Sundress Publications is now open for applications for our Craft Chaps Fiction Editor. Craft Chaps offers substantive essays by contemporary writers on creative writing practice. Each chap focuses on one aspect of craft and contains a writing exercise and bibliography for further reading. They are freely downloadable on our website.
Our fiction editor’s responsibilities primarily include soliciting one author for the series each year, editing the author’s craft chap, delivering the final product to the managing editor in a timely fashion, and working with the managing editor to make sure that it is released and promoted.
We are looking for applicants with the following qualities:
Knowledge of contemporary fiction and prominent authors
Strong editorial skills including both line edits and proofing
Good communication skills
Ability to self-start on projects
Great time-management and attention to deadlines
Applicants are welcome to telecommute and therefore are not restricted to living in any particular location.
Sundress Publications is staffed entirely by volunteers, so this position, as with all positions at the press, is unpaid. Craft Chap editors will receive a small honorarium for their work each year.
To apply, please send a CV and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in the position to Executive Director Erin Elizabeth Smith at erin@sundresspublications.com. Applications are due by December 1, 2023.
Or that I could even begin to consider myself Appalachian at all.
Everyone learns to play “Smoke on the Water” on a lap dulcimer to pass fifth grade. “Crick” and “crans” (“creek” and “crayons”) were just how you said it. Pittsburgh is the place only ever referred to as the city, and if you live there, as I do, that means you made it (out).
I’m from Mars. Pennsylvania, not the planet.
I’ve always said It would make more sense if it were the latter. I’ve always thought myself to be simply alien(ated).
I couldn’t read until I was seven. Everyone else could. Not me.
Numbers and letters might as well have been the same. I got by with sheer memorization of words or phrases. My parents required I read to them—my mother Goodnight Moon, my father Good Night, Gorilla. Slow speech curling from tongue & teeth in tandem with the drag of my mother & father’s fingers beneath sentence fragments. I stop when they stop. I start when they start.
Kindergarten had one Y2K Apple desktop & two CD-ROMs, Oregon TrailandWhere In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, and the teachers instituted a two-book reading mandate in order to play. Games were the only thing motivating me through the drum of childhood.
I was strategic—I was sure to gun for the books when it was time to choose so I’d make it to the shelves first, select whichever we read during story time because they were fresh in my mind.
I performed for my teachers.
I took my time.
Dragging my pointer finger along the bottom of each sentence, lingering on the cliff of it, & I knew if they quizzed me, I’d be able to make them believe I read the two books required. I’d do anything to button mash my way from Paris to Minnesota to Australia searching for Carmen, or to risk dying of dysentery on the way to some new frontier home.
Anything but learn to read.
I’d have chosen to scour a pixelated world for pictures for images for clues as to what life was like for others who weren’t from Pennsylvania like I was. I wanted to know anyone who wasn’t like me. I learned young that who I was wasn’t someone I was supposed to like. I knew the world was kept from me, & I wanted to know.
I didn’t know the empowerment of words. I didn’t know books other than the Bible could send me to ethereal worlds not otherwise known.
My mother became so desperate for my literacy that she took me to the next town over to peruse the library’s shelves in the hopes I’d delve into a book beyond my disapproving look of the front and back cover. The library was the only place she didn’t censor me.
There I found books about betrayal and vengeance, secrets and alienation, love without adverse consequence.
There was where words became worlds.
There I became empowered to explore word-worlds and build my own world of words.
Halsey Hyer (they/them) is the author forthcoming full-length hybrid collection, Divorce Garter (Main Street Rag, 2024). Their microchapbook of micropoems, Everything Becomes Bananas (Rinky Dink Press, 2022), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023, and their debut chapbook, [deadname] (Anhinga Press, 2022), won the 2022 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Based in Pittsburgh, PA they’re a collective member of The Big Idea Bookstore and the 2022-2024 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow in Chatham University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Find out more on their website—www.halseyhyer.org.
Following the release of our new e-anthology A Body You Talk To: An Anthology of Contemporary Disability our Editorial Intern Max Stone spoke with editor Tennison S. Black about the importance of sharing and amplifying work by disabled writers, their editorial vision for the anthology, the story behind the title, the inclusion of visual art in the collection, and more.
Max Stone: Could you talk about the title of the anthology? Why this title? Where did it come from and how do you see it unifying this collection of work?
