Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce that Sunni Wilkinson’s chapbook, The Ache & The Wing, was selected by Esteban Rodriguez as the winner of our ninth annual chapbook competition. Wilkinson will receive $200 and publication. Sundress plans to release the chapbook in late 2020.
Esteban Rodriguez, contest judge and author of the forthcoming collection The Valley (Sundress 2021), had this to say about the chapbook:
“Lyrical and elegiac, this collection boldly explores a range of personal tragedies and uncertainties—the unexpected death of a son, the memory of a mother leaving, the realization that life had different plans than were originally conceived. As the speaker so succinctly states, “I don’t want another love story. / I want immortality,” but if immortality is off the table, then let us sit with a collection that page after page does everything it can to provide an authentic space to heal.”
Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Adirondack Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sou’wester and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press 2019), and winner of New Ohio Review’s inaugural NORward Poetry Prize. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three young sons.
Ugochukwu Damian Okpara’s I know the Origin of my Tremor and Allyson Whipple’s This Must be the Place were also selected as runners-up.
We are also excited to announce that Ugochukwu Damian Okpara’s chapbook, I Know the Origin of My Tremor, was also selected for publication and will receive the $100 Editor’s Award. A Nigerian writer and poet, Ugochukwu’s work appears or is forthcoming in African Writer, Barren Magazine, The Penn Review, and elsewhere.
The entire Sundress team would like to thank everyone who sent in their work. Finalists and semi-finalists include:
Finalists OF TUNEFUL ROT, Prince Bush Literary Self-Portraits of an Americanized Migrant, Natalie Cortez-Klossner BREAKING WATER, Karen Llagas Field Notes Recovered from the Expedition to Devil’s Peak, Laura A. Ring Blur, Katherine Vanderme
Semifinalists wash between your toes, Teni Ayo-Ariyo Parent. Worshipper. Carrion, Stella Hervey Birrell TACKY LITTLE NOTHING, Chelsea Margaret Bodnar Small Girl: Micromemoirs, Lisa Fay Coutley Feralandia, Nicole Arocho Hernández As Things Developed, She Was to Have All Manner of Revelation, Elizabeth Devlin Silencio, No Mas, Adrian Ernesto Measurable Terms, Arlyn LaBelle Massive and Newly Dead, Rebecca Martin Object Permanence, Jeni De La O Kaitumjaure, Laurence O’Dwyer What Shot Did You Ever Take, Brian Oliu & Jason McCall Harridan, Melissa Tyndall between virus & police, ar young
Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing collective founded in 2000 that hosts a variety of online journals and publishes chapbooks, full-length collections, and literary anthologies in both print and digital formats. Sundress also publishes the annual Best of the Net Anthology, celebrating the best work published online, and the Gone Dark Archives, preserving online journals that have reached the end of their run.
Our editorial board members’ responsibilities primarily include reading manuscripts for contests, open reading periods, and solicited submissions, but they can also include soliciting manuscripts, reviewing residency applications, serving as a contest reader or judge, writing/curating features for our blog, and more.
Required qualifications include:
Knowledge of contemporary literature
Strong written communication skills
Exemplary literary citizenship
Preferred qualifications include:
Experience with Adobe Creative Suite
An interest in book design
Applicants are welcome to telecommunicate and therefore are not restricted to living in any particular location. We are particularly interested in applications from writers of color, transgender and nonbinary writers, and writers with disabilities.
Sundress Publications is staffed entirely by passionate volunteers, so this postion, as with all positions at the press, is unpaid. We are beginning fundraising efforts and hope to pay our editors a small stipend beginning in 2021.
To apply, please send a CV and a cover letter detailing your interest in the position to our Managing Editor, Erin Elizabeth Smith at erin@sundresspublications.com. Applications are due by August 20, 2020.
In her powerful debut out via Dzanc, Don’t You Know I Love You, Laura Bogart sheds light on some of the deeply challenging relationships many of us face with our parents.
Bogart is a regular at Salon, where her essays on body image, dating, politics, and violence have gone viral. A recipient of the Grace Paley Fellowship from the Juniper Institute at UMass Amherst, Bogart has also written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, SPIN, The Rumpus, Vulture, Roger Ebert, The AV Club, and Refinery 29 in the past. She is currently a contributing Editor at DAME and a featured author at The Week.
