I’ve gotten to live in about five different places over the last three years, which means my bookshelf has become almost a capsule wardrobe. I add and remove books based on what I’m interested in or reflecting on at the time. Because I’m never in one place for too long (and often do not have the qualifications for a library card) I enable myself to collect and collect and collect. I’m especially bad in the UK, where books tend to be a bit cheaper, and I convince myself I’m saving money even though I’m definitely not. I’ve kept about 10-15 books in each era divided by Asheville, London, Williamsburg, and St Andrews. Each collection marks an era of personal growth and exploration.
My library’s homebase is my Washington D.C. childhood bedroom and, having transcended the bookshelf, has spread itself across the floor. They continue to sprawl to the nightstands, windowsill, and desk drawers. There, I keep older academic or out-of-season books. It’s become a sort of library for my friends. My parents still talk about the times I have been out of town and friends of mine have come into my house, run up the stairs, and changed one book for another.
The first bookshelf of the last three years was in Asheville. I was 17 and had scored a summer internship out in Appalachia. The books I kept migrated as I switched houses every other week, and remained stashed largely on the floor. But they told stories of adventure and self-discovery. I was a teenager living by myself for the first time in a new city and my books helped me navigate that experience. I whipped through The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I held Klara and the Sun particularly close.
Several weeks later in London, I would recommend to a friend of mine Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. He hated it. A well-connected musician himself, he would send me songs and ask for my notes as to how they could be improved. In a similar vein, he sent me notes on Klara and the Sun. I tried to defend it and we fought. He’d picked it up in Shoreditch walking by a stall in a market selling a few of the more highly-rated books at the time. Based on the notes he gave me, he would have done better with my London bookshelf. A smaller collection, but it included a very waterlogged East of Eden by John Steinbeck and a muddy Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari. I felt very critical in London. I was studying anthropology down the street from the British Museum, so it was hard to not feel critical.
Less critical in Williamsburg, VA; but feeling quite angsty, I read books about escape. Take Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, which stuffed itself into my nightstand alongside several Norton anthologies and Brontë sister novels. When studying “The Slough of Despond” in Pilgrim’s Progress I read The Upstairs Delicatessen by Dwight Garner to lighten the mood. The latest semester I spent at William & Mary had me fall in love with uniquely American literature through a class I took on Paterson, New Jersey. It turned me on to a critical analysis of America through writing. I spent the following Washington D.C. summer with Patrick Radden Keefe, biographies on Boston mob icon Whitey Bulger, and more William Carlos Williams. These library books accompanied me on the metro each morning and kept me busy as I killed time between my internship and my restaurant job in a variety of D.C. cafes.
Now, in St Andrews, I use about one shelf’s worth of space adding up to about three feet. From Oxford’s Major Works of Francis Bacon to Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, to Allen Ginsberg’s The Best Minds of My Generation; the books on my St Andrews bookshelf explore our relationship to the cosmos. I like the way Ginsberg words it as a cosmic vibration for each particular being. I love the way Tokarczuk argues for the souls of non-human beings as well. Our relationship to the earth and the sky is easy to wonder about when living in a place so blessed by history, the Northern Lights, and the North Sea. I’m increasingly happy that St Andrews introduced me to the cosmic line of questioning.
Whether rooted in my studies or my work, my books help me find clarity in conflicting thoughts. Their sage wisdom has become a part of me and I look forward to coming home and stuffing the D.C. bookshelf with my newfound intimations each holiday.
Annabel Phoel is a junior studying English and Government/International Relations between William & Mary and the University of St Andrews, where she currently resides. She is a staff writer on St Andrews’ Not Applicable Magazine and helps on their editorial board. When not writing or studying, Annabel is rowing on various lochs in Scotland.
In the latest edition of the We Call Upon the Author series, the lovely Raye Hendrix discusses her debut collection What Good Is Heaven. Rife with critters, queerness, and Christianity, Hendrix’s raw yet tender poetry is transcendent.
Mia Grace Davis: Throughout What Good Is Heaven—especially, I noticed, in sections I and III—one can find Alabama’s foxes, squirrels, dogs, raccoons. What significance do animals have for you in these poems? Do they represent something, whether as the collective or the individual?
Raye Hendrix: I love the instinctive intelligence of animals. I see a lot of queerness in them, in that way—they just do what they want, what they need, and don’t care what anyone thinks. Their instinct is to survive, but they also play—it’s very human, to me. Growing up around so many animals, and especially the ones we think of as “critters”—I felt, and feel, such a natural kinship with them. A little sneaky, a little misunderstood, a little nocturnal. Freaky little weirdos just doing their own thing—I resonate with that. I’m personally also really interested in resisting the narrative of the Anthropocene—that humans and animals and nature are all separate things and that humans are meant to dominate. Animals are a prophetic and convicting mirror—what we do to them we ultimately do to ourselves. Their habitat is our habitat; our homes are their homes. And I think we see our animal in their animal, too—instinct, nature—the things we suppress in ourselves that they feel no need to. I’m really inspired by that.
MGD: I particularly enjoyed “Letter Never Sent to a Once-Lover on the Coast.” With an intriguing narrative thread, the voice within this piece is particularly evocative. I’d love to talk about developing the speaker: who are they? What are they looking for in these poems?
RH: I was trying to write this breakup poem that isn’t really a breakup poem since the lovers in it were never really together, and trying to navigate the complicated pain of losing something you never actually had. The ambiguous largeness of that sadness—you have to carry it and move through it, but you can’t talk about it either because you feel a little silly for it. It’s like, yeah, you know you’re not supposed to count your chickens before they hatch but you did it anyway and hurt your own feelings when they didn’t hatch and you don’t want anyone to say “I told you so” because you’re already saying it to yourself. It’s a bitter kind of misery. I think the speaker of this poem is looking for a way out of that bitterness and misery, and it’s hard because there’s so much love there, still. And because the lover didn’t really do anything wrong—it was all undefined and tenuous. Bitterness too just isn’t an emotion I see a lot in poetry and I was really interested in exploring it with this speaker—and I wanted to sit with that, let it be recursive and a little bit seething and see where it took me. I think the speaker is figuring out that bitterness is just a different kind of grief, and it’s a grief she has to grapple with alone.
MGD: It appears as though most of your poems are free-verse, though they all approach the page in different ways—for example, “Squash Garden” is the only piece to take the form of a prose poem, while couplets are more prevalent throughout. What was, and continues to be, your process for discovering a poem’s form?
