Alluring and verdant, Ae Hee Lee’s Dear bear, (Platypus Press, 2021) is a gorgeous assemblage of post-apocalyptic love letters addressed to the speaker’s beloved, “bear”. You only need to have read Dear bear, once for it to permeate your living, for it to burrow deep into the innermost layer of your heart, for it to transform how you think about love and possibility after the end of the world. In this collection of tender epistles, Ae Hee Lee cultivates an ecology of romance and wonder.

Dear bear, is set in a (meta)physical forest after a flood—“when the mouth of the sea gaped over our homes”—destroys the speaker’s world. The poems guide us into a forest where a strange collection of flora and fauna blooms from the wreckage. The forest, both real and unreal, marks the destruction of the speaker’s past world as it grows into something alive and intoxicating, while underneath the forest’s ethereal beauty is a desperate rot and brokenness. Ae Hee Lee’s poetic world-building is irresistible, even as she acknowledges that “in this world, nothing can ever be whole.”

Dear bear, is bursting with color; its rich and vivid language engages all of our senses: honey rivers flow down tree trunks, red camellias whirl like silk dresses, and a swarm of bees make love to their queen under the pear blossoms. These poems exude a secret wildness that is thrilling and beautiful. Here, the forest is not yet threatened by the violent process of discovery: “The forest is not delineated or discovered. It pours suddenly until you realize it has always been there behind your eyelids.” Using the forest as a guide, Dear bear, gives us a new way of looking at the self, which decomposes into the “clever design of propagation,” gesturing towards collectivity. Dear bear, leads us towards new possibilities for connection between humans and the more than human world. 

The relationship between the speaker and the bear is full of tenderness, equipoise, and desire. They are each other’s solace and strength in the forest: “I looked hard and tender into the ebbing black and met you.” Witness the gentle twining of sharp bear claws and a woman’s tender spine as they nuzzle and curl into each other. Dear bear, is seductive and lush; a decadent, verdant pleasure is unearthed within these letters—“I sighed along the moss that moaned under the bareness of my legs.” Their romance is defined by a wild longing for what cannot be captured or taken: “my fingers run through the abstract fur of your body”.

The forest is not without its dangers. Along with the speaker and bear, it is inhabited by the huntsman—”blunt-force trauma, the last of men, gristle of the earth”—who chases after them. The huntsman seems to be a vestige from a dangerous past, hunting them across worlds and time. In the huntsman’s looming shadow, the speaker wants to forget the “spectacle” that is our violent history. Here, in the forest, “the only blood we witness is from the berries we burst inside our mouths and let slide down our fingers.” The speaker avoids the ruins beyond the abundant forest, evades the past before it can harm her again.

Like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dear bear, is a compendium of myths that guide us through transformation. The poems begin with a devastating, world-ending transformation, but even as we find evidence of eroding and rotting, we also bear witness to burgeoning and blooming. The mythos here is rooted in change and re-imagination: “I peeled my past like a tangerine and ate it because I feared I would turn into a pillar of salt.” Through Ae Hee Lee’s vibrant poetics, we are transfigured alongside this curious new world, reminded that transformation is both a survival strategy and a flourishing. In reading these poems, we become something more than how we began.

Dear bear, beautifully charts the edges of erasure and absence, including the loss of adequate language. Sometimes, the forest is an impossible thing because we have forgotten its name: “In the forest, a blood vessel is not a blood vessel, it’s an ocean that shed its rivers, its roots, and forgot it was once a tree.” As an archive, this book builds upon what has been broken, meandering around what was forgotten or erased in the disaster. However, absence is never feared because it is “forever here.” The inevitability of absence is transformed into the possibility of presence—“a universe beating inside silence and stasis.”

Throughout this collection, the speaker fixates on endings. The letters are a part of a never-ending sequence, where each letter ends not with a period but with a comma—perhaps leaving an opening for an answer. Dear bear, is about the end of the world and the depth of love that is nurtured in its wake: “P.S. Maybe the world had to end so we could finally love, but since the cosmos remains inside of us, it must be all the more complicated than that.” Even as the world is destroyed and reborn, parts of it remain inside of us, and we make a home out of what is left behind. I promise that long after you’ve put Dear bear, down, it will remain inside of you.

Dear bear, is available at Platypus Press

---

Abigail Renner is a junior at George Washington University studying English and American Studies. She is currently a writing consultant in her university writing center, where she loves unearthing writers’ voices and reading across a myriad of genres. She dreams of living on a farm, filling her shelves with romance novels, and laughing with friends over cups of peppermint tea.

Sundress Publications is open for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts. All authors are welcome to submit qualifying manuscripts during our reading period of June 1st to August 31st, 2021.

