as “anonymous / and intimate as a nurse who can deliver pain / or take it away.” In this open-faced recognition of cruelty and fear, Girgosian reminds us that “Nature is neither cruel nor moral, / but she’s irrepressible / as a kink in the nervous system”. The presentation of this ambivalent yet unstoppable natural force feels like the modem by which we are told to trace our truest form of history with tactile diligence, remapping the ancestral land that has been too often erased. It is a triumphant, if pained, call for justice.

The second section, “To Kingdom Come”, makes its presence known with the gentle propositional poem “Origins.” Here, the first line theorizes, “suppose we / were intimate / before the Bang / all of us / you and me / and the cosmos / cramped in at a point / finer than an atom.” The connectivity of a collective comes to the forefront, making us aware of the ways our dreams, movements, and actions pulse out a vibration we are capable of feeling with humble acuteness. Traversing dark and dirty energy to travel through towns including Terlingua Texas, Beacon New York, and the Rio Grande, Giragosian encompasses the experiences of immigrant families facing a “wild-eyed” America “rehearsing his blunt sand trap quiz.”

This presentation of a restrictive, nationalistic consciousness contrast the moments of connectivity Giragosian proposes at the beginning of this section. By doing so, Giragosian shifts between first, second, third person plural perspectives, as well as the anonymity of a character called E., in order to dare exclusionists to “private tour your way around my mind / too gaslighted by Sparkle the Racist, Boo Boo the Homophobe, and Frisky the Sexist / to be any good to you now.” The multiplicity of perspectives allows readers to hold an orbital view of American discrimination at the same time that Giragosian asserts connectivity as a source of understanding and love. Ultimately it is the hopeful message of connection that makes headway through the title poem, “The Death Spiral”. Here, Giragosian evokes the courtship ritual of eagles to propose, “Suppose that to marry is to defy death / talon to talon, / to promise to learn together the art / of freefalling as mutual deference.” The feeling of interlocking talons—another instance of deep connection—is not just a plummeting force in this poem, but a mutual respect with the power to fall upwards. By spotlighting this action, Giragosian suggests a similar move for our communities—an activism which freefalls with mutual deference.

Thus, in the final section, “Father Absence,” The Death Spiral  takes a step past connectivity to ingestion—embrace. Here, Giragosian writes of a sort of decomposition in which nature fits into humanity, and vice versa. She writes to a T-Rex stillborn to say, “And when your ghost squirms / in my spleen, I know the foreboding’s inbred.” Backcountry situates in a human “I” narrator with gill slits, bat bones resembling a grandmother’s hand, and memories are either from a former life as a Galapagos Marine Iguana, or as the detritus of organic matter. What Giragosian accomplishes in her final section, and throughout The Death Spiral as a whole, is a sensation that our history, pain, deaths, memories, and mistakes are all shared, traceable, organic matter. In writing The Death Spiral, Sara Giragosian illustrates the past that we, as a community, must recognize as traceable, breathing, and still waiting for honest representation.

The Death Spiral is available at Black Lawrence Press

Hannah Olsson holds a double BA in Cinema and Creative Writing English from the University of Iowa. During her time in Iowa, Hannah was the president of The Translate Iowa Project and its publication boundless, a magazine devoted to publishing translated poetry, drama, and prose. Her work, both in English and Swedish, has been featured in boundless, earthwords magazine, InkLit Mag, and the University of Iowa’s Ten-Minute Play Festival.

Project Bookshelf: Hannah Olsson

I think it’s funny how much books can reflect someone’s current life. Right now, for example, my bookshelf looks like something modest but growing—something in transition. It reflects almost exactly the way I feel right now in my extended stay hotel, waiting for my new apartment lease to start in Portsmouth, Virginia after my recent move from Iowa City, Iowa. Since my partner and I couldn’t fit much in the place we’re living at the moment, the books I brought are a strange, miscellaneous collection of college books—The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz or the Norse saga Poetic Edda—and my most recent reads, such as Maggie Stiefvater’s newest book Mister Impossible, or K.M. Szpara’s First, Become Ashes.

The mix adds up to a collection of books tied to my degree, books I’m currently reading, and books that I carry around because they’re simply narratives that I feel ground me during this exciting time of changes and new surroundings. In this way, this miniature shelf I have at the moment really reflects the way my massive bookshelf usually looks like in its usual place near my bedside: partly filled with favorites, partly filled with new reads, and definitely filled with all the books I’ve read as class assignments in the past.

A lot of these books I’ve read already, and most likely will not read again. I’ve never really been one to reread books; instead, I usually go back to a book only to glance through the most memorable parts, like one often looks back on fond (or maybe even not-so-fond) moments in their life. Though I never fully reread them, I do think I’ve always struggled giving away books because they hold those kinds of personal memories that you can look back on—not just memories of what happened on the page, but also memories from what was happening in my life at the moment I was reading that page for the first time.