RH: I like the way you phrased that, “discovering” the form. For a lot of the poems in this book, I knew what their form wanted to be before I wrote them. As you say, couplets are probably the most common, and I think a lot of it was subconscious, at least at first. So many of these poems were dealing with binaries—man vs. woman, straight vs. gay, life vs. death, etc., and it felt right to have that hinge reflected in the body of the poem as a couplet. But most of the time I don’t begin writing with any form in mind at all, so it really is an act of discovery. An example that comes to mind is the poem, “Husk Hymn,” which resisted any form I tried to give it for a long time—I really wanted to force it into couplets, for it to be mirroring these binaries again. It sounds cliché, but that poem found its form when I started listening to what the poem wanted, and it wasn’t a binary. I was trying to force this speaker into that space—man or woman—and my own words reminded me that wasn’t what the speaker was doing—they’re actively resisting a gendered binary. So why shouldn’t the form resist it too? Why shouldn’t it be in the shape of cicada wings, trying to outrun tercets—the triune God? The one you mentioned, “Squash Garden,” sort of happened like that too. More than any other poem in the book it felt like it needed to be controlled, domesticated—a small box in which something must try to grow.
MGD: I commend your bravery for talking so openly about challenging topics, such as sexual assault and animal slaughter, throughout the collection. If you’re comfortable discussing it, were there any pieces that were particularly challenging to write? How did you find the courage to write with such intense vulnerability?
RH: Thank you for that—I haven’t thought about it as bravery, because I’ve honestly been afraid of people reading this book, so it’s really nice to have that acknowledgement. I still don’t know if it’s bravery or just necessity. Writing this book felt a lot like coming out again, and in some ways it was literally, if subtly, that. I’ve been out as bisexual for a long time now, but I’ve been very slow to publicly talk about being nonbinary, even though I’ve known it about myself, in some way, since I was a kid. But to the point, anyone who’s come out knows that being in the closet is a crushing safety—you’re alive, but not all the way. It’s disingenuous. And so coming out is scary, but not nearly as terrifying as the thought of living half-known. That’s how writing these poems felt, and how having them in the world feels now—honestly frightening, but it’s fear tempered by the clarity that comes with telling the truth. Two of the hardest poems to write, maybe predictably, were “There Were Daisies” and “Let Not a Woman,” both dealing with sexual assault. I don’t know if I found the courage so much as it was wrenched from me. It’s that line from Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” I want the world split open more than I want to hide.
MGD: Are there any poems, then, that you love the most (just as the speaker’s father “once told me (made me swear to keep it secret / to never tell my sister) / that he loved me the most”)? Which did you enjoy writing, which do you enjoy reading, and which have you enjoyed sharing?
RH: I love the way you’ve posed this question—like I have to whisper my answers to you so I don’t hurt the feelings of the other poems in the book. There are two I remember loving writing, but for very different reasons. “The Heron” is dark, but I had so much fun writing it because I had to work backwards. I think all poems are puzzles, but with “The Heron” all I had was the final image—the drowned heron—stuck in my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I started inventing narratives and worlds around it until one clicked into place. The other poem, “When There is Nothing Else to Do We Drive,” was fun for a very different reason: I was in college, tipsy from cheap pitchers of beer on a bar patio watching the sunset with my poet friends, and summer break had just started. We were broke and sunburnt and deliriously happy, writing poems and reading our drafts aloud to each other. I drafted this poem there. It’s one of those memories that feels golden when you look back on it, so the poem feels golden to me too. The other two are simpler: I’ve really enjoyed sharing “Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You” because I get to tell people about that weird sign, which is peak Alabama lore. I really enjoy reading “Against Salvation” because it feels like wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses and throwing middle fingers in a church.
MGD: Think back to when you first developed the idea for this book. What advice would you give to that poet, on the brink of such a special undertaking?
RH: I would tell a younger me and anyone else embarking on something like this to slow down and savor it. Don’t look at what everyone else is doing. Write down why you want to do this and repeat it to yourself like a prayer. And to reverse an adage, don’t lose sight of the trees for the forest. The trees make the forest, not the other way around. The trees—the poems—come first. Collect them as you write, but don’t try to force an oak into a pine just because you’ve got a lot of pines. Trust yourself and enjoy it—if you’re not having fun, what’s the point? There are plenty of ways to be miserable in this world. Poetry shouldn’t be one of them. Focus on the trees, put on a leather jacket, and go flip off a priest.
Dr. Raye Hendrix is a writer from Alabama. Her debut poetry collection, What Good is Heaven, was selected for the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series to represent Alabama by Texas Review Press (2024), and is the winner of the 2024 Weatherford Award for Best Appalachian Poetry. Also the author of two poetry chapbooks, their poems appear in American Poetry Review, River Styx, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. Raye lives in Knoxville, where she teaches in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. Find out more at rayehendrix.com.
Mia Grace Davis is an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Her work appears in Gone Lawn, The Tusculum Review, and Ice Lolly Review, among others. She is a 2023 National YoungArts Finalist in Writing and a U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts Semifinalist. Visit her at miagracedavis.com.
Following the release of his debut nonfiction chapbook, Distance Sequence, Luke Sutherland spoke with Sundress intern Aylli Cortez about his creative process and influences. In this book, the narrator unearths his past to dwell on the persistence of trans love across physical and temporal barriers. Through hybrid forms and innovative craft decisions, Luke’s prose offers raw and earnest reflections on intimacy, ecology, the body, and the task of remembering.
Distance Sequence won the 2023 OutWrite Chapbook Contest and was published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2024.
Aylli Cortez: While distance becomes a barrier in the literal world, the narrator returns to their partner B through nonlinear vignettes. What made you decide to move back and forth in time rather than stick to a chronological sequence of events?
Luke Sutherland: Traditional chronology never comes to me easily. I find it generally not up to the task of translating memories in any real way. One of the push-and-pull struggles of memoir is contending with the fact that you’re narrativizing your life. Making a story of our personal experiences is a very human impulse; almost everyone does it, whether they write it down or not. There’s a fiction to this, and when we turn that self-narrative outward, letting others share in it, it can be very uncomfortable for both reader and writer. Non-linearity is a way of poking at the necessary artifice of memoir, while also an attempt to depict memory in the slippery way we actually experience it.