Don’t You Know I Love You, released in March 2020, focuses on Angelina Moltisanti, a queer artist who is forced to move into her abusive father’s house because of an accident that renders her broke and facing life with one remaining arm. Angelia has to re-negotiate her relationship with her father as he tries to get her an accident settlement. She becomes friends with Janet, another queer artist, as she attempts to deal with this re-negotiation, alongside her mother’s wish to give her broken family a second chance. All of this while trying to make art one-handed. Don’t You Know I Love You zooms in on the life of this struggling artist, giving us occasional peeks into the lives of Jack Moltisanti, her father, and Marie, her mother, stringing together the politics of a complex family matrix that encompasses bonds beyond bloodlines.
Bogart’s powerful and lyrical prose is a prominent feature of this novel, something that aptly captures the complex matrix of emotions it weaves. Her prose beautifully balances the paradoxes of trauma.
Elizabeth Outka, associate professor of English at the University of Richmond, talks about this kind of trauma in the essay, “Trauma and Temporal Hybridity” which appeared in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. “First,” Outka writes, “traumatic events may, strangely, be both erased from memory and yet return repeatedly as flashbacks […]. A second and related paradox involves the freezing of time at one instant, locking the subject in the past moment of trauma; yet alongside the freezing, there is a false sense of movement or unfreezing, as the memory returns again and again to haunt the present.”
Angelina, similar to the characters of The God of Small Things, experiences these paradoxes as she goes back to her father’s house after the accident. She experiences flashbacks as she tries to occupy the space again and puts up with her father’s overwhelming presence even as she attempts to move on for her mother’s sake.
The art piece she tries to create is also perhaps an embodiment of the paradoxes of her trauma and her attempts to deal with it. The prose forces the reader to step into her shoes—we are drawn into Angelina’s space and experience things as they happen to her. This makes it relatable because the reader can draw these into their own complexities and step closer to Angelina. This is a great step toward normalcy and pushing away toxic relationships, even if the person being pushed away is a parent.
Equally beautiful is how the novel deals with sexuality without making it explicit or the centerpiece of the story, something a lot of queer fiction is constantly criticized for. Angelina never really comes out in the novel: all we see is her sexual relationship with Janet, but we are never told what exactly her sexual identity is.
Janet becomes her safe space in the novel, and we see her, Bildungsroman style, being inspired and constantly pushed to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. Janet also plays a pivotal role in Angelina taking the first steps toward pressing charges against her father, even if it means becoming a “memory too painful to be named.” Angelina and Janet’s relationship perhaps also represents a union that was necessary in order to maintain a balance of two extremely opposite emotions—emotions that were broken once they cooled down and emerged as actions.
What is also surprising, at least for me, is that we get to hear from Jack and Marie, Angelina’s parents. This was definitely a tiny break for the reader occupying Angelina’s space, perhaps so as not to overwhelm the reader. One thing that this definitely does is validate the irrationality of “thinking from the other person’s shoes.” That is, how do we make space for ourselves when we are burdened with the other person’s perspective, whatever it might be? These add to the complexities of the novel without disrupting the flow, and Bogart cleverly uses these to give us more context.
Don’t You Know I Love You, therfore, becomes an amalgamation of these ideas and comes together to form a powerful, bold and empowering story that one should definitely read!
Gokul Prabhu is a graduate of Ashoka University, India, with a Postgraduate Diploma in English and creative writing. He works as an administrator and teaching assistant for the Writing and Communication facility at 9dot9 Education, and assists in academic planning for communication, writing and critical thinking courses across several higher education institutions in India. Prabhu’s creative and academic work fluctuates between themes of sexuality and silence, and he hopes to be a healthy mix of writer, educator and journalist in the future. He occasionally scribbles book reviews and interviews authors for Scroll.in, an award-winning Indian digital news publication.
