The woman cursed, threw stones, waved her arms in the sky. Nothing but a blink, a yawn, a trot back a few feet to sit and face her again. Once upon a time, the woman learned this surge of fear and thought she could carry on. The woman cursed this calm refusal to shrink or move. But the wolf on the beach sat in her stillness, waiting. When finally the woman turned to leave, the wolf slipped into the trees, returned with three small pups trailing behind her to splash and play in the sea. Now that you have heard this story, what will you do with your own ecology of fear?
This selection comes from Living With Wolves, available from Splitrock Review. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sunni Brown Wilkinson.
Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches as associate professor in English and Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She migrates to the coastal northwest most summers. Her poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, The Georgia Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Alpinist Magazine, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Her poems won the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize and second place for the Gingko international ecopoetry prize. @splitrockreview
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 & The Wing (forthcoming 2021, 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 Literary Magazine. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.
If you are peeling chestnuts on the rocks above Frank’s beach. If the basket in your lap balances the day’s grey light, corrals the sky between polished stone. If days of rain and more rain have pushed newts to their slow, blood-chilled crawl on the road. If yesterday you carried each one across in its open-toed freeze, orange belly above your open palm. If the sea gentles here between islands, your fingers work back bits of leathery skin, the nuts fuzzed and naked in a blue bowl. If you keep your eyes down— the song you sing in your off-key quiver, the words lift and drop and lift
until the young wolf you caught sleeping on sand takes you in and takes you for this place you are trying to belong to—
This selection comes from Living With Wolves, available from Splitrock Review. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sunni Brown Wilkinson.
Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches as associate professor in English and Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She migrates to the coastal northwest most summers. Her poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, The Georgia Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Alpinist Magazine, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Her poems won the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize and second place for the Gingko international ecopoetry prize. @splitrockreview
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 & The Wing (forthcoming 2021, 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 Literary Magazine. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.
It’s difficult to define what my bookshelf actually is, because I share my home with two English Lit professors, and there’s a bookshelf in almost every room containing books from all three of us. The bookshelf in my room is one of the few exceptions to the rule: every one of these books is mine, and I keep my favorites close. Many are books from my childhood: The Chronicles of Narnia, Artemis Fowl, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and so on. Some are more recent fare: Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams have particular prominence.
This shelf is the one I rearranged most recently. While some of the bookshelves elsewhere in the house were being shifted, I took the opportunity to put some favorites in a more proper place. Aside from the aforementioned Douglas Adams, many of these are hand-me-down copies – everything between Dracula and Moby Dick is an old copy filled with teaching notes. It’s always a joy to flip through them and read what my parents thought was important to note down, a way to connect with them even when we’re not in the same room. The Stanislavski books – An Actor Prepares and Building a Character – are a remnant from my Theater minor, and hold a special place in my heart.
A few other books inhabit my room, these on my writing desk along with the notebooks I use to organize my own writing. These are another mix of hand-me-downs and the few new books I’ve bought, most recently a translated copy of Ryōgo Narita’s excellent Baccano!, a story about mafiosos, alchemy, and incompetent thieves set against the backdrop of the roaring twenties. Out on the desk is a treasured copy of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, one of my favorite books in the world. I first read it long before I had any business reading horror, and I’ve picked it up again almost yearly since then.
This bookshelf is in the basement, and is a bit more representative of the rest of the house. Most of these are my father’s classic sci-fi collection, although I’ve added a few of my own: Andy Weir’s The Martian and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
I’ve always been very confused by questions about why I read. Everyone seems to expect some deep philosophical logic behind the books I spend my time on. To me, reading is an end in itself, and I read whatever is available and feels good to experience. If I have a bias, it’s towards science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I love exploring other worlds through stories. Stories have always been a central focus in my life, to the point that (as my parents tell me) one of my first words as a child was “Read.” My bookshelf isn’t only what I’m reading now, it’s also a living history of my life and a record of everything that’s inspired me to reach where I am today, a record that will continue long into the future.
Gray Flint-Vrettos is an aspiring author and a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University with a BA in English and Creative Writing, and minors in Theater Arts and Film. He has a long history with theater, having appeared in multiple productions both on stage and behind the curtain. Currently, she’s focusing on getting involved with publishing and writing her first book.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week, poet Esteban Rodríguez is joining us to discuss Jay Wright and the complexity and inspiration behind both Wright’s and his own poetry.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: What inspired you to choose Jay Wright for today’s feature?