AC: One of my favorite sections in the book takes us to Olympic National Park, where the narrator and B share intimate moments in nature. As the narrator detailed their lush environment and tender exchanges with B, my attention was drawn to their sense of awareness—what they observe around them, and how they ponder their visibility as a transgender man. Where does the book take place, and what about this setting spurs you to reflect on the body? How does nature shape your writing?
LS: The book spans the east and west coast, but the meat of it happens in the Olympic peninsula. All of my work plays with ecology. I’m always trying to get at the social construction of the ‘natural,’ both ecologically and morally. It’s a violent construction; we see this in everything from Zionist ecofascism (trying to make the “empty” desert bloom) to the criminalization of transition. Attempting to label certain expressions of human life as unnatural is deeply fascistic. On a practical level, the park is in Distance Sequence because that is where the events took place, but the decision to make it so central was strategic.
AC: Themes of queer love and longing crystallize in the narrator’s relationship with B. I noticed their interactions didn’t end when B moved away, and the narrator’s feelings didn’t fade when other loves entered the picture. This portrayal of “dykelove” and “transsexual love” as a generous rather than finite resource was so refreshing to me, and I liked how it emphasized community. Would you be willing to share your influences? I’d be curious to learn about the people and/or art that informed your notions of love.
LS: I love your phrasing of love as a generous resource. The most important lessons I’ve learned have come from my friends and lovers, especially other transsexuals, and especially disabled kinksters, who know radical care better than most. To that end: the documentary BloodSisters and Davey Davis’ newsletter are both indispensable. Southern Comfort and By Hook or By Crook also come to mind. Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrillio is one of the best novels about love, period. And it’s impossible for me to talk about my influences without mentioning The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.
AC: There are several parts where the narrator describes having a visceral reaction upon recalling painful events. When it came to narrating these moments, how did you manage your proximity to the text? The book also includes pictures of what appear to be journal entries. When did you start writing about these events?
LS: I started writing the bookalmost immediately after the events took place. I’ve never been one to keep a diary or document my life in a straightforward way. When I got home from seeing B, though, I couldn’t stop writing about it. The incessantness is what tipped me off to the fact that I was writing a book, not a private diary. I had recently seen Minari and read an interview with Lee Isaac Chung about how the arc of the film revealed itself when he made a list of eighty memories of his childhood—really granular, sensorial stuff. I thought: can I do that? Get down eighty moments in as much detail as possible? That’s how it started.
The most painful memories in Distance are ones my body has held onto without the permission of my consciousness. The game then, so to speak, was to try to remember something on purpose, to bleed on purpose, rather than allowing whatever alchemic equation that usually dissolves some experiences and preserves others to take over.
AC: The book is divided into twelve sections, each one focusing on a single or series of memories. Three sections share a recurring title: Memorywork. How did the “work” of writing these sections differ from the rest of the book?
LS: The ‘Memorywork’ triptych is me speaking directly to B. There is so much art about falling in love, and yet it is easy to forget what a difficult thing it can be. It is ecstatic, but pleasure and ecstasy aren’t always synonyms. Explaining your life to a new lover is in a way an act of dialogic memoir. The ‘work’ of memorywork isn’t labor in the capitalist sense, but it is effortful. I wrote the triptych the way I wished I could tell it to B but which distance prevented me from doing. Thinking of it that way, they are probably the most intimate chapters in the book, where the writer/reader veil is stretched thinnest.
AC: I’m drawn to the images that are scattered throughout the book: handwritten notes, travel photos, maps of hiking trails, illustrations of flora… I love how they surround and “hug” the prose, positioning the text among visual mementos. What urged you to include these in the book? What was the thought process behind their arrangement?
LS: It just made sense to me! Similar to non-linearity being true to the actual experience of remembering, including images made the text feel fuller. All relationships create ephemera, a mutual archive of sorts, but much of the relationship in the book played out through ephemera; it wasn’t incidental flotsam, but a driving force. Sharing it directly captured an intimacy that my text alone couldn’t. It’s also playful. What is an image, after all? When you’re looking at a scan of a handwritten note, is that image, or is that text? The two categories eventually start collapsing.
AC: The fluidity of your prose, your playfulness with form, was really immersive for me as a reader. Did these formal choices come naturally to you or were they the outcome of revisions? Do they stretch or sit comfortably with your practice of writing creative nonfiction?
LS: I always like fucking with form, but for this project in particular, that was the case from the beginning. I’m agnostic of genre, and the idea that creative nonfiction should ‘sit’ on the page in a certain way strikes me as very boring. Prose writers do themselves a disservice when they don’t consider the options that verse and experimental text rendering offers them. Why are we so stiff with our lines? A paragraph can be such a dull container.
So, this wasn’t a stretch for me, but the formal influence of Camelia Berry Grass’ Hall of Waters can’t be overstated. That book changed my writing, and Camelia is one of the most interesting essayists there is.
AC: Is this sequence finished? Do you envision your next project/s as extensions of this book, or as conversant with it?
LS: I’ve made a concerted effort to not think about whether the sequence of the book is over. When I started to feel myself dissociate from the present moment with B—thinking things like, how can I write about this later, what’s the thematic thread here?—that was my sign to back off. We have to actually experience the present if we have any hope of writing about it authentically later.
Most of my time lately has been focused on a novel about a trans punk band who start to experience bodily mutations. The novel and Distance Sequence are connected in that I am perennially interested in unconventional narrative structure, the mutability of bodies, trans intimacy, and the illusion of a distinct natural world. But it also feels like a bit of a relief to get back to full-throated fiction—finally I can stop thinking about myself for a while.
Luke Sutherland is a writer, librarian, and publisher on Piscataway lands, so-called Washington D.C. His debut chapbook Distance Sequence won the 2023 OutWrite Chapbook Contest and was published by Neon Hemlock Press. He was a finalist for the Larry Neal Writers’ Award, the Black Warrior Review Flash Contest, and the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. He is an interviews editor at smoke + mold and co-founder of the DC-area trans small press Lilac Peril. You can find him online as @lukejsuth. Photo credit to Farrah Skeiky.
Aylli Cortez is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His debut chapbook Unabandon was a winner of the Gacha Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2025. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him online @1159cowboy or visit his website.
Have you ever loved something so deeply that you’d learn a new skill just to protect it?