The few books I reread from time to time are tied closest to my Cinema and Creative Writing degree. These textbooks are what I cling onto just in case I ever forget how to write a logline for a script, hold a camera, or study a Norse poem. Not featured, for example, are several of the thickest film theory books I own, works like The Cult Film Reader or Eric Schaefer’s Bold! Daring! Shocking! True: A History of Exploitation Films. These books feel like lasting examples of the work I put into my double BA. They also stand as information I always feel I can look at in a different perspective.

While this list of books covers most of the genres and reading that I’ve done recently, I don’t think that it’s possible to get the true look at my bookshelf without including my best friend Caroline’s bookshelf. I say this because for the past year I’ve basically read any and all of the books she’s recommended (she has phenomenal taste when it comes to YA). These books include Maggie Stiefvater, but also Leah Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology, and a series that Caroline and I realized we both loved as children (a start to any good friendship), Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society. I think it’s important to recognize Caroline’s bookshelf because, though I often want reading to be such an individual, unique, personal experience, I have since found through my degrees that reading can also become something globally transformative; so long as we feel the bravery to discuss, contemplate, study, and admire books together.

On this subject, I think I need to also add the self-published books on my shelf that I’ve either read or helped publish. These are magazines like the two boundless publications I currently have on my shelf (as the former president, I have always have multiple copies floating around me like a cloud). This also includes the cowboy poetry book Hooftracks written by my once-horse-instructor, now-friend, Tom Sharpe, the self-published Blue, Black by Caroline, and the un-pictured but current read: a YA fiction manuscript centered around the Mafia and written by another close friend, Annie. All of these books are the ones closest to my heart because they’re about the process of writing; these books, though in varying stages of the writing process and covering a variety of genres, all stand the same in the way they hold voices of the loved ones closest to me. These books, in combination with all the other reading on my shelf, work to help me write, understand, and grow during this exciting new chapter in my own life.

Hannah Olsson holds a double BA in Cinema and Creative Writing English from the University of Iowa. During her time in Iowa, Olsson was the president of The Translate Iowa Project and its publication boundless, a magazine devoted to publishing translated poetry, drama, and prose. Her work, both in English and Swedish, has been featured in boundless, earthwords magazine, Inklit Mag, and the University of Iowa’s Ten-Minute Play Festival, among others.

Nominations Are Now Open for 2021 Best of the Net Anthology

Nominations are now open for Best of the Net, an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional publishing.

In addition to poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, for the first time, we will also be accepting art nominations!

Nominations must have originally been published online between July 1st, 2020, and June 30th, 2021. See guidelines for more details on eligibility. Submissions must be received between July 1st and September 30th, 2021.

See the full submission guidelines here.

To submit, please use the following forms:

Poetry submission form
Fiction submission form
Nonfiction submission form
Art submission form

This year’s judges are Mai Der Vang (poetry), Amber Sparks (fiction), Krys Malcolm Belc (nonfiction), and Rhonda Lott (art).

Asian woman with black glasses and long black hair and navy blouse, viewed from waist up, standing in grassy field with sunset in horizon.

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Writer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, and The American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Mai Der also co-edited How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology with the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. A Kundiman fellow, Mai Der has completed residencies at Civitella Ranieri and Hedgebrook. Born and raised in Fresno, California, she earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

White woman with shoulder-length blonde hair standing in front of bookshelf with both hands on hips, wearing navy cardigan, cream blouse, and orange pants

Amber Sparks is the author of four collections of short fiction, including And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges and The Unfinished World, and her fiction and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Paris Review, Tin House, Granta, The Cut, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

White man with shaved hair and beard and gray glasses smiling directly at camera in front of white background

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (Counterpoint) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet.) His work has been featured in Granta, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press), Wigleaf Top 50, and Best of the Net 2018. Krys lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children and works as an educator in a pediatric hospital.

White woman with dark hair and glasses smiling slightly at camera, wearing an off-the-shoulder navy blouse and large necklace with silver leaf

Rhonda Lott is an artist, code developer, and writer based in Knoxville, Tennessee. As a lifelong lover of the arts and sciences, she holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Springfield and a doctorate in creative writing from Texas Tech University. Her poetry has appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Whiskey Island Magazine, among others. She has contributed cover art to Best of the Net for twelve years.

Meet Our New Intern: Stephi Cham

Children have an uncanny way of latching on to specific snippets and remembering them for the rest of their lives. As a child, I once came across a quote that never quite lost its effect on me: “Chase your passion like it’s the last bus of the night.” I knew I would, so at age 11, I told my mother I wanted to be a writer. Today, I work as a book editor and a writer, and above all, I am still a lover of stories and words.