Esteban Rodríguez: Jay Wright has always been fascinating to me for a number of reasons. His work (that is his work after his debut collection The Homecoming Singer) is considered quite complex, and he seems to be overlooked when we discuss contemporary American poetry, despite the fact that he has won numerous awards and fellowships (the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the American Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award, a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship). No doubt there is still conversation around his work, but enthusiasm seems to be absent, or at least minimal. I am enthused with Wright’s work precisely because of its difficulty and because I believe his poetry, in more ways than one, extends into philosophy, myth, and history, and brings its readers closer to the sublime. Any chance I get, I reread Wright’s work, and I recommend it to writers and readers.
AH: At times, in the poems you’ve chosen, there seems to be snapshots of moments that are quietly intimate. During the past year, I’m sure we’ve all had a moment like this. Are there any specific moments from your life that have inspired you?
ER: I am always looking for the moments that upon reflection were actually much more meaningful than I had originally thought, and that show up in my poetry, especially in The Valley: Playing in a plastic pool in the middle of summer (“Recuerdo: Summer, 1996”), microwaving leftover food (“Recuerdo: Nuked”), or watching my uncles work on customizing their cars because of the promise those cars offered (“Recuerdo: Lowrider”). I don’t think the mundane is uninteresting, rather, I think it hasn’t had a chance to be looked at thoroughly, and I’m constantly referring back to these moments for inspiration.
AH: The poems here are both from the same collection, Transfigurations: Collected Poems. Transfiguration means a metamorphosis, typically into something more beautiful or in a spiritual sense. So, to follow-up on the previous question, do you think these poems exemplify the idea of transformation, or, perhaps, the idea of beauty in the mundane?
ER: I think they do, especially over time. Rereading “The Lake in Central Park” now from when I first read it (back in 2018) has been a completely different experience. I’ve obviously changed and grown as a person and writer, so maybe I am seeing a transformation within them that doesn’t necessarily exist. Nevertheless, the best poems don’t try to be portraits a person, event, or moment, but rather they attempt to transform an idea into another, and I believe Wright’s work does exactly that.
In “The Healing Improvisation of Hair,” the speaker gives the following account:
How like joy to come upon me in remembering a head of hair and the way water would caress it, and stress beauty in the flair and cut of the only witness to my dance under sorrow’s tree. This swift darkness is spring’s first hour.
Wright takes what appears on the surface to be mundane (washing hair and viewing the way water caresses it) and he makes it meaningful, tying it in to spring’s first hour and a new phase in the speaker’s life. This is what makes Wright great, revealing how the ordinary is actually extraordinary.
AH: If it has, how has Wright’s work inspired you?
ER: Wright’s work has inspired me in the way that I approach not just a poem, but an overall manuscript in progress. There has been some debate in recent years about the book project versus the book of poems, and while I appreciate the latter, my work always veers toward the project. I don’t want to leave poems abandoned, and in my early days, when I was writing my first book, I left a lot of poems behind. Wright reinforced the idea of cohesion in a book, as well as the idea that poetry can incorporate various other elements, such as history, philosophy, surrealism, myth, and folklore, while still focusing on the complexity of the human condition. If I can do some of that in my work, then what more can I ask for?
Jay Wright is a poet hailing from the Southwestern United States. He has published fifteen poetry collections since the start of his career, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, the Academy of American Poets, Princeton University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent collection of poems is Disorientations: Groundings (2013).
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications, 2021). His debut essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us will be published by Split/Lip Press in late 2021. He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for Heavy Feather Review. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Purchase Rodríguez’s newest collection The Valleyhere.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi has had work appear, or forthcoming, in Into the Void Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She currently reads for Mud Season Review and EX/POST Magazine, is the Playwriting & Director’s Apprentice at New Perspectives Theatre Company, was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and is the co-Editor in Chief of Juven Press. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com
Last night’s rain fills the mud rim of this track where the wolf with two crooked toes crossed the trail so close to where we spooned in sleep— dark tucking in the edges of our looselimbed dreaming, bodies curved and pressed together like an ear.
This selection comes from Living With Wolves, available from Splitrock Review. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sunni Brown Wilkinson.
Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches as associate professor in English and Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She migrates to the coastal northwest most summers. Her poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, The Georgia Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Alpinist Magazine, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Her poems won the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize and second place for the Gingko international ecopoetry prize. @splitrockreview
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 & The Wing (forthcoming 2021, 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 Literary Magazine. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.
are carried by almost everyone. Whispered over gas pumps, traded as currency in aisles at market. A shadow slipping back to trees. A white wolf at the corner of Red Rock Road. Two black wolves, sleeping with snouts tucked under tails in deep moss on the bluffs. A wolf eating apples in the orchard, slurping up seaweed, digging for clams. The terrier that followed the howls, never returned. The sheep torn open. Each story has a pit to carry and turn over: stone of worry, stone of prayer, warm against the body, in a pocket like the one on your thigh as you bend to gather piles of salt-crusted seaweed the storm left in a lumpy rope at tide line. You fill two orange buckets, one in each hand you carry up the trail below the bluff to the shrinking compost. The stone in your pocket starts its soft bleating, almost bleeding, your skin lit and honed, prickling in the undergrowth. Salal berries glowing red as meat. You step over fresh scat—still-wet deer fur, chips of black hoof, shards of white bone glisten with grease. In the forest, just beyond sight, a snap and crack of branches charges the air between trees. Something sudden waits for an opening. Above you, nighthawks thread the evening sky with boom and whistle. A loon in salt water wails to a loon somewhere on the inland lake.