That’s how I’ve always felt about my small collection of books and journals. I’ve always fantasized about the worst possible scenario coming true. Maybe an apocalypse by fire or ice. Maybe someday, I’ll just have to jam and leave everything behind. Not everything. Not my beloved books. I’ve dreamt that someday I’m going to get into welding, and I’m going to create the world’s most efficient, titanium, disaster-proof, portable bookshelf, so I’ll never have to worry about what’ll happen to my precious babies. While that is such a lovely thought, we all know I won’t be dedicating my life to welding, so I keep my book collection relatively small. Then, if anything should go wrong, I can save most of them.
I got my first bookshelf at sixteen, built it alone, and felt very proud. Most people have had a bookshelf in their house growing up, but how many have had bookshelves that are completely their own? Untouchable, sacred, an old-fashioned kind of server with many worlds tucked neatly into its slots.
Back then, I filled mine with all the right classics and things I knew I had to read if I wanted to be a serious writer. The only survivors from the collection are two Shakespeare plays, and The Alchemist lost a lot of the books from my first bookshelf during a big move. My favorites then were Anne Rice, Stephen King, some Greek tragedies, and more. It was seriously tragic. If I listed every title, you’d be reading all day.
Today, my shelves reflect my quest for some sort of wisdom. I love things that inspire deep thought, or even simple thought. I suppose it’s really easy to forget to analyze certain things less. You may notice I have a guilty pleasure for self-help, but there are a few fiction stories on my shelf that could be labeled “self-help”, so it’s all balanced out. Speaking of which! My plays and poetry are my most prized possessions. My comfort reads, believe it or not. There is nothing like quietly reading William Shakespeare’s plays so intensely and with such a serious face, only to be knocked out of it by a Shakespearean insult. Genuinely, it’ll make you laugh every time. The photo above is of the bookshelf in my office.
The photos below are of the bookshelf in my bedroom. It also contains a few things that mean a lot to me at the moment: (1) my current read, 2001, A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clark. (2) My pending read, ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë, and (3) The most incredible Christmas gift I’ve ever gotten: a collection of introductory essays byCoretta Scott King on influential black figures. I hope to use them for a literacy workshop or pass them on someday, but I’m just reading them myself for now, and it adds a bit of substance to my day.
The bookshelf I keep in my bedroom is for the books that I want to give my immediate or partial attention, while the bookshelf in my office is for books that I know will inspire me if I’m having writer’s block or an all-out identity crisis, ha! It sounds odd as I write it out, but that’s my system, and I love it! Honorable mention to The Emerald City of Oz. Reading that has been part of my nighttime routine recently.
There’s also Dune by Frank Herbert: that’s my husband’s. He’s read it maybe five times, excluding the other books in the series. He’s told me it’s a lot to get into, and I want to take his word. I’m sure I’ll end up reading it and its sequels by the end of this summer. I have honestly taken a liking to science fiction lately, which is strange. I never thought I would.
Jahmayla Pointer is a three-time National Goofing Around Award winner and specializes in consuming gothic literature and horror films. Jahmayla’s playful and observant nature, and deep love of horror, magic, and literary thrills led her to pursue an English and Creative writing degree four years ago. She began taking creative writing workshops in her senior year of high school and fell in love with working with others on various projects. During her sophomore and Junior years at Southern New Hampshire University, she’s also done Men-tee and beta reading work for authors local to Cincinnati, most notably Victor Velez, author of A Triduum of All Hallows. Jahmayla was an ACES member briefly through which she received several beneficial developmental opportunities including courses through the Poynter Institute. During her downtime, she likes to spend time with friends and family, dance, write short stories, and of course, read in copious amounts. Something that means a lot to Jahmayla is grassroots work and helping people directly through mutual aid and acts of service, she puts this passion into action by working with a group of good friends to develop education tools and encourage high literacy in her local neighborhoods.
Following the release of her craft chapbook, Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, Sarah Fawn Montgomery spoke with Sundress intern Aylli Cortez about recognizing alternatives to traditional creative writing instruction. With incisive clarity, Sarah presents a multitude of possibilities for accessible spaces and work that empowers rather than depletes.
Aylli Cortez: From discussing the need to unlearn ableist workshop advice, you then provide alternative ways for readers to develop their practice, design their space, and discover forms that truly work for them. What made you decide to organize the book into these sections?
Sarah Fawn Montgomery: I began with unlearning ableist advice because so many disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers are encouraged to believe they are somehow failing because they struggle with the writing instruction they have received. Because so many of us are quick to blame ourselves due to internalized ableism, it’s important to dismantle ableist education, pointing out the ways that this kind of instruction not only hinders our work, but hurts our brains and bodies.
I wanted to point out ways traditional writing workshops are at odds with the disabled experience, as well as common microaggressions disabled writers encounter as advice, because this is the starting ground for many who have endured abuse in the workshop and are looking for ways to remake their practice entirely. This starting point then allowed me to discuss other important and often overlooked aspects of being a disabled writer. Offering ways to design disabled writing spaces, discover disabled forms and structures, and develop strategies for the practical business of being a writer was essential because many disabled writers operate entirely differently than our abled colleagues, yet this is never discussed in writing workshops or common craft advice.
AC: Not only is this book dedicated to crip kin, it also demonstrates what it means to be crip kin—to, as an author, write with your disabled readers and their varied experiences or symptoms in mind. What were your goals while writing for this audience?
SFM: So often disability is ignored or presented as a burden to accommodate. Most craft books and writing workshops assume a universality of experience, as if every writer utilizes creativity using the same methods, education a one-size-fits-all experience. I’m someone who spent many years in traditional writing workshops, pursuing an MFA then a PhD, and eventually achieving tenure as a creative writing professor. While I was able to write using the conventional methods I was taught, they never seemed authentic to my creativity, and, as I write about in Nerve, they came at great physical and mental costs.
This is a shared experience for many disabled writers, so I wanted to center our experiences in this book, framing them not as deficits, but as abundant sources of inspiration and innovation. This is a book that explores the disabled experience but does not suggest that this experience is universal. Instead, I try to provide many ways of writing the disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent experience, recognizing that what works for one writer may not work for another, and may not even work for the same writer as their bodies and minds shift with symptoms, abilities, and time. Instead, this is a book about modeling disabled perspectives, offering a variety of ways of being and writing in the world, and encouraging writers to listen to their bodies and minds rather than conventional wisdom. Disabled writers are incredibly innovative—we have to be to survive in an ableist world!—and so I wanted this book to center this innovation so that we might learn to trust our intuition and find the ways that foster our success rather than trying to force myself to follow ableist methods do not actually serve us.