I completed my undergraduate education at Southern Methodist University, where I majored in music therapy with a minor in psychology. My music therapy work further solidified my goals. Everyone I worked with had unique struggles, hopes, and dreams, each person a main character in their own story. Though I loved my clinical work, I wanted to help people who tell their stories in their own ways. As a music therapist, I learned to focus on patients’ goals and avoid imposing my own perspective on them while gently providing guidance as needed; as an editor, I found that my professional relationships with authors were much the same.

In Dallas, I worked at Student Media Company, at the time a small private company that managed the SMU newspaper and yearbook. I trained under the editors there, then eventually became chief copyeditor and stepped in as a writer when needed. There, I found my passion for helping writers organize their thoughts, revise their writing, and realize their visions.

Editing became my focus. Working full-time with reading, writing, and editing showed me that I wanted to take the next step and become further involved in the publishing field. Now, I’m working on my MA in Publishing at Rosemont College, where I’ve picked up more industry knowledge and become a better publishing professional.

The first books I held in my hands that I’d authored were five books published by Capstone Press about Asian-American historical figures. The experience of writing about people from my own ethnicity, along with the publication process from an author’s perspective, motivated me to be part of creating these opportunities for other Asian-Americans. Having seen the numerous barriers to publishing for many disenfranchised and historically marginalized people, I hope to be part of the ongoing change to remove these barriers and increase the publishing world’s accessibility and diversity.

With this in mind, I’m so excited and grateful to join the Sundress Publications team as an editorial intern. The Sundress team has done a lot, and with this incredible opportunity, I hope to be not just a better and more knowledgeable editor, but also someone who contributes actively to the publishing field with compassion, insight, and care.

Stephi Cham holds a BM in Music Therapy with a Minor in Psychology from Southern Methodist University. She is currently working toward her MA in Publishing at Rosemont College, where she manages the publishing program’s communications as a graduate assistant. She is a freelance editor and the author of the Great Asian-American series published by Capstone Press, and her work has appeared in Strange Horizons.

Doubleback Review is Seeking Short-Form Previously Published Works

Doubleback Review is currently seeking submissions for issue 3:2! We are a part of Doubleback Press, a small press specializing in republishing creative works that were originally published by now-defunct journals and presses. Doubleback Review has also had a special edition for conscientiously withdrawn pieces—works that were withdrawn from journals because of harmful behavior from an editor. We are a home for your retired darlings, and we are also committed to uplifting the voices of marginalized creators.

We are open for submissions year-round and accept poetry, short stories, artwork, and more short-form work. Poets should send up to five poems and prose writers should send up to 4,000 words total—one story or essay, or up to three shorter flash pieces—in one document (Word preferred). Please begin each piece on a separate page. Include your name and email address at the top of each page. Below each piece, specify where it was previously published.

Artists may send one high-resolution image in .JPG, .JPEG, .PNG, or .PDF format, up to 25 MB in size. Please include an artist statement and specify where the piece was previously published in the cover letter field.

Our full submission guidelines can be found here.

Doubleback Books’ 2021 Open Reading Period for Previously Published Poetry and Prose Books

Doubleback Books, an imprint of Sundress Publications, is open for submissions for previously published poetry and prose books. All eligible previously published authors are welcome to submit their manuscripts during our reading period from July 1st-31st, 2021.

If you are the author of a book that has gone out of print since 2000, we want to read it. Authors of works that have gone out of print due to the closure of the original press may submit full-length or short books, including novels, novellas, chapbooks, short story collections, poetry collections, essay collections, and memoirs. Editors may also submit out of print manuscripts their presses published before closing.

Submit your manuscript(s) in a .PDF or .DOC format to doubleback@sundresspublications.com and include the name of the manuscript’s original publisher, the name and contact information of the publisher’s former editor-in-chief (if available), and a brief cover letter in the body of the email telling us about your work and yourself, noting the genre of the manuscript.

Accepted manuscripts will be turned into free downloadable e-books available. We do not republish translated work or previously self-published work. You can read our previously published titles here.

2021 Prose Open Reading Period Selections Announced

Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce the results of the 2021 prose open reading period. The winning selection is Margo Berdeshevsky’s Kneel Said the Night (a hybrid book in half notes).

Margo Berdeshevsky, born in New York City, often lives and writes in Paris. Her latest poetry collection, Before The Drought, is from Glass Lyre Press. A new poetry collection, It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Berdeshevsky is the author of Between Soul & Stone and But a Passage in Wilderness (Sheep Meadow Press). Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two. She received the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her works appear in Poetry International, New Letters, Kenyon Review, and many others. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared in Poetry International online. 