You finger the stone, its wave-worn surface, its weight—the story you carry has made you another animal.
This selection comes from Living With Wolves, available from Splitrock Review. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sunni Brown Wilkinson.
Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches as associate professor in English and Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She migrates to the coastal northwest most summers. Her poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, The Georgia Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Alpinist Magazine, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Her poems won the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize and second place for the Gingko international ecopoetry prize. @splitrockreview
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 & The Wing (forthcoming 2021, 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 Literary Magazine. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.
From June to August, 2021, the Sundress Reading Series will continue online via Zoom. Applications to participate as a reader are open and the deadline to apply is April 6, 2021.
The Sundress Reading Series is an award-winning literary reading series usually hosted on-ground in Knoxville, TN, just miles from the Great Smoky Mountains. An extension of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Sundress Reading Series features nationally-recognized writers in all genres from around the US while also supporting local and regional nonprofits.
Our readings take place the last Wednesday of every month from 7-8PM EST. The spring series will be streamed June 30th, July 28th, and August 25th.
We are currently seeking readers with books recently released—or to be released in 2021—with an emphasis on marginalized voices especially BIPOC writers, trans and nonbinary writers, and writers with disabilities. To apply to read for the summer, send 6-8 pages of poetry or 8-15 pages of prose, a 100-word bio, CV (optional), and a ranking of preferred reading dates to sundresspublications@gmail.com with the subject line reads “Reading Series Application.” Please note if you are a member of one of the above-mentioned marginalized communities
Those selected will be notified by April 15, 2020. Readers will receive publicity across Sundress Publications’ social media channels in the lead up to their event, and, thanks to a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, Sundress is now able to compensate readers $50 for their services.
Find our more or to view some of our past readers and schedules, visit us our website.
What if you were able to dance between reality and dreams, flicker in and out of shadows, and melt from life to death, in a mere moment? Kelli Stevens Kane’s debut poetry collection Hallelujah Science(Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) is a masterful lesson in transmutation and revelation. Hungry and electrifying, Kane’s poems burn with the wild energy of becoming and the haunting stillness of shadows. In a collection of lucid and piercing vignettes, the speaker floats outside of her own body, conducts an orchestra of the dead, and shakes the planet until a song is left standing. Reading these poems is a mind-altering experience, as previously closed doors are thrown open, finding yourself straddling the in-between spaces of thresholds: “No matter where I am, / I’m in the middle of something / in the middle / of something / lost.” Even the non-sequential numbers of Hallelujah Science’s poems tell us that we’re no longer in the realm of any linear narrative.
Kane revels in shadows and darkness, the supernatural and the spiritual. These poems haunt and tremble with otherworldly knowledge, as if we have been invited to lift the veil and experience how the reality of everyday life is intertwined with the extraordinary: “Of course everything revolves around me— / the moon, the stars, the grocery clerks. / Picture me higher than the clouds, / orchestrating lightning flashes.” There is a connective heartbeat thrumming throughout these poems, a pulsing and vital energy that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading. In “(62),” the line “and I can’t seem to lie still” describes the experience of reading these poems, this relentless desire to remake yourself. Kane reminds us that we are made up of the same stuff as the universe, that we are of this world and part of its sacredness. The success of this collection lies in its ability to transform what is logical and ordinary into something that is both metaphysical and inexplicable.
Many of these poems have a nursery rhyme feel, their language deceptively simplistic and full of childhood whimsy. Kane notes that a majority of these poems were drafted in the 1990s, when she worked as a nursery schoolteacher. Directly inspired by her students, whose language “was the amniotic fluid in which these early poems grew,” this collection very much feels like we’ve stepped into a child’s beautiful and unspooling imagination. Kane’s poetry is wild, magical, and sustained through endless possibility. Throughout this collection, we let ourselves marvel at the world and each other. There is an earnest and shimmering innocence here in poems like “(84),” where the father’s magic trick ends in a burst of joy: “my father / juggles eggs / and one time / the ceiling caught one. / the yellow yolk / landed / laughing.” Hallelujah Science is whip-smart, delightful, and charming, inviting us to laugh and cry, to be unconstrained and bewildered, to cut ourselves on the sharp edges of these poems and knit ourselves back together with the tenderness of a mother.