We’re looking for manuscripts of forty-eight to eighty (48-80) single-spaced pages; front matter is excluded from page count. Individual pieces or selections may have been previously published in anthologies, chapbooks, print journals, online journals, etc., but cannot have appeared in any full-length collection, including self-published collections. Single-author and collaborative author manuscripts will be considered. Manuscripts translated from another language will not be accepted. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but we ask that authors notify us immediately if their manuscript has been accepted elsewhere.

The reading fee is $13 per manuscript, though the fee will be waived for entrants who purchase or pre-order any Sundress title or broadside. We will also accept nominations for entrants, provided the nominating person either pays the reading fee or makes a qualifying purchase. Authors may submit and/or nominate as many manuscripts as they would like, so long as each is accompanied by a separate reading fee or purchase/pre-order. Entrants and nominators can place book orders or pay submission fees at our store. Please note that this submission fee is waived for all BIPOC writers.

All manuscripts will be read by members of our editorial board, and we will choose at least two manuscripts for publication. We are actively seeking collections from writers of color, trans and nonbinary writers, writers with disabilities, and others whose voices are underrepresented in literary publishing. Selected manuscripts will be offered a standard publication contract, which includes 25 copies of the published book, as well as any additional copies at cost.

This year our top selection from the reading period also will receive a free one-week writing residency at the Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, TN.

To submit, email your Sundress store receipt for submission fee or book purchase, along with your manuscript (DOC, DOCX, or PDF), to sundresspublications@gmail.com. Be sure to note both your name and the title of the manuscript in your email header. For those nominating others for our reading period, please include the name of nominee as well as an email address; we will solicit the manuscript directly.

Sundress Publications announces the release of Amorak Huey’s Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy. The fourth collection from award-winning poet Amorak Huey is an unflinching, humorous meditation on American masculinity and fatherhood.

Drawing on fictional characters, cultural figures, and personal stories, Huey deftly weaves an intergenerational tale about coming of age as a boy in the twentieth century and becoming a father in the twenty-first. In a collection built around the narrative structure of a joke, the poems’ speakers reflect on the complex intersections of childhood, war, love, pop culture, and parenting. From Southwestern deserts to the flatlands of Indiana to the post-9/11 landscape of New York, Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy deconstructs the enduring notion of American patriarchy and explores the delineations between collective and individual memory. Playful and profound, nostalgic but not naïve, these poems trace a masterful journey of personal discovery and fatherly love.

Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth, said of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy, “Earnest, funny, and heartbreaking, the poems in Amorak Huey’s new collection explore that lonely office of fatherhood. Such work is forever searching for the appropriate formula—that clever negotiation between self-actualization and self-negation as one struggles to understand what it means to care for children in the current quotidian. The joke is that Huey knows we are raised by many voices, where the voice of these poems sings with a wisdom that is both burdened and joyful. The joke is that the answers are here, in this wonderful collection, ready to delight.”

Order your copy of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy today!

Amorak Huey is the author of two chapbooks and three previous full-length books of poetry. His poems appear in The Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review, Columbia Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in East Grand Rapids, Michigan with his wife, two children, and pets.

For the release of Our Small Faces, Jamie Moore spoke with Doubleback Books associate editor Bayleigh Kasper about her world building, characterization, and how her novella has changed since its original publishing.

Bayleigh Kasper: What is your writing process like? Any quirks or habits?

Jamie Moore: My writing process is all over the place. I tend to write in short vignettes and often in big spurts. I’m not great at writing every day because of my job(s). So when I feeling the call to write, usually early morning or late at night when everything is still, I try to focus as much as possible and give myself to the moment fully. 

BK: Have you ever gotten reader’s block? What brought you out of it?

JM: Yes, definitely, especially because I read student essays all day. Poetry is usually the way to get out of reader’s block for me. Reading one or two poems and thinking of the beauty of the language feels like progress and motivates me to pick up a book.

BK: What is your writing Kryptonite?

JM: My to-do and my to-read list! I will get lost in work or other people’s words before I get to making my own, which is something I’m actively working on! 

BK: Which of the characters in Our Small Faces do you see yourself most in? Are there any that were based on people you know?

JM: I think I see myself most in Zeke. He’s the one of the three friends that is not as quick to fall into the thinking around him while also taking on a lot of responsibility around him. He doesn’t think everything ends in their neighborhood, but feels loyalty and is a homebody at heart. All of these characters are loosely based on real people—circumstances reflect stories told to me or those I overheard in my communities and I took liberties with the personalities of the characters 

BK: Since this is a re-release of your novella, do you have any different feelings, hopes, or fears as you send it out into the world this second time around?