Runners-Up

Christine Stewart-Nunez, Chrysopoeia: Essays of Language, Love, and Place
Xuan Nguyen, The Fairies Sing Each to Each: A Libretto

Finalists

Josh Denslow, Magic Can’t Save Us: 15 Tales Of Likely Failure
Andrew Gretes, Please Don’t Feed The Philosophers: Stories
Leslie Jenike, Hide Fox And All After: Essays
Frances Park, Ahn Love: A Novella
Juan Carlos Reyes, Three-Alarm Fire: Fictions
Darci Dawn Schummer, The Ballad Of Two Sisters

Semi-Finalists

Elizabeth Bruce, Universally Adored And Other One Dollar Stories
Holly Burdorff, Legal American Tender
Heidi Czerwiec, Scents & Sensibility
Michael Czyzniejewski, Having A Catch At The End Of The World: Dad Stories
Nathan Gehoski, Horsemen
Leah Griesmann, Stripped
Daniela Molnar, Chorus

Sundress Reads: Review of The Pelton Papers

In her 2020 novel The Pelton Papers (She Writes Press), Mari Coates portrays the life of 20th-century modernist artist Agnes Pelton in a multifaceted rainbow of color, reaching into the recesses of Pelton’s personality and career to portray a woman who rose above all odds to obtain a legacy that lasted beyond her 79 years. Told from the first-person point-of-view of the protagonist, Coates lingers in languish on the page as she painstakingly outlines the process by which some of Pelton’s most historic paintings came into being, etching each moment of discovery the artist experienced as it must have unfolded in Pelton’s real life.

The depth and span of the novel begins in 1888 and ends in 1961, positioning Pelton in the historical framework in which she lived and worked. While describing her early childhood, Pelton is first introduced to drawing as a way to cope with her father’s loss: “I must have been fourteen when I started telling everyone who would listen, I was going to be an artist. I spent every possible moment of the day drawing pictures, often furtively when I should have been doing my lessons.” This succinct statement encapsulates the artist’s career: surrounding herself often with nature, alone, yet always within comfortable reach of friends who shared similar passions and experiences. Coates does not shy away from expressing Pelton’s sexuality as an obstacle in the early 20th century (“Shocked, I realized that my friend had become my beloved. I would never tell her, but I would find a way to contain happiness, grief, exhaustion, and despair”), but ensures that a full portrait of her struggles and eventual happiness is shown. The artist’s life was a full and complete one, and Coates uses dialogue and setting to bring the novel to life in a way that allows Pelton to become a fully realized character on the page. Perhaps one of the most notable experiences in reading this book is learning, through Pelton’s narration, what it must have been like to attend a salon in the 20th century: “from what I could tell, [salons] were calculated gatherings of the most unlikely groups of people: newly arrived immigrants, Communists, socialists, artists, writers, and the leading likes of New York society, all packed into an elegant parlor…as evenings designed to provoke, inspire, and even outrage, the salons were unqualified successes.”

Throughout the book, Coates uses vivid language to describe Pelton’s art and influence in the art world, and the picture of this mysterious woman begins to gain clarity through the author’s account of her life. By the end, as she goes through her past, the reader gains the sense that Agnes Lawrence Pelton’s acclaim would far outlive the artist herself.

The Pelton Papers is available at She Writes Press

Nikki Lyssy (@blindnikkii) is an MFA candidate studying creative nonfiction at the University of South Florida. Her essays have appeared in Hobart, Sweet, and Essay Daily. When she is not working, she can be found in a coffee shop.

Interview with Sunni Brown Wilkinson, Author of The Ache and the Wing

For the release of award-winning poet Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s chapbook The Ache and the Wing, Editorial Intern Nikki Lyssy sat with Wilkinson to discuss the relationship between hope and loss, the many different selves we live, and honoring grief through remembrance.

Nikki Lyssy: What was your conception of the title for this collection?

Sunni Brown Wilkinson: As I gathered the poems together to see if there was any kind of coherence, I noticed how many poems were about loss and how many included birds. I was actually surprised by both and thought maybe they go together somehow. I do think all life grieves in some way and all life experiences joy, and the title grew from that. And I realized this collection not only showcases this phase of my life (mother, wife, middle-aged, grounded but still a little lost) but it also mirrors general life experiences: loss, letting go, reflections on the self, curiosity about the world, wonder.

NL: How does the speaker conceive of the relationship between birds and body in the opening and closing poems?

SBW: In the opening poem (“Rodeo”), something in the speaker is broken. I don’t say what outright, but it becomes apparent in the poems directly following: we had just lost our youngest son. I did feel like my body was literally broken. I was recovering from my fourth C-section, I was 40, and the baby we had anxiously been awaiting was stillborn. I’d never known how physically crippling grief could be, and I barely had the strength to get through each day. And in that opening poem, there actually aren’t any birds, just a hummingbird hawk moth, which looks like the tiniest bird but is in fact an insect. So in that first poem, I would say there’s just heaviness and struggle, no wingspan, very little to lift the body toward lightness.