Kane’s exploration of identity through Blackness and motherhood forms the dynamic undercurrent of this collection, as she delves into the ever unfolding and endlessly shimmering darkness. Here, Blackness is rich and generative and open, refusing to coalesce or constrain itself. In these poems, we are always already immersed in the process of discovery and unruly materialization: “it’s okay to close your eyes in the dark / there’s no such thing as too black / clouds go somewhere on a clear night / the moon, unseen, knew.” Domestic and wild, uncanny and unyielding, Hallelujah Science leans into life in all its messy and visceral beauty. Intimations of motherhood recur throughout the collection, yet they are complicated and unsettling at times: “I hunger for these dreams / I draw one in, and she curls up / pondering my stomach / tasting womb, deciding nothing.” Kane imagines many possibilities of mothering, nurturing, and sustaining one another, yet resists ebbing into total softness.
Kane guides us to almost unbearable extremes, where you will feel like you are burning up or shivering alongside the speaker. This fever dream of a collection is grounded in the verdant, familiar world that we inhabit. In “(40),” the speaker lists all of the things they’ll miss when they die, including “the sound of any living creatures breathing” and “the dark green shape of ivy.” Kane offers us refuge in the most beautifully humdrum parts of our lives. In the last poem in Hallelujah Science, the speaker tells us: “I cut / a moment and watch it sprout a million minute petals / they pick me up / and carry me / back to the beginning / (once upon a time) / where there are no / sharp / things.” The ending brings us back to the beginning, reminding us of the importance of regeneration and embracing impossibilities. Haunting and revelatory, you will be immersed in this strange and lovely collection of poems. You’ll want to dwell in Kane’s world forever, where divisions between time and space, dream and reality, body and spirit all collapse, and where you can be both ordinary and full of phantasmal light.
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.
My desire to be a writer largely stems from a desire to create stories in which I see myself reflected. When I was a teenager going through middle school, I began to experience intense amounts of depression and anxiety, and my search for these same experiences in books was a way for me to try to understand what I was going through. Still, I never found exactly what I was looking for, and I knew that, eventually, I’d have to write that story myself. As time went on and I began to be exposed to more perspectives on disability, I learned to embrace my identity as a disabled woman. With this embracing came the awareness of how little representation disability has in media, art, and literature, and the desire to work to change this.
In the summer of 2015 I studied abroad in Ireland as a part of a creative writing program, which would impact my life in many ways. For instance: one of our instructors told us that writing should not be therapy—something I took immense issue with—as words have always been a way for me to make sense of and document various lived experiences. I believe strongly that writing, in fact, should be therapy, whether it is a salve for the writer or the reader, or, preferably, both. In my creative work since then, I am always striving to crack open understanding and create more space for people within the outlines of my words. I studied creative writing and journalism as an undergrad at the University of Iowa, where a journalism professor told us that journalism should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, an adaptation of the saying “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” I do think that art can change the world, and in fact, that it must.
There was a time when I believed, briefly, that if someone had already done what I was doing before me, my contributions to the field were no longer relevant. I quickly learned that this is not true—that the more diverse voices a community is able to uplift and make space for, the better. I love being a part of the disability community and learning from other disabled artists.
My current work explores how we understand bodies, minds, and lives outside of what is traditionally considered “human,” and the wisdom we can learn from these ways of being. I want art and writing to be creative outlets that are accessible to all, and I’m excited to join Sundress Publications in their journey to do so.
After all the wolves on the island were killed by cyanide, traps, and bullets, decades later, wolves from the mainland swam for miles to repopulate the island.
By dream, by twitch, by lope, by gazing from the shore, by howls that gather, by circle and whine, by hint, rumor and surge, by yearn, nip, and bark, by stretch, itch, and shake, by splash, dunk, and swim by starlight, by bull kelp and driftwood, by calm and gelatinous sea, by stink of whale, by salt of far, by winter fur, by paws as paddles, by chuff and nostril huff, by steam of breath above the sea, by belly of salmon, by hunger for deer, by memory in blood, by roam for love, by milk and teat, by marrow and fat, by muscle, skull and golden eyes, by magnetic pull, by currents and tides, by miles, by sinking cold, with no one watching by sea by sea by sea.
This selection comes from Living With Wolves, available from Splitrock Review. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sunni Brown Wilkinson.
Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches as associate professor in English and Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She migrates to the coastal northwest most summers. Her poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, The Georgia Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Alpinist Magazine, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Her poems won the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize and second place for the Gingko international ecopoetry prize. @splitrockreview
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 & The Wing (forthcoming 2021, 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 Literary Magazine. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.