In the spring of 2018, while I studied abroad in Tokyo, I only brought one book with me: a bound volume of poems by G.M. Hopkins, a Victorian poet and priest I had studied in a class the previous fall. Hopkins had been the subject of my major paper in that class, his poem “The Windhover” in particular, but I was by no means a fan of his, or of poetry at all, when I departed Newark Airport for Narita. No, my paper had been an examination of time as two forms–kairos and chronos–co-existing in the poem and their relation to Hopkins’s vocation as a Jesuit, the same order under which I’d received my high school education. It was a topic I’d chosen for simplicity: I had neglected to read the prose pieces assigned for the class, my usual focus, and thought I’d be able to rest on the laurels of my kilt-clad religious education when making an argument.
When we read the poem aloud, I had dominated the ensuing discussion, condemning Hopkins as artless, slack-jawed, and hopelessly bent by the Jesuit credo of ‘for others’ to where his verses were nothing but crowd-pleasing missives instead of art. My classmates nodded along, smirking, already accustomed to this crass vernacular from my campus stand-up routines. My professor, I think shocked by my sudden passion, said nothing at the time to rebuff me but when the paper was returned, she commented she found it hard to believe I truly held Hopkins in contempt when I wrote about him with such fondness. And, upon giving my essay the second look I hadn’t before turning it in, I realized she had a point.
So, when I happened upon the Hopkins volume in a donation bin a week before my departure, I felt like I had no choice but to pocket it. If anything, having it would help me construct further criticisms of the material and so it found its way into my carry-on. Eventually, after hours spent slogging through the bland prose of a well-regarded Japanese author who will remain nameless in my sole literature class for the term, I found myself looking up “The Windhover,” reading it aloud once, then twice, eventually affording this same treatment to the rest of the collection. The lines stuck in my head and I had already spent a fair amount of time analyzing them before it occurred to me that I truly had come to love G.M. Hopkins in spite of myself.
What I took away from this moment is that sometimes things can seem easy, can seem good, because they are. No trick, no trapdoor. Glitters can be gold, it would seem. Another takeaway was that I need to be more open to broadening my horizons, which is something I hope to accomplish through this internship. Though I now fully identify as a fan of poetry, I have a lot to learn about what makes a poem more than just a string of words on a page. With its commitment to varied, thoughtfully circulated content, Sundress seems like the perfect overseer to this next phase of my education, and I’m thrilled to join the team.
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Nora Walsh-Battle is a recovering stand-up comedian currently living and working on an organic farm outside of Asheville while she plans her next move. She is endlessly enraptured by the poetry of Richard Siken, considers Wikipedia to be a primary source, and is a certified Excel pro.
I wrote my first story when I was three years old. It was a classic feminist tale, one inspired by the frustration I felt while playing a Mario game on my older sister’s Gameboy. Why did I have to save Princess Peach every time? Why couldn’t Mario be the one who was kidnapped for once? So I wrote my own story, reversing the narrative. There were no damsel-in-distresses in my world: only women who beat up the antagonists with an umbrella.
I’d lock up the little rainbow Care Bear journal those stories were written in It was an artifact of a distant childhood, lost in history until high school, lost until I decided to become an archeologist and really dig deep into my personal lineage.
I went to a little arts school in Baltimore County, Maryland, where I majored in literary arts. Auditioning for the school, I thought writing was “kinda cool,” and when I got in, it only seemed natural to pick it over the two law magnet schools I’d gotten into. And, indeed, it was “kinda cool.” Our classrooms had couches, we had workshops with teenage angst poetry, there were literary feuds—it was the kind of surreal writing dream I never knew I wanted.
So I began my descent into the rabbit hole at this school. I swore off poetry until my junior and senior year, proclaiming it for hipsters and nerds, but when I actually sat down and wrote a poem, I found that I kind of liked it. It turned out I was pretty decent at it, so I continued with it. I thought of my life as a black and white film, shot with a grainy 15mm lens, before I began to take writing more seriously.
Once, I used to briefly live and study in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. I went to Ewha Womans University in Seoul and had to commute over two hours to actually get to my classes. On the crowded 900-bus from Anyang to the outskirts of Seoul, I used to translate Emily Dickinson poems from English to Korean, and I found myself memorizing these lines, writing them in Korean on the foggy windows. It was here I learned the power of writing, as I made new bus buddies who wanted to talk about poetry to the foreign girl. Literature truly connects in a unique way, transcending international borders and linguistic barriers.