JM: Thank you for this question because yes I do! After the acceptance and the re-release began to feel real, I got very nervous. I’m a different writer today than I was in 2014, especially as I study critical race and Black feminism as part of my doctoral work. I made small edits to language I didn’t want to dictate a certain reading of the text. I wanted to make it clear that the characters are searching for validation, often in the wrong ways. But I believe in the heart of this little book so much. 

BK: I love the game your characters have come up with—Island—and how it metaphorically sets up the feelings of isolation and different-ness. Can you tell us more about the game, and how it relates to the rest of the story?

JM: The game of island is a mashup of a game told to me by an elder and that kind of game kids often play like “the floor is lava.” I grew up with very strict boundaries around where I could go and the limits of my play spaces. This came from my own parents’ fear of what could happen if I was out of their sight. Hearing elders in the community talk about this, I understood how deep that fear went—that fear for their life and/or physical danger  was also embedded in these limits. Zeke, Leroy, and Selma lose some of their innocence as they began to encounter racism unmediated by their parents and have to figure out how they will draw their limits around their lives in the attempt to protect themselves. Island is the first iteration of that.

BK: What was the hardest scene for you to write in Our Small Faces?

JM: The scene between Zeke and Selma after he tries to confront her about what’s happening with Leroy and her new boyfriend. I wanted to convey the heaviness and tension and awkwardness that comes when vital friendships in your life are changing while also showing how important they are to each other. 

BK: What was the easiest or most enjoyable scene to write?

JM: The opening scene with Selma’s parents. As I wrote her looking up at the picture of her grandmother, I was thinking of my own.

Download your copy of Our Small Faces for free on the Doubleback website now

---

Jamie Moore is a writer and professor in California. She received her MFA in fiction and is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. She is an alumna of the VONA writers and Mendocino Coast writers workshops. She can be found on social platforms at @mixedreader.

Bayleigh Kasper recently graduated from the University of Evansville with a creative writing degree, where she was the co-Editor-in-Chief of The Evansville Review. She serves as associate prose editor at Doubleback Books.

Doubleback Books announces the release of Jamie Moore’s Our Small Faces. With its generous focus on characterization, Moore’s novella charts the intertwined stories of self-discovery and self-preservation.

Selma and Zeke are two teenagers living in small-town California. Feeling trapped by their community, the persistence of racism and responsibility to family define their imagined possibilities. Navigating friendship and loss, they consider who or what their way out is and what they may sacrifice with those choices. Our Small Faces explores how young people learn the limits of love, lead foolishly with heart, and often grow up too fast. 

The novella is a lyrical, heartbreaking trip back to the moment childhood ends for all of us, when we leave our families and neighborhoods and begin to venture out in the wider world. In its pages, Selma and Zeke learn that inevitably, “we all become someone different with time.” And when the protections of childhood dissolve, they discover that all along they’ve been living in a world of casual hatred, of cruelty, and loss, and longing.

Download your copy of Our Small Faces for free on the Doubleback Books website.

Jamie Moore is a writer and professor in California. She received her MFA in fiction and is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. She is an alumna of the VONA writers and Mendocino Coast writers workshops. She can be found on social platforms at @mixedreader

Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces
Winners of Summer 2021 Residency Fellowships

Knoxville, TN: The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera and Levi Cain as the winners of fellowships for summer 2021 residencies. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to complete their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment. 

Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera is a Black Dominican-American writer and educator, based in Brooklyn. She is the HUES Nonfiction Fellow as well as the writer in residence at Velvet Park Media. She is nominated for Best Small Fictions 2021 and was the winner of the 2019 Cosmonauts Avenue Nonfiction prize. She was also the 2020 Oyster River Pages Creative Nonfiction intern, as well as a Tin House and VONA alum. Her words can be found online at Barrelhouse, The Offing, and Watermelanin Magazine, as well as in a forthcoming chapbook from The Hellebore Press.

Levi Cain is a gay Black writer who was born in California, raised in Connecticut, and currently lives in Massachusetts. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, their work has also been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets, as well as shortlisted for Brain Mill Press’s National Poetry Month contest. Their first poetry chapbook, dogteeth., was published by Ursus Americanus Press in the fall of 2020.

Finalists for this summer’s fellowships included Maria Isabelle Carlos, Caliche Fields, Manny Loley, Meher Manda, DW McKinney, and Tochukwu Okafor.

***

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.

Web: sundressacademyforthearts.com Facebook: SundressAcademyfortheArts

Email:   safta@sundresspublications.com Twitter: @SundressPub

It’s hard to capture what Silvina López Medin’s Excursion (Oversound Press, 2020) is about. Rather, readers grasp only at what it does. Even its table of contents evades “aboutness.” At first glance, it functions somewhat like a poem. The pieces are titled by their first lines, resulting in entries such as “Breath,” and “Do you hear that creak?” that invite each row of the table of contents to spill into the next.