AC: The book’s generative prompts are direct and specific, inviting readers to write from their own lives and resist non-inclusive expectations. Why did you place these prompts at the end of the book?
SFM: Disabled writers experience radical shifts in our abilities on a day-to-day, sometimes moment-to-moment basis, so it was important to structure this book in a way that responded to this reality. Some writers may have the ability to engage with craft advice, while others may be looking for quick prompts to get them started. By sectioning them out this way, disabled writers can reflect on their abilities in the moment and quickly locate what will best serve them.
Similarly, not every writer engages with writing exercises the same way. For example, as an autistic writer, I have always struggled with direct prompts. I prefer a larger list of possibilities to choose from rather than a direct exercise, which can feel prescriptive, and often renders me unable to write. That’s why I model so many possibilities in the book, offering writers many different ways to do something so that they can choose what works for them and hopefully feel unencumbered by the performance of an exercise, as well as providing a list of generative prompts for writers who prefer direct exercises. Many of these prompts come directly from the advice in the book but are worded in a way that is more specific and offer readers and writers a clear task, while still providing the freedom and flexibility to make it their own.
AC: A recurring tip that resonated with me was the act of reframing rest and reflection as integral parts of the writing process, especially as one’s body and sense of time shift. Could you tell us more about the intention behind these themes of replenishment and regulation as opposed to healing?
SFM: Writing and publishing seem to constantly reinforce productivity, but this is exhausting for anyone for whom writing is not a full-time job, let alone disabled people, who are busy instead with the task of living. Capitalistic hustle culture maintains that products are more important than people, and craft books are no exception, focusing on the writing rather than the writer. But we can’t write well if we don’t live well, so I wanted to reframe rest and reflection as part of the writing process because these are essential for writers yet largely absent from conversations around craft.
In addition, it was important for me to write about replenishment and regulation rather than recovery, because for many of us, recovery simply isn’t an option. I can’t recover from my various disabilities, and while I would certainly like to be in less chronic pain, I would not choose to recover from my neurodivergence even if I could. My disabilities and my neurodivergence are essential parts of my being, essential ways that I process the world, essential components of my creative abilities. Rest and reflection are important strategies that allow us to exist in our bodies and brains in ways that can sustain us. We spend enough time and energy trying to live in an ableist world, so by considering replenishment and regulation as necessary to both disabled and writing life, we can start to consider writing as an act of agency rather than capitalistic production. Narrative is an act of empowerment, but we can’t be empowered if we are hurting. Rest and reflection are essential because we deserve to exist in our bodies and brains in ways that respond to pain and encourage pleasure.
AC: In response to academic and publishing settings that enforce formal constraints on an already constrained group, what formal choices did you have the most fun with while putting this book together?
SFM: As someone who has spent many years in academic and publishing settings, I took a lot of pleasure in dismantling many of the constraints I was taught and have been required to follow throughout my career. First, the length of this book is a direct pushback against the argument that a longer work is inherently more valuable than a shorter one, that hybridity or chapbooks do not hold as much intellectual weight as full-length books. I wanted the length of this book to surprise readers and ask them to reconsider their beliefs about what constitutes a good craft book, what counts as good craft advice, and who gets to decide.
Similarly, this book puts the reader firmly in the role of expert. Most craft books situate the author and various writers included throughout the text as the experts readers must follow if they want to succeed, but disabled people are experts of our experiences, and so we should be taking advice from our own bodies and brains rather than forcing ourselves to follow the ableist advice of others, no matter their résumés. This book is full of reminders to unlearn various ableist advice you may have learned in school in favor of your own intuition and innovation.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice. She is also the author of Halfway from Home, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, and three poetry chapbooks. Abbreviate, a short collection of flash nonfiction, is forthcoming. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.
Aylli Cortez is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His debut chapbook Unabandon was a winner of the Gacha Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2025. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him online @1159cowboy or visit his website.
My main bookshelf, housing one half of my much-reduced personal library.
A few months ago I moved into my first apartment. What this meant, unfortunately, was that I had to find a new home for most of my books. There was simply no way I was going to fit three shelves and countless floor piles of books into my one-bedroom apartment. Each man kills the thing he loves, I suppose, and my little book collection was my pride and joy. As I was packing up my books for a trip to McKay’s, however, I began to realize that I hadn’t actually read most of these books in years. Somewhere along the way, my love for reading had morphed into sentimentality for the physical objects themselves. Why did I keep the Percy Jackson or Warrior Cats books I loved as a kid? Because seeing them on my shelf made me feel good. I had become someone who owns books because they look good on a shelf. I decided then and there that in the future I would only keep the books I loved, and give away the rest. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning of another cycle of book-hoarding. My shelves, once sparse, are now becoming cluttered once again. In my defense, I have been giving away books that I don’t plan on revisiting, although it appears that the book-bug has bit me once again.
Today I’ll be touring the bookshelf in my living room. It’s a little disorganized right now, so I hope you’ll bear with me. I’ll start with the middle shelf, which started as somewhere to set my things down when I walked in the door. I decorated it with trinkets (and a fake plant, because I’ve never been able to keep real plants alive) until eventually it was too cluttered to be useful as a catch-all shelf. I also decorated the back with stickers; my favorites are the June Henry, No Cure, and Rig Time stickers, all of which are cool bands/artists that played in Knoxville last year.
Also of note: the boxes of Japanese “Peace” cigarettes. These were a gift from a friend who spent a semester in Japan; they make for wonderful party favors. The only things remaining from this shelf’s past life as a catch-all are a pile of laundry tokens and a Campbell’s Soup mug for storing loose change.
This shelf used to be organized alphabetically, but that went out the window as soon as I started buying more books. The bottom shelf has now become where I put anything I have recently purchased or read. My favorites from this shelf include Auden’s Selected Poems, Home by Toni Morrison, Secret History II: Stories About Knoxville by Jack Neely, and Grief Slut by Sundress’s own Evelyn Berry. I also use this shelf to store my zines, a hard hat from my time at Amazon, and three stuffed frogs my friend Audrey made.