By the end of the book, in the final poem (“After Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe…”), there’s a clear admission that our bodies will continue to be broken in this life, but there’s also a reaching toward joy and, more specifically, immortality and a place of wholeness. The birds in that poem could represent that lightness and joy of the body, but the final image suggests that maybe the birds are also whatever breaks us down in this life, whatever tears through us to get to that inner being. Like the seed glimmering at the end of the poem, we are simplified and small. Our bodies are weak and “wingless,” but something in us is still bright and full of expectation. I guess this is also a full admission that I do believe in a life after this one. My first collection also leans heavily on that belief.

NL: How do the themes of the collection speak to each other in each poem?

SBW: I’m still teasing this out, and I’m still seeing the poems in different ways with each reading, but my hope is that each poem strikes a slightly different chord about loss and hope, the body, and even what it means to be a man or a woman in this world. Two poems in this collection are specifically about the experience of living in a man’s body. “The Difficult, Liquid Art” and “In the Voice of My Husband’s Grandfather” both celebrate the struggles of being a man, maybe even suggest the weight of patriarchy, the vulnerability and exquisite beauty of men. Even “Don’t Feed the Coyotes” includes a man on a Harley Davidson (the ultimate symbol of machismo, right?) who patently ignores the signs to not feed the coyotes and instead mercifully throws them raw hot dogs. Having grown up with three brothers (no sisters) and now having three sons (no daughters), I feel like I’ve observed men for a good part of my life, and I find them fascinating. The men I know and love are the most surprising, tender, generous people. And that’s just one thread in this collection. My hope is that, in each poem, the reader feels a deepened appreciation for both the struggles and joys of living. These poems were sheer catharsis for me. They propelled me back into a love of being alive.

NL: There are poems that read like mirror images: the structure of “Ghost” and “They Call it Weeping”, or “Rodeo” and “The Woman who Became a House.” In what ways are the structures in each poem in conversation with the themes you are presenting on the page?

SBW: “Ghost” surprised me because I don’t typically write prose poems, or, at least, poems that appear more like prose, but as I was writing it, I knew it had to be compact and read more like vignettes that are slowly braided together, as if someone were telling you a few bits of story and then by the end of the conversation you realize all of the pieces create one larger story. I love braided essays, and I try to do something similar in my poems. And in “They Call it Weeping,” I realized that there were several images that reflected weeping that, when brought together, also created a larger story about how the body processes and moves forward from grief. I’d never considered how, even if a woman loses her baby, her body still produces milk. Or just how much water is in a newborn’s body. It occurred to me that our bodies weep in ways we cannot control, and that weeping allows the body to let go. And the sections in those poems allow the reader (and the speaker) to slow down and inhabit each moment, maybe even to honor it, before moving on. That’s also what grief is, an honoring.

NL: In “The Woman Who Became a House”, the metaphor lingers below the surface in a very different way than in any other poem in the collection. How did this metaphor of grief and pain find its form for this book?

SBW: I was thinking one day of just how vast each of us are, all of the rooms we’ve lived in in our selves, the different people we’ve been in our lifetimes, and it occurred to me that it was as if we are each a great house and all of the rooms hold something different, with a different purpose. I also once described the feeling of my grief as “brick-heavy,” as if my whole body was made of bricks. The two kind of merged and I wrote this poem to describe what it felt like at that point in my life. And on top of all of that, I remembered a story my mother once told me of my grandmother hiding sometimes in the boiler room and crying because she was so overwhelmed with life. And I was thinking too of the way women are often seen as something to inhabit or own, certainly in ways men are not. All of those came together to meditate on how women are like these houses that are filled with fascinating things and are complex and crumbling and haunted with weeping and singing.

NL: Is there a dichotomy between the ache section and the wing section of the collection as a whole?

SBW: I think so. When I was originally organizing the book, I had the poem “When It Comes” as the final poem, as a kind of “what to do when the hard stuff comes” wrap-up to the book. But my very wise friend Natalie Taylor suggested I put that poem at the end of the poems directly related to grief and then allow all of the bird poems to kind of sing at the end of the book. She thought that would help the reader “journey” through grief and into hope more clearly. It felt right. And I remembered something Ada Limon said when she visited our university a few years ago. She said that when she read a poetry manuscript, she looked for a narrative arc. I’m still teasing out what that means exactly, but I think that it suggests some nod to the age-old, even biblical, story of a fall and redemption. The ache section dissects grief and the complexities of loss while the wing section moves toward a deeper reverence for life and a belief in its ultimate timelessness.

NL: How is the speaker at the beginning of the collection in conversation with the speaker at the end of the collection?