The collection’s 24 pieces reference the 24 frames per second that, in film, conjure movement from static images. Medin’s work is similarly incremental, each fragment an essential installment that makes the titular journey possible.

The pieces are split among two parallel and possibly converging scenes. One features a couple in a hotel; the other is set on a moving boat populated by the narrator and her brother.

The first hotel piece is “INT. HOTEL / BEDROOM—NIGHT”, while the titles of the others are variations of this template. The scenes, rooted in the “interior,” are thus defined by their positionality. Throughout Excursion, the couple is afforded a radius of movement that extends to the hallway, the bedroom during the day, the doorway. 

The boat poems, though, lack distinct titles. Our narrator is glaringly location-less, left bereft. In poem 4, a woman demonstrates life vest procedure “in case of a wreck.” The narrator reacts immediately: “I sink into the word / wreck, into what possible loss”. In this unmoored state, even the suggestion of harm enacts it; the narrator sinks while aboard. 

The narrator’s search for grounding is one of the collection’s more extractible themes. Somewhat unexpectedly, this desire continuously and newly leads her to words. As the boat embarks and accelerates, the narrator asks her brother questions, primarily because “the metal sound of his words / soothes me.” 

Words become metallized and machine-like just as the machine that transports them becomes humanized. Perusing the brother’s dictionary of nautical terms yields the converging realization that “a ship has a body, / this is the sway”. Importantly, this humanization of the ship is brought about because of the dictionary, which is itself a tool: a technical, near-mechanized approach to words.

Throughout this journey, it’s not immediately clear whether our four characters undergo any changes. But one development is certain: the vessels of word and ship become increasingly alike. Words, once thought of as vessels of meaning, are revealed to be in equal parts mechanical.

Perhaps the best example of this superimposition, and certainly some of the most memorable lines of the collection, rests in 23: “He dries his body and describes / a rudder’s mechanism / the way a surface breaks / the strength of a current thus imparting / the craft a controlled turning.” The brother mechanizes his own body in describing it; simultaneously, the naturalness of the current is contrasted with the contrived and “controlled” movement it generates. The brother embodies the composite “craft” that makes motion possible, giving this knowledge—“imparting” it—to our narrator.

With little narrative clarity to hold onto, the reader finds themselves clinging to the collection’s title as material guidance. But Medin plays with the notion of an excursion, too.

The hotel setting, which at first seems to be a tangible destination for a journey, is revealed gradually to be unnavigable, unable to be located at all. The “INT.” of their titles refers to their interior location, yet also gestures towards an intimacy that secludes them from our knowledge. In “INT. DAWN” near the collection’s end, the hotel itself finally dissipates: “The hotel room / could be what a hotel room is expected / to be, a background / for those film frames: / no image, no image, no image,”. 

Still, the collection continuously leaves us wondering where the boat departs from and heads to. As readers, we never become privy to its directionality—we only witness the motion as it occurs. 

Medin makes us aware of the impossibility of capturing destination in writing. At one point, the boat accelerates; its sails are hoisted. “it’s not said, it happens”, she writes, plaintively. “the scene becomes the final one / there’s no The End / what follows is a black screen”. Words can’t signal the end, but rather, the black screen —the very lack of words.

The speaker must spell this lesson “letter by letter” for us: “an excursion implies displacement / … you move forward / within certain limits”. Motion is defined by its bounds; what we can understand and what we can capture is preconditioned with limits.

If a piece of writing is an excursion, as she suggests when she writes “I’ve traversed the distance / from a word to a body,” then Medin has shown us the limits of the word. In the end, it is simply a small piece of machinery, just like the ship.

Similarly, the individual poem acknowledges these limits: as readers encounter the assertion “you move forward / within certain limits,” the line break itself is a form of limitation that hinders movement. 

Medina’s work is not an easy one. Deeply concerned with interiority, it speaks to itself, folds into itself. It presents characters that are distinctly uncharacteristic; the hotel inhabitants, identified as “she” and “he,” are especially formless, only existing against a backdrop of vague danger. It does not do the work of making itself understood for you. Instead, it provides passages of words to be mapped onto physical passage. It asks: what is the difference between the two?

Excursion is available at Oversound Press

---

Claire Shang is a freshman at Columbia University, where she is an editor with The Columbia Review. She is a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, and a reader of mostly everything. Her work has appeared in or been recognized by Peach Mag, No, Dear Magazine, and Smith College.