Now I go to the Fashion Institute of Technology. I study International Trade, but I never really forgot how writing made the narrative of my life bleed from black and white into color. Yeah, sure I’m a business major, but I still discover pockets of poetry in my mundane everyday routine. I read for three different literary magazines, I’ve taken workshops with Brooklyn Poets, and now I’m interning at the Sundress Academy for the Arts! As I grow older, I’m finding that this is something I want to do for the rest of my life.
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Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an undergraduate at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her work has appeared in Into the Void, Corvid Queen, and cahoodaloodaling, among others. She attended the International Writing Program’s Summer Institute and was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Currently, she is trying to figure out a happy intersection between her writing, film, and photography endeavors.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week, we welcome the very talented Roya Marsh, who reads two poems by Eve L. Ewing and discusses poets’ roles as storytellers, activists, and informers. Thank you for reading!
Erica Hoffmeister: Eve L. Ewing’s poetry is so powerful – how and why did you choose to read these two particular poems for Lyric Essentials?
Roya Marsh: When prompted to read poems for Lyric Essentials my mind immediately centered Black women. When sifting through pieces and poets whose pieces I love, I’d ended up with a list of poets and poems that were in conversation with the work that I create. The Horror Movie Pitch poems by Ewing bring about the exact questions most folks should be asking themselves. The “what ifs” and “how abouts” in these poems beg the readers to consider a fictional world where Black women (the ones the world loves to hate) can choose to retaliate or live their best carefree lives. It brings about the topic of visibility and calls out the folks who so often abuse and take advantage of us and then comes back for more in the second piece.
EH: What is your personal connection to Ewing? Does she influence your writing or activism in any way?
RM: Dr. Eve L. Ewing is an outstanding writer with an incredible body of work that allows the reader to explore the past, present and future of Black experience. Her writing has an incredible impact on my own craft as she uses her everyday life’s work and research to craft intriguing, witty and powerful poems based in truth and historical context. The poems are made to inform, remind and demand change through messages that are accessible to readers of all backgrounds.
EH: You are an incredibly talented performance poet who always seems to be so comfortable reading poetry for others. Is that an accurate perception of your relationship with reading poetry aloud? How is the experience of reading Ewing’s poems different from reading your own?
RM: The only difference between reading my own work and Dr. Ewing’s is that I pray I do her poems justice. My reading voice is heavily impacted by the theme of the poems. I never attempt to assume a poet’s intentions, but I am guided by my own interpretations of the piece. I can imagine what it sounds like to pitch an idea, especially one that seems so farfetched, and let my imagination guide my voice. Here, I also considered what it would be like to be one of the Black women that Dr. Ewing is referring to in the lines. Now, that adds another layer to my reading voice. It is less about who I sound like when I read and so much more about doing the tale justice. Paying homage to the lives that would inspire Dr. Ewing to craft such a tale about invisible Black women seeking revenge.
EH: Your debut collection dayliGht was released this spring, and has been met with well-deserved praise in working to dismantle white supremacy and center LGBTQIA experiences. Can you speak to how poetry in particular is such an important medium when creating space for your voice and activism?
RM: Poets have become the storytellers. Our work now is to inform the public of what is going on and continue prompting conversations around these subjects. In our current social climate, poetry is a meaningful outlet for the surging thoughts, questions and emotions plaguing our minds. There’s an indescribable feeling that comes along with the craft, when your work is honored and valued you are reminded that people are listening. The platform makes room for countless others to resonate with what you’ve created, and it calls for an audience. The work from today’s poets broadens the genre and builds on the legacies of Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez and so many more set the path for. The goal is to dismantle white supremacy and all of its ills. The artists use poems to liberate the marginalized and incarcerated, highlight youth experience, demand rights LGBT+ community and so much more.
EH: Lastly, is there anything you are working on, whether writing or organizing, that you’d like to share with readers?
RM: I’m working on so many things at once that it is sometimes hard to center my mind. Luckily, I am never alone. I have a lifestyle brand, Blk Joy (Black Joy) that is giving away a $1,000 book scholarship to a Black scholar pursuing a college degree. We are also launching a fundraiser, which will benefit 4 organizations doing the work to liberate the incarcerated and support with bail funds. That showcase will be livestreamed on Facebook on 7/31. More information can be found at http://www.blkjoy.com.