SBW: That’s a terrific question! The speaker in the opening poem is working towards saying that hard, awful truth: “Sometimes you hold your own hand./ That’s all there is to take.” That poem isn’t all sad—some of it is funny, I hope—but it admits right away that life is hard and that some days it feels like there isn’t much to cling to. By the end of the book, however, the speaker isn’t holding her own hand anymore. She’s holding what feels like a kind of wisdom, an acceptance of what is difficult but also family, memories, wonders in the natural world, and an appreciation for simply being alive. The final image of that last poem is of the speaker being a seed the birds of the morning have uncovered. It’s exposing and kind of scary, but it’s a hope for a deeper existence where even loss is transformed into joy.

Download your copy of The Ache and the Wing for free here!

Sunni Brown Wilkinson‘s poetry can be found in Western Humanities Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, SWWIM, Crab Orchard Review and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press 2019, finalist for the Hudson Prize) and The Ache and the Wing (winner of Sundress’s 2020 Chapbook Prize). She also won New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize and the 2020 Joy Harjo Prize from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.

Nikki Lyssy (@blindnikkii) is an MFA candidate studying creative nonfiction at the University of South Florida. Her essays have appeared in Hobart, Sweet, and Essay Daily. When she is not working, she can be found in a coffee shop.

Interview with Kimberly Ann Priest, Author of Slaughter the One Bird

Ahead of the release of Slaughter the One Bird, her debut full-length collection of poems, Kimberly Ann Priest spoke with editorial intern Eliza Browning. Here, they discussed the complicated legacy of trauma, living with memory and grief, religious myths and parables, and cycles of abuse and healing.

Eliza Browning: Tell me about the title Slaughter the One Bird from Leviticus 14:50. How and why did you choose this verse as the title?

Kimberly Ann Priest: That’s an excellent question Eliza. Thank you so much for asking.

To answer this question well, I’m going to give you more context from Leviticus 14, quoting from the English Standard Version of the Bible:

“1 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “This shall be the law of the leprous person for the day of his cleansing. He shall be brought to the priest, 3 and the priest shall go out of the camp, and the priest shall look. Then, if the case of leprous disease is healed in the leprous person, 4 the priest shall command them to take for him who is to be cleansed two live clean birds and cedarwood and scarlet yarn and hyssop. 5 And the priest shall command them to kill one of the birds in an earthenware vessel over fresh water. 6 He shall take the live bird with the cedarwood and the scarlet yarn and the hyssop, and dip them and the live bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the fresh water. 7 And he shall sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed of the leprous disease. Then he shall pronounce him clean and shall let the living bird go into the open field. 8 And he who is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes and shave off all his hair and bathe himself in water, and he shall be clean. And after that he may come into the camp but live outside his tent seven days.”

As you can see in the passage, someone is sick with an incurable disease and the proposed healing ritual is a juxtaposition of death and life. One bird is killed; the other bird is dipped in its murder and set free.

On a metaphorical level, this death/life paradigm as cure is incredible when related to abusive situations where some sort of traumatic pain is festering. In my book, according to the mandate of unrequited pain, someone has to die—a bird must be slaughtered so that another can go free. This can take a variety of forms in relationship, but essentially, an individual demonstrating abusive behavior due to their own pain, their own “slaughtering,” will relieve suffering by creating a situation in which another individual is “sacrificed” to pain. It’s an ugly cycle, as is the nature of ritual sacrifice in the Biblical Old Testament.

EB: How does this collection navigate the complicated intersection of tragedy and grief?

KAP: There’s a line in one of the poems titled “Preparing the Body” that reads “She… / wants to be the hero of this story / for at least this would exonerate her doubts.” As I was writing this poem in its first draft, this line came from somewhere in my psyche. Like, it was just there; I had no idea what it meant. But, of course, since these poems were written as I was working through the grieving process, I felt the importance of this line and just left it in the poem.

Later—quite literally in the last several weeks—I took some time to work through the weight of this line with another poet friend. I wanted to know what it meant. He and I went back and forth and finally, I realized that this line was expressing quest to redeem something from my personal tragedies so that I would feel less shame for how I may have been complicit in their lived realities. I think that when we are blindsided by evil, afterward, we abide with questions like “What did I do to cause this?” or maybe “What could I have done to prevent this?” Those questions tend to be answerable as well as unanswerable. In other words, we can often look back and examine the few adjustments we could have made to influence circumstances, but in the end, we can never be certain those adjustments would have changed everything.

In my own story, I carried a question concerning my childhood trauma. I did not remember the trauma until my 30s and, by then, I was living with a violent spouse. Suddenly, I began to wonder if somehow my past trauma has contributed to the reasons my ex-husband abused me. It took me so long to work through that and realize that abuse is not something we earn due to our own dysfunctions. This collection, in particular, does the work of noticing how one cannot grieve well in the midst of tragedy, how tragedy consumes all of this space, and how our psyches grapple to understand our roll in the tragic drama.