Pictured above are the books I am currently reading or finished over winter break. You can tell which ones are my favorite based on how worn they are. I’ll go into a little more depth on some of these below:
Currently Reading
I’ll refrain from sharing my thoughts on these books (one of which I’ll be discussing soon for Sundress Reads) until I finish them. That being said, this is what I’m currently reading:
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Critique of Modernity by Alain Touraine
Amerikaland by Danny Goodman
Recently Read
Rant: The Oral Biography of BusterCasey by Chuck Palahniuk
Rant is the first book I finished in 2025. I’ve been a Chuck Palahniuk girlie for years, but I haven’t gotten a chance to read this one till recently. I enjoyed it, but not as much as Fight Club or Invisible Monsters. It has all the hallmarks of a Palahniuk novel: improbable events, strange characters, and the twist about two-thirds of the way through. And of course, it is incredibly gross, probably grosser than any of his other works. As much as I wanted to love it, Rant was disappointingly formulaic, with none of the dynamism of Palahniuk’s other works to make up for it. I’d still recommend it, but if you aren’t already a Chuck Palahniuk fan, Rant won’t be the book that sells you on him. I’ve chosen to spare you the details here; if this sounds like something you’d enjoy, you should go into it totally blind (trust me).
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
A Little Life is another book I have mixed feelings toward. As others have noted, it is beautifully written. It’s impossible to not love Jude and Willem, the main characters of A Little Life. Despite knowing Jude would never get better, and despite knowing this book would break my heart, I couldn’t seem to put it down. If you have the stomach for it, it’s a must-read.
That being said, I have some issues with this book. As convincingly real as they are, every character is, unfortunately, incredibly flat. JB is mean but fun (and changes the most out of anyone, but we don’t see nearly enough of him). Malcolm is stuck-up but generous. Willem, Harold, and Julia are all angels. Jude is possibly the only exception. For a novel about men and their relationships, Yanagihara focuses far too much on Jude. The fact that half of the characters are gay seems to have no bearing on any of their lives. Perhaps Yanagihara is imagining a world where one’s sexuality really does not matter, but I’d like to see aspects of the queer experience portrayed in greater depth in a novel that has been touted as a “gay book.”
I saw someone online say that A Little Life is the emotional equivalent of a Saw movie (which are, in my opinion, really fun movies). That is 100% accurate. I enjoyed A Little Life, but if that’s not for you, you won’t miss anything by skipping this one.
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin
I read this back in July, but it was so good that I had to revisit it over winter break. Manhunt is about a post-apocalyptic world where a virus has turned all men into zombies, basically. In an interesting twist on the “what if every man suddenly died” genre (a favorite of mine), Manhunt imagines what such a world would be like for transgender people. Like most transgender post-apocalyptic fiction, it’s pretty bleak. Manhunt is violent, heart-wrenching, and something of a transgender power fantasy (which is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a novel before). If you’re into thrillers and strange, gender-fucky scenarios, this is definitely the book for you.
Babbit by Sinclair Lewis
Babbit, published in 1922, is an absolute gem that is not talked about nearly enough. Babbit is a comedy-of-manners and biting satire of 1920s political life that follows the titular George Babbit, a successful realtor, and his search for meaning. Despite his wealth and status, Babbit is dissatisfied with the stifling social world of petit-bourgeois strivers in middle America. Combining cutting political satire with a critique of the spiritual emptiness of middle-class life, Sinclair crafted a story that still resonates today. In modern America, George Babbits are everywhere. Walk into a used-car dealership, watch grindset videos on social media, or sit in on a business class, and you’ll find them. They are the upwardly mobile yet discontented middle managers of America: they love highways, McMansions, and cable news, and they would resurrect Ronald Reagan if they could. They are utterly terrifying. Read Babbit.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
I think we’re in for a critical reevaluation of David Foster Wallace as a brilliant, but seriously flawed author. I personally have a love-hate relationship with DFW. For all his talk of kindness in This Is Water, there are times when his writing devolves into petty cruelty, and it goes without saying that he is awful at writing women. That being said, I enjoyed Brief Interviews With Hideous Men a lot. I don’t agree with all of his sentiments, and he’s definitely a show-off, but when he hits, he hits. If you’re into weird fiction or works that experiment with form, then I’d definitely recommend this book.
Natalie Gardner is a trans writer hailing from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is currently pursuing a BA in English with a minor in philosophy from the University of Tennessee. She loves transgressive fiction, hiking, and schlocky, B-tier horror movies. When she isn’t working, you can find her haunting the coffee shops of Fort Sanders and DIY shows across East Tennessee. Her work in the field of linguistics can be found in Feedback Review in Second Language.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Alexa White. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, June 22nd, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”.
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!
Alexa White is a neurodivergent writer and graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. As a student, she won the 2022 Bain-Swiggett prize for traditional poetry forms and her poetry and art has appeared in Phoenix, the school’s literary and arts magazine. She lives in Knoxville, her semi-hometown, and is the Creative Director Sundress Academy for the Arts and Associate Editor at Sundress Publications. Alexa takes delight in backroads, bodies of water, and the last few seconds of sunset and she redefines her bedtime nightly.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Writing the Chronically Ill Body-Mind,” a workshop led by Chisom Okafor on Wednesday, June 18th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).
In the poems we’ll read and the ones we’ll write, body and mind will meet. Drawing from our own experiences and the experiences of the people we love, we’ll reclaim narratives and break stereotypes surrounding the chronic condition. Our daily medications will become effective weapons and touchstones for description. We’ll wrest poetry from a place of pain, strength, or vulnerability. To help us do this, we’ll be immersing ourselves in a river of poets who explore medical deficiencies or blood conditions: Urvashi Bahuguna, Rachael Boast, Katie Farris, Kayo Chingonyi, Airea D. Matthews, Sarah Nichols, and Ada Limón. Finally, we’ll seek to answer the question: How does the chronically ill body-mind create power and occupy space in an ableist world?
Chisom Okafor is the author of Winged Witnesses (University of Nebraska Press, Forthcoming 2025) and the chapbook, All I Know About a Heavy Heart Is How to Carry It (Jacar Press), described by Jaki Shelton Green as “an interrogation of vulnerability through raw, fierce and unflinching energy.” He has received nominations for the CAAPP Book Prize, the Brunel Prize, Gerald Kraak Prize and Pushcart Prize. He has also received support from the Sundress Academy for the Arts (for the SAFTA residency) and Commonwealth Foundation. He presently lives in Tuscaloosa where he is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate at the University of Alabama.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Chisom Okafor via Cashapp: $chisom47 or Paypal: kcokafor1@crimson.ua.edu.