Dr. Eve Louise Ewing is a poet, essayist, visual artist and sociologist of education, teaching as an assistant professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and Faculty Affiliate at UChicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Electric Arches, which received awards from the American Library Association and the Poetry Society of America, and most recently, 1919. She has also written the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, and co-authored the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks with Nate Marshall. She also writes comics for Marvel: Ironheart and Champions. Her first children’s book, Maya and the Robot, is forthcoming in 2020. Ewing’s writing, art, activism, research, and work as an educator centers around racism, social inequality, urban policy, and the effects on the public school system.
Further reading:
Purchase Ewing’s acclaimed debut collection of poetryElectric Archesfrom Haymarket Books. Check out Ewing’s comic series from Marvel: Ironheart and Champions. Listen to Ewing’s podcast, Bughouse Square.
A Bronx, New York native, Roya Marsh is a nationally recognized poet, performer, educator and activist. She is the Poet in Residence at Urban Word NYC and works feverishly toward LGBTQIA justice and dismantling white supremacy. Roya’s work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, Flypaper Magazine, Frontier Poetry, the Village Voice, Nylon Magazine, Huffington Post, Button Poetry, Def Jam’s All Def Digital, Lexus Verses and Flow, NBC, BET and The BreakBeat Poets Vol 2: Black Girl Magic(Haymarket 2018). In Spring 2020, MCD × FSG Originals published Marsh’s dayliGht, a debut collection of experimental poetry exploring themes of sexuality, Blackness, and the prematurity of Black femme death—all through an intersectional feminist lens with a focus on the resilience of the Black woman.
Further reading:
Purchase dayliGht by Roya Marsh from MCD x FSGO. Watch Marsh read her poem “Black Joy” featured on All Def Poetry. Listen to Marsh discuss dayliGht on LitHub’s podcast collaboration, Well-Versed With FSG.
Erica Hoffmeister is originally from Southern California and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. Currently in Denver, she teaches college writing and is an editor for the Denver-based literary journal South Broadway Ghost Society. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019). A cross-genre writer, she has several works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, articles and critical essays published in various outlets. Learn more about her at http://ericahoffmeister.com/
I was initially drawn to Charlotte Pence’s Code by its title. I was not sure what type of code she was referring to, but I was intrigued. When I read the description of the book on her website, I was interested in its description: “At its center, Code features a narrative sequence with three characters: a new father, a mother dying young from an inherited disease, and that mother’s own DNA…Ultimately, Code is a book about grief—specifically, how to accept it.”
While I had read plenty of poetry about grief, this would be my first time reading poetry that centered on a scientific concept, specifically that of genetic code. As a person who spent most of my life torn between STEM and the humanities, I was excited to see how Pence would entangle the two.
I found myself enamored by her style and her use of metaphor as I delved into this intricate tale about grief, illness, art, and interpersonal relationships. Throughout the text, Pence uses compelling imagery imbued with metaphor to illustrate the complexities of living and loving in the face of illness, creating an emotional yet hopeful look at the way that our DNA affects our lives.
Code is told in five parts, two of which are highly narrative. Part III tells the story of A and T, a pair who fall in love and have a child together called U. After A gives birth to U, she is diagnosed with a genetic disorder. The rest of the section is dedicated to how A and T navigate their relationship with one another and their child as A’s health rapidly deteriorates. Cleverly using A and T to represent adenine and thymine, a nucleotide pair that is part of the DNA sequence, this section of the text most heavily deals with the theme of genetics. Pence’s skill with stylized narration shows through in the poems from A’s perspective, which become increasingly freeform and more incoherent as A grows more ill. Witnessing A’s decline through these stylized poems is extremely compelling, and it is quite well-executed. T also narrates several poems, which highlights the way that he and his child are processing his wife’s illness. This section provides an interesting look at how illness affects a family while smartly exploring issues surrounding genetic illness including the genetic modifying technology known as CRISPR.
The other largely narrative section of the work is Part V, which tells the story of a husband and wife exploring intimacy and grief after the birth of their child. This narrative is very interesting when read against A and T’s story, because, while the mother in this story does not have a disease, she also has a deeply complicated relationship with her child and her husband. I particularly enjoyed “How to Measure Distance,” which highlights the fear involved in mothering. Read together, the stories of A and the unnamed mother create a compelling look inside the grief and sacrifice inherent to motherhood.