EB: How do you think the abuse of religious principles manifests itself as evil? How has this impacted your own religious beliefs?

KAP:  Wonderful question. Deep breath. Well…

I grew up in church, in evangelical Christian faith. To be honest, there was so much about it that I loved…but also so much I detested, or that I simply found nonsensical. My core values have been deeply formed by Christian faith and I have taken some concepts like “love your enemies,” “your sins are forgiven” and “judge not” at face value. [And, of course, I could have a whole conversation on the misuse of the word “sin.” But I digress.] Understanding that all of humanity is guiltless, including myself, gives me grounds to never shame, accuse, judge, retaliate or expect retributions…it gives me grounds to let all the birds go free. Though, I will also add that coming around to this guilt-free attitude is always a process of working through my desire to do and be otherwise. Loving my enemies is extraordinarily difficult because “enemy” is often perceptual, and sometimes my enemy is my very self. So, in my opinion, love all around is sanity. Day by day we can become offended, and then not offended, with anyone. We are fickle beings. Best to get lost in acts of love, recognizing that offense is just going to happen in this world, and what I’m offended by today might be cause for celebration tomorrow. Again, let all the birds go free.

All of that said to also say that a great deal of what I have experienced in Christianity has been a far cry from values like these. Christian communities can be some of the most guilt-ridden communities, using guilt, shame, and blame to enslave others mentally, emotionally, and ritualistically. My deepest wounds have been inflicted in Christian circles and it’s taken me years to come back around to embracing any kind of faith again. I’ve wandered a long time through questions [still wandering!!] and am fully aware that embracing faith is not equal to opening myself to people “of faith” that I can’t trust. I will never be able to return to religious sects that devalue certain groups of people or use religious principles as an excuse to wield power over vulnerable souls. Clearly, in my book, this is the way religion is wielded. And, my goodness, I could tell you so many horror stories about such happenings.

Honestly, religion or no religion, any system lends itself to being a tool of illegitimate control. The best thing that I can do, after all of these tragedies, is keep asking my questions into the very heart of my faith and keep myself free from needing control over anything more than my own self-life. I’d rather live in this space of uncertainty about what I believe and, thereby, never assume I know how others should think, feel, or live. Perhaps I should say that I will always be a person “of doubt” rather than a person “of faith.” If you saw my bookshelves, you’d see that I have all sorts of books on various religious perspectives, my favorite being anything written by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I think it’s incredibly important to explore spirituality of all sorts with curiosity, expecting each to offer some clarity and wisdom concerning the practical concerns of everyday life.

Personally, I have no real desire to step back into religious arenas; I experience “god” [and I prefer to use other names for that entity—whatever I need “god” to be at the time] best in nature, among trees; and I embrace a more holistic spirituality than faith circles typically offer. But I also see incredible value in finding people to share life with, life informed by acts of love and kindness and a sense of the divine. But, if love isn’t the program, skip it.

EB: How did you navigate the shift between past and present throughout this collection?

KAP: Painstakingly. Like every other poet building a manuscript (I assume), these poems went through a multitude of orderings. With this final version, there’s a sense of chronology, but also a sense of flashing backward and forward throughout. I wanted the book to feel as though the past was intruding into every present moment. This required sectioning; for instance, “the house” is a set of “my pedophile” poems to help the reader get into the traumatized body of the abused woman after much of her story had been told.

Honestly, I’m not sure how I accomplished this, but I can say it was with a lot of help from Dennis Hinrichsen (a poet friend) and Erin Elizabeth Smith (my illustrious editor).

EB: What was the inspiration behind the use of deer as an ongoing motif?

KAP: Michigan. I live in Michigan. We have too many deer. They are everywhere. Roadkill deer is part of the charm of winter. And I lived in a trailer in the woods for a good portion of the drama in this book where we were frequented by lots and lots of deer.

EB: Tell me more about your choice of language, imagery, and syntax. What words or images did you find yourself returning to?

KAP: Obviously, the deer and birds show up frequently. Again, Michigan is abundant with both. The trailer is re-occurring because I spent years living in a trailer. Even though it was actually quite nice compared to most, it was still a trailer and felt like a long box with cheap walls in the middle of nowhere—a nowhere that entrapped me. Strawberries make appearances—sort of my Garden of Eden forbidden fruit in this drama. I used to do a lot of strawberry picking here in Michigan. I feel like tongue, hand, teeth, kiss, meat, trailer, sex, crave, ammunition, and corn show up a lot. I’m not sure on syntax. I mostly write first person narrative poems, but my formal imagination is all over the place. I let the lines lead me in terms of what they want to be.

EB: What was the intent behind the thematic subset of the “my pedophile” poems? What impact do you believe this has on the collection?