Upon the release of his new poetry collection, Brutal Companion. Ruben Quesada spoke to Sundress Publications’ Darren Demaree about his writing and creative decision-making process and the importance of rhythm and musicality in his work.
Darren Demaree: Tell me how this collection took its final form. What was the last decision that made it feel complete?
Ruben Quesada: The day Barrow Street Press accepted Brutal Companion, I added about a dozen additional poems, some of which have appeared in various publications. The collection took its final form in early 2024, and the manuscript continued evolving until the final round of copy edits. While I don’t labor excessively over thematic cohesion, I focus on conveying sharpness and immediacy. There was a time when I would publish work, and I’d want to continue thinking about its situation, and sometimes I’d make one poem two or vice versa, but the poems in Brutal Companion have their own life, and I’m fine with them.
My writing process has shifted over time. I wish I had your stamina and drive, Darren. You are prolific. I feel like when I wrote in journals, I wrote more. No, with everything being almost entirely digital writing and more painstaking to produce. It’s difficult not to edit as I write. Earlier in my career, I often sought to write about everyday moments, preserving their spirit in a journal and allowing for some emotional distance. Writing in a journal, I was able to have some distance after I’d written it.
I knew I had to try to sit fully with each moment, allowing its rawness to remain intact. But I was limited by the scope of the journal and its pages. Sometimes this change in approach influenced the final shape of Brutal Companion, as I included poems that confronted moments directly without retreating into metaphor or detachment. Spencer Reece calls it flat and sharp.
Sometimes you must believe you’ve shared everything you want to share about a situation. A former teacher of mine, Juan Felipe Herrera, has often said that the poem you write is the first iteration that finds its place on the page. Everything after that is a different poem. A different spirit than the one that found its way out of you in the first place. I revise a lot. I spent nights just reading the book again and again. But when the book had its ISBN, it felt complete.
DD: I’m always fascinated by the entry and exit points of a poem or of a poetry collection. I’ll spend forever trying to choose the first and last poem of a book. How did you choose “Terminology” (to begin) and “The Fortune Teller” (to end)?
RQ: The decision to open Brutal Companion with “Terminology” and to close with “The Fortune Teller” came after much deliberation. These poems are bookends that set the tone for the emotional and thematic journey of the collection. “Terminology” is an invocation, a moment of realization and vulnerability. Its opening lines, “My mother is going to die. Her ashes / will be sewn into the ocean, stitched / onto passing angelfish,” draw the reader into a space of reckoning with loss and the language we use to give shape to grief. There is an urgency and a willingness to confront a difficult past and present. I want the reader to feel the weight of this emotional landscape from the beginning. I want a sense of cleaving to loss, much like Li-Young Lee’s The City in Which I Love You starts with a meditation on loss that reverberates through the entire collection.
On the other hand, “The Fortune Teller” offers another kind of closure. My poem explores themes of fate, reflection, and the elusive nature of certainty. It’s about seeking answers, even as they slip through our grasp, symbolized by the fortune teller’s grasp moments before her terminal revelation. This ending leaves the reader with a moment that lingers, inviting them to sit with the questions rather than find neat resolutions. It echoes the work of my predecessors like Louise Glück, where the closing lines often leave space for reflection and ambiguity, allowing the reader to carry the poem beyond the page. Choosing these poems as the entry and exit points created a frame through which the entire collection could unfold, making the experience circular yet open-ended for multiple yields and interpretations.
DD: That was one of my favorite parts of this book. I think it’s a real skill to show how capable you are in terms of the music and energy of the poems, and know when you have the reader in the rhythm of things, and cut the music completely. There were parts of Brutal Companion where I got lost in the execution of the piece, just the tethers of you at work, but then you so deftly would give us a line or an image that made things stark and profound in the bareness of that moment.
Were some of those moments built in purposely, or did the weaving of the poems into the collection show you what you’d done, and you leaned into it?
RQ: I’m happy you asked about this. Thank you for recognizing the energy in my poems. I love how you describe the music as “the tethers of [me] at work.” Those moments are needed like “Pyre of a Vanishing Planet” with its nostalgic view of Los Angeles through the newly refurbished Sixth Street Aqueduct. You can find the poem at Honey Literary.
I remember when I first noticed the shift in movement. The heaviness in some poems is undercut by the music and energy you mention. As I began putting poems together, I knew I needed moments of respite, where the reader could lose themselves in the rhythm and sound or the energy and juxtaposition of a line break. It was an intentional movement through the book. It’s satisfying to have a clear-eyed vision of a poem’s intent, which takes practice to understand.
DD: Every time I have a new book come out, I carry it with me for 24 hours. Everywhere I go, the book goes. I try to make sure I read it from beginning to end that day, the same way a reader would. The best part is when I manage to surprise myself. What part of this finalized version of the book surprises you the most?
RQ: I am most surprised to find that although most of these poems and the book were completed in the past two years, so much reading, writing, and thinking from the past ten years is present in the work. I can feel it; sometimes, there’s a phrase or an idea that originated long ago.
There was so much care taken for the diction and syntax as much as curating the poems to resonate ideas or images, threads that tied it all together. The opening and closing references to my mothers was a dynamic surprise. I find myself in tears sometimes when I read these poems. I keep finding deeper emotions and memories each time I read the book.
DD: How has it felt to read some of those poems in public while you’ve been promoting the book?
RQ: Reading the poems aloud anytime feels like sharing the work for the very first time. There’s a feeling of excitement that I’m sharing the work, but also a feeling of concern that the poem won’t be well-received. It always reminds me of my time in the 1990s when I would participate in Open Mics at my local coffee shop. I love reading aloud. I struggled with reading as a child because English is my second language. Now, every time I get to read aloud, I feel a sense of pride that I’m able to do it. I’m always hoping for more reading opportunities, both online and in-person.
DD: What’s become your favorite “performance” poem from this book?
RQ: That’s a question I’ve never been asked about my work, and it strikes me as odd that I’ve never been asked, considering how much music is found in this new book. I’ve been reading a contrapuntal poem I wrote that’s in the new Taylor Swift anthology Invisible Strings (Ballantine Books, 2025).