There are a few interesting aspects of this work that make it a bit atypical for a poetry manuscript. First, Pence includes two essays in the text, the first about her friend and fellow poet Shira Shaiman, whose work she includes in the text, and the second about a trip to view cave paintings which reflects on the relationship between art, grief, and history. These essays provide an interesting change in pace for the text, yet they still read with the same poetic artistry as the rest of Pence’s work. These essays are a welcome addition to the text as they provide context for the other pieces in the work while remaining artfully executed in their own right. Additionally, Pence intertwines quotes from various texts about genetics and history such as the work of Richard Dawkins and Siddhartha Mukherjee which provide further insight into the role of genetics in human life and history.
Finally, I want to highlight Pence’s decision to include poems by the aforementioned Shira Shaiman in the work. Shaiman’s work again emphasizes the theme of motherhood as she reflects on her mother’s cancer and how losing her mother impacted her. The inclusion of Shaiman’s work adds another layer of meaning onto the narratives of illness, motherhood, and grief that sits at the center of the text. While I am not a mother myself, I have always been fascinated by literary explorations of the complex emotions involved in motherhood. The interplay of narratives in this text, including that provided by Shaiman’s work, provides a unique perspective on motherhood that stood out to me as I read.
Charlotte Pence’s Code cleverly intertwines narrative poetry, essays, extracts from other texts, and the work of her dear friend to tell a compelling story about the way we process illness and grief through art and our relationships with one another. In a time wrecked by illness and grief, this book is a touching and hopeful look at the ways we can work to heal our bodies and minds through love and relationships.
Sydney Peay is a senior studying sociology and English literature at the University of Tennessee. In addition to interning at Sundress Publications, they serve as the social media coordinator for the Voices Out Loud Project, an LGBTQ+ archive of East Tennessee. They are also a student library assistant at Hodges Library, and they hope to pursue a master’s of library science after they graduate.
Stirring: A Literary Collection is seeking editors! Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing literary journals on the internet. Stirring operates under the umbrella of Sundress Publications, an entirely volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing collective.
Our volunteer editors’ responsibilities include reading submissions in their respective genre, responding to submissions, and submitting final selections to the Managing Editor in a timely manner.
We are currently taking applications for the following positions: Book Review Editor, Nonfiction Editor, and Associate Poetry Editors.
Required qualifications: a knowledge in contemporary works, strong written communication skills, and the ability to work under a deadline.
Stirring strives to commit to diversity through encountering as many unique and important voices as possible through the work we publish and the members of our editorial board. We are actively seeking editors of color, trans and nonbinary editors, editors with disabilities, and others whose voices are underrepresented in literary editing.
To apply, please send a CV and a 150-250 word letter of editorial intent to Luci Brown at stirring.managingeditors@gmail.com. The letter of intent should include, but not be limited to: what authors and type of work interests you; your vision as a staff member at Stirring; your past work in literary editing (if any); and what books or journals you are currently reading.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts Workshop Series is excited to present a flash fiction workshop series led by Sundress editor Meagan Cass. This generative workshop series raises money for organizations supporting Black Lives in St. Louis. Come to just one, or two, or three, or all four! The second, “Flash Horror,” will take place on Tuesday, July 21st via Zoom from 7-8PM CST. Subsequent workshops will include Flash Fairy Tale (July 28), and a Sundress and StL Works-in-Progress Reading (August 1st).
Admission for this workshop is a receipt of at least a $10 donation to STL Mutual Aid, a network of organizers, healers, artists, community leaders, and every day people coming together to deliver food and supplies, provide financial solidarity, offer emotional support, and connect people to their neighbors. This workshop will be free for Black writers. Find out more and donate at https://stlmutualaid.org/.
In order to sign up, please email (mcass3@gmail.com) or direct message Meagan on Instagram (@meagan_cass) or Twitter (@CassMeagan) within two days of the workshop.