KAP: As I stated earlier, I wanted to get the reader inside the mind/body of the abused woman, to feel the past drama happening in her present like a parallel story line. The subset is titled “the house” and she is “the house” that needs to be cleansed according to the passage from a Matthew Henry commentary on Leviticus 14 quoted at the beginning of the book:

“…but now sin, where that reigns in a house, is a plague there, as it is in a heart.”

And the quote continues. In the book, the woman isthe bird that must be slaughtered and the house that must be cleansed, because she is the one who reveals a past contamination. This is used against her—which is part of my true story. Once I had memories that I had been molested in childhood, my spouse often stated that my trauma was the reason I needed to be “controlled.” Thus, the commentary quote continues:

“Masters of families should be aware, and afraid of the first appearance of sin in their families, and put it away, whatever it is.

…the infected part must be taken out. If it remains in the house, the whole must be pulled down. The owner had better be without a dwelling, than live in one that was infected

…sin ruins families and churches. Thus, sin is so interwoven with the human body that it must be taken down by death.”

There it is…slaughter the one, infected bird. Take down the house. Religion becomes license to isolate and destroy.

EB: Several of these poems mention your children. What do you think is the generational impact of this collection, and what may younger generations take away from it?

KAP: Mostly I think of the impact this situation has had on my kids. All of our lives were thrown into chaos, and it’s taken years to rebuild and reorder. Every day, I have to trust that I’ve modeled an openness, resilience, and courage that inspires them to honor their pain while embracing a new story. I am very close to my kids; we foster good ongoing communication. Healing from this sort of abuse takes time, but we are all getting there.

If anything, I hope a collection like mine encourages others to unmask and write through trauma, to not feel ashamed for becoming prey to evil’s intrusion; to recognize that evil is in the world and all we can do sometimes is try to breathe through its happening; and that it’s enough to be human, to not have what it takes, and live in a troubled body. No shame.

But this book is also about the art of inhumanity. It has so much to say as a warning of what we become when we use guilt, violence, and economic/biological leverage to control another human being. Every generation needs to look back at the inhuman practices of past generations and take time to examine the relational self as well as communal practices to see if there is any temptation to repeat inhumanities.

EB: Tell me more about how Slaughter the One Bird navigates the process of healing. How does language inform this process?

KAP: Ha! I avoided the word “healing” for a very long time. It was too “Christian” and smacked with programming—so many Biblical catch phrases used to dismiss real pain and teach a listener to mask over that pain with religious positivity. This kind of stuff turns my stomach.

Our pain needs to be honored. All the hurting parts of ourselves need to be listened to, attended, fought for, and offered a cup of cold water when thirsty (to use a Matthew 25:35-36 example of love). The darkest regions of our psyches and emotions don’t need flashlights swung in their eyes; they need slow introduction to candlelight, then moonlight, then streetlight, then sunlight. They need nourishment and awakenings. But not too much too fast with too much demand for “healing” to happen. Writing the poems in this book, I wasn’t at all thinking about healing. I was trying to survive my own mind. It was reliving memories it could not remember at an episodic pace. So, I wrote through them and decided that poetry was the best medium for capturing the disordered involuntary mess I was experiencing. Intuitively, I knew that if I didn’t let each part of my broken soul have voice, I would have to reckon with that part of self sometime in the future in a potentially unhealthy way. It turns out that, embracing this process is a true healing. I’ve been writing steadily for eight years now, and the writing is finally slowing down. A clear indication, I think, that there’s been a lot of “healing.”

But the book itself is NOT navigating healing. It’s navigating slaughter. Like a normal bird, the speaker is trying to flap away from the knife of her lived experience. The book ends with some hope, but mostly in the throes of cyclical trauma.

EB: How did you choose to organize the poems in this collection, either chronologically or thematically?

KAP: A little of both. There’s a chronology from childhood trauma to divorce, but it is also interrupted by disorder. Each section is headed by part of the Leviticus passage and that part informs the drama in that section. So, there’s some thematic work as well. It’s incredibly challenges to satisfy the linear needs of a reader while telling a cyclical story of abuse and trauma. I hope this book succeeds.

Order your copy of Slaughter the One Bird today!

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of three chapbooks, Parrot Flower from Glass Poetry Press, still life from PANK Press, and White Goat Black Sheep from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Borderlands, RELIEF, RiverSedge, The Meadow, Ruminate Magazine, and The Berkeley Poetry Review. Priest received an MFA in Creative Writing from New England College and an MA in English Language & Literature from Central Michigan University. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is a winner of the 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize in New Poetry from the Midwest. She lives in Michigan and teaches at Michigan State University.

Eliza Browning is a student at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she studies English and art history. Her work has previously appeared in Rust + Moth, Vagabond City Lit, Contrary Magazine, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among others. She is a poetry editor for EX/POST Magazine and reads poetry for COUNTERCLOCK Journal.