DD: Any lessons you’ve learned from publishing this book you’d like to share?
RQ: There are definitely some important lessons I learned with the publication of this book. It’s the second book I’ve published in the past two years—an edited anthology and my poetry collection. Having help and others who share in supporting your work is extremely valuable. It’s important to have a network of colleagues who can share in the promotion of the book through various means like reviews, interviews, and features. My experience with literary journals is helpful only in that they may be willing to offer space to a review or an interview, but again, having colleagues willing to do some of that work with you is necessary. Additionally, getting work placed into magazines or journals that are outside of my network is valuable exposure. Access to those venues may only be possible with the help of a publicist or editor, which can sometimes be costly. Hiring a publicist is something I only recently started to consider.
DD: Thank you for your time, and thank you for sharing so much of the process of the book. Keep reading it and keep celebrating it. You earned it.
Ruben Quesada is an award-winning poet and editor. He edited the anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, winner of the Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. He was poetry editor for AGNI, Poet Lore, and Pleiades. Quesada has received fellowships from the CantoMundo, Jentel, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His new collection, Brutal Companion, won the Barrow Street Press Editors Prize.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-three poetry collections, most recently So Much More (Small Harbor Publishing, November 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Art Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
Songs For Wo(men) (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) is a poetry chapbook by prolific writer and artist, Mugabi Byenkya, containing painfully relatable anecdotes around male expectations, gender identity, mental health, disability, and marginalization, and most importantly, having something to hold on to. Byenkya writes very honestly about the people and experiences that have shaped him; it feels very much like reading a hero’s epic. This gorgeous chapbook is a scale model of what self-acceptance over doubt via trial and error looks like. Byenkya uses a handful of storytelling methods, styles, and forms to reflect of life of a disabled black person who has questioned gender norms and fought back against the othering of their outward identity.
They begin with an epigraph by Timiro Mohamed, a poem called “Dear Self.” In it is a reminder to celebrate, love, and honor oneself and accomplishments: “Take this poem / to be prayer / and ritual / and celebration. // An invocation of joy for a Black boy / dressed in all the shades of his holy.” This poem sets the tone for the rest of the book, and almost reads like a disclaimer, saying, The following is what I have gone through, and this is who I am now.
Byenkya then introduces readers to their version of home through their poems “Enyumba” and “Eddwaliro.” In “Eddwaliro,”they write,
“Home is not always comfortable. Home is not always a
sanctuary. Home is different things to different people. Home can be
pain. Home can be suffering. Home can wear you down. Home
can be an addiction. Home can be an illusion.” (Byenkya 3)
These poems represent something foundational for the curation of identity; the relationship with self and definition of home were great ways to start this book.
Byenka’s “Dick” and “Philomina” series of poems are the essence of the project. “Dick: Scenes 1-8” tell the story of an awkward interaction. Mugabi’s speaker navigates a sudden and intrusive conversation, brought on by Dick, an all too curious and vocal stranger who wants to know things about the way the speaker dresses, their disability, and why they won’t whistle at women they don’t know. This conversation shows us exactly what it’s like for anyone refusing to adhere to gendered pressures and how frustrating it is that they can’t even introduce themselves without being subjected to tight-lipped smiles or a million and one questions. Byenkya’s “Philomena” derives its name from their award-nominated 2017 novel/memoir titled Dear Philomena. These three poems retell Byenkya’s discovery of femininity and comfort in it during turbulent times. In“Philomena’s Interlude Pt. 3” they write, “This was years before I / wrote my first letter to Philomena, but she was always there with / me, providing solace, especially during times like this…I didn’t see the point of having this same argument again and / again, where she tried to force me to be something I’m not and / we both walked away upset” (Byenkya 24). This is where we come to understand Philomina’s role in the speaker’s life; she is a charm, an alter ego, there to remind them of what truly matters.
One of the most eye-catching forms in Songs For Wo(men) pays homage to music, another passion of Mugabi’s. The table of contents is modeled after a tracklist, beautiful preparation for an album-like experience. As another nod to entertainment, Byenkya’s “Dick” series take the shape of a stage script, with center-justified dialogue between the speaker and Dick and each installment labeled as a scene. The varying styles, in the “Dick” series especially, work not only as vehicles for a compelling narrative but as effective engagement hooks as well. As soon as I began reading, I could not take my eyes away.
Everything about this chapbook is creative, down to the little details. In the poem “Squib,” Byenkya uses repetition to emphasize the point that words are like spells, inspired by Susan Lori Parks’ quote, “words are spells in our mouths.” Byenkya writes “Healing” / “Healing” / “Healing” // No matter how many times I cast the spell, it never comes” (Byenkya 18). The key word here though is like; words are like spells, but they don’t always do the job.
They also uses very short and pointed lines to convey a clear and concise assertion of boundaries and autonomy in the “Don’t touch my hair” series of poems, which serves the theme very well. This was something I was able to feel and deeply relate to.
“‘Don’t Touch My Hair’
I repeat
as they try to
act like:
being touched without consent is a compliment
act like:
I should be grateful and flattered for
them touching me without my consent
act like:
I don’t know or appreciate the true beauty of my own hair
but they do
and they can teach me just how special I am” (Byenkya 10)
Songs for Wo(man) is Byenkya’s story, ode, and study of identity through an Afrocentric perspective. It is a deeply essential piece of work that thankfully does not take itself too seriously in exploring issues that do indeed deserve serious attention. Mugabi Byenka is witty in the telling of their story; they know exactly what their message is and how to get people to pay attention. This chapbook is worth getting your hands on because there’s a strong personal message within it for anyone who wants to pick it up.
Jahmayla is a three-time National Goofing Around Award winner and specializes in consuming gothic literature and horror films. Jahmayla’s playful and observant nature and deep love of horror, magic, and literary thrills led her to pursue an English and Creative Writing degree four years ago. She began taking creative writing workshops in her senior year of high school and fell in love with working with others on various projects. During her downtime, she likes to spend time with friends and family, dance, write short stories, and read in copious amounts. Something that means a lot to Jahmayla is grassroots work and helping people directly through mutual aid and acts of service, She puts this passion into action by working with a group of good friends to develop education tools and encourage high literacy in her local neighborhoods.