Meagan Cass’ first full-length collection, ActivAmerica, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, judged by Claire Vaye Watkins. Her flash fiction was selected for SmokeLong Quarterly’s The Best of the First Ten Years anthology and the Wigleaf Top 50. She is author of the chapbook Range of Motion (Magic Helicopter Press, 2014) and her stories have appeared in DIAGRAM, Mississippi Review, Joyland, Puerto del Sol and elsewhere. She teaches at University of Illinois Springfield and co-edits Craft Chaps at Sundress Publications. She lives in St. Louis.
Andy Fogle’s book, Across From Now begs us to listen and to listen with our whole selves. Apart from its daring reflections on familial elements and the lives that are often lived as we sift through the marrows of life, this collection of introspective poetry spans the question of what happens to us in the in-between spaces?
This collection covers time to the various environments and lands that occupy that time. Fogle takes us on a ride that fills our head-spaces and heart-middles. From speaking about beaches to discussing mornings to speaking about what makes us alive in living, Fogle allows us access into an authentic world where the minutia of space and feeling intertwine, and where readers can lean into spaces that challenge and inspire them to think about interpersonal dynamics, connectivity, and what it means to be part of a family, as well as to have a family.
In one of his beginning poems, “One Ring,” Fogle drops readers into the symbolism between what once was, and emotionality—how even the positionality of a telephone was something that impacted emotional access, depth, and understanding. Fogle asserts, “Back when phones still had bells inside them / and plugged into walls / back when we were tethered to the box.” Fogle helps readers explore the ways in which history has transformed our relationship to items, the tangible, and the emotional resonance of that tangible.
Each of Fogle’s poems explores a motif of noticing and remembering. Whether Fogle is exploring the way things feel within a family context, how things resonate in the world, or simply how things create themselves in the world, the writing hums and throbs within our bodies, and challenges the way we perceive the world around us.
Fogle invites us to think about how we participate in our humanity alongside other living and breathing entities. Each poem occupies a body of its own and traverses the poem’s corresponding breath, parts, and emotional vibrations. Fogle illustrates the extent of what lies behind the quiet, the everyday, and often reveals common environments to describe things and what is happening inside of them. Fogle is bold in the way he marries the minutia of humanity with its simultaneous thrumming aliveness, in how he conjures a sense of things that happens outside of the page completely.
Fogle’s writing encourages readers to lean into their own minds, to melt into their bodies, as the words are being read. Fogle challenges readers to sit with what is, to stay still with what is and forces us to bend as the poetry too bends, as he implores us to continue looking further. The beauty of this writing is that it keeps us thinking about what is happening between the lines—it keeps us balancing reality and the space we go right before we fall asleep.
The hallmark of Fogle’s poetry is centered around the use of the everyday riddled with emotions behind the banal, the commonplace, the pedestrian. This work takes us to places where the poems begin and end inside themselves. Fogle challenges us to think about ourselves as we are contained within ourselves. We are forced to consider things outside of ourselves, to truly sink into what makes us feel, what makes us yearn, what makes us access our full spectrum of emotions.
Fogle begs us all to occupy a different perspective, to see things through a new lens. Fogle invites us into worlds completely new and fascinating and allows us to move through its time at our own pace. This collection cuts deeply. These poems force us to consider the monotony present in our lives, present in our bodies. These collections are not here to make us comfortable, but rather to help us confront the reality of ourselves. Fogle supports readers in rending a new version of the mundane, in seeing something we might not have considered before in what we see continually.
The best part of this book is how Fogle cradles us in the reverie of quiet language with sharp and loud meaning. There is no shortage of critical thought and intentional feeling throughout this collection. Readers are hooked onto every line and are immersed in the world of being. There is interesting play and daring narrative language used in this work—it never fails to put things for us right in our bodies, or in our experiences. These poems require our attention; they exist on the page and beg us to exist alongside them.
Sabrina Sarro is a social worker in the state of NY. They hold an LMSW from Columbia University and are currently pursuing an MFA from the City College of New York—CUNY. As a queer non-binary writer of color, they are most interested in investigating the intersectionalities of life and engaging in self-reflection and introspection. They are an alumnus of the LAMBDA Literary Emerging Voices for LGBTQIA* Writers Retreat, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Yale Writers’ Workshop, and many others. They have received scholarships from The Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.