Tennison S. Black: The thing about me that few realize is that I have to coach myself through chronic pain to complete basic tasks. Sometimes I’m really kind to myself, “Okay, here we go. You’ve got this.” And sometimes I’m irritable with the pain or outright inability to accomplish what I want, “Just do it. Oh for fu**’s sake.” But the thing is that I talk to my body all the time. Opening a car door requires a conversation in my mind, “Focus on the ring finger and let it do the work—don’t use the thumb—okay maybe just hook it then turn your shoulders and it’ll work as leverage.”
My primary disability seems hell-bent on taking out my hands, especially. Though I’ve had this disease since 2001, in recent years it’s increased the toll and I seem to be steadily losing my access to the use of my hands. So I talk to them a lot. But also to my knee, my left hip, my shoulders, neck, and spine. I guess it depends on the task but I coach my parts toward cooperation.
In the summer months there’s something about the way my bedroom door was originally hung and so when it swells in the heat, it’s really difficult to open. Every day is hard, but when you combine that with a flare in my hands, I can easily get stuck in my room because the doorknob and the strain of opening the door causes me extreme pain but also because I just can’t pull hard enough to get it to open anymore. At some level my instinct is to sit on the floor and have a good cry until I’m rescued. But no one is coming to rescue anyone else, it seems, and also, that’s not who I want to be in this life—I don’t want to give up. Except when I really really do. The way I bridge the difference is to talk to—I don’t know—the arm, the hand, the disease that puts me in that position, myself for eating something the night before that I know could cause me additional pain—all of it. The hot summer air and humidity that causes my door to do this. The inability to pay for someone to fix it—yes and yes and yes. So I have one of those bodies that you have to talk to just to get through the day. From opening a can or jar, yes even with tools, to carrying my bag, to pulling on my clothes, I need a coach so I coach myself. And in this way, I’m not alone.
MS: Why was it important to put together an anthology of poetry on contemporary disability at this current moment?
TSB: I haven’t always been good at saying I’m Disabled. It’s not in my nature to disclose my feelings or my struggles. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mostly I think it came from raising my kids as a single parent with no family or friends, and feeling utterly terrified that if anyone knew the amount of pain I was in on a daily basis, or how much I was struggling, I’d lose my kids. Now, that may seem irrational today, but I can’t overstate how alone I was in those years, and how I was just trying not to die. So it took a lot for me to even begin to understand my own disability, and what it may mean to be Disabled in the world, and also what to do with that information. I was trying to just get by, walking to food banks—got evicted, and on and on. Anyway, I’m not always great at it, and I struggle still, but I feel like I need to do better.
There’s not yet been a time when being Disabled wasn’t a radical act. Yet Disabled writers are still routinely excluded in many presses and open calls. Listen, there are several incredible anthologies of this type so we’re not breaking new ground here but until it’s routine and expected that a certain percentage of writers in every anthology are openly Disabled, we all (meaning presses) have work to do. As for Sundress, this won’t be our last effort toward this end, it’s just our most recent. But I still hear from publishers that Disabled writers are “difficult,” or that we “can’t handle touring and promotion,” and that we’re just “too much,” so we still have a long way to go.
MS: How do you see these poems contributing to the conversation on disability and creating more space and empathy for disabled people in the world?
TSB: Not all of the work in this anthology is about being Disabled except in as much as everything everyone does is influenced by their identity—Disabled and non-disabled alike. But this anthology is not necessarily intended to focus strictly on the experience of Disability as much as it’s intended to offer one more outlet, one more space for Disabled people to speak their minds or to place their art. It’s another marker saying that we’re here. In some cases these artists and writers are responding to other Disabled writers and artists. But in many cases they’re just representing themselves and saying hey, I want to be included in the conversation, please. And what else is there?
MS: Talk a little bit about your editorial vision for this book; what considerations did you make when choosing which poems to include? A variety of different voices, disabilities, intersecting identities, and poetic forms are represented; was this a conscious, deliberate choice that you made?
TSB: If I could have accepted every submission, I would have. But what was my vision—I mean here we sit in this world with fascism rising all around us, trying to gobble up and kill everything good. My daily vision is to defy that push, to offer space where people can be in love and in sorrow, in pain and in hope with each other. And to offer that space up to those who are living in defiance of all that is horrid and terrible in the world.
MS: Are there specific poems by different poets that you think speak to or resonate with each other? If so, which ones and how do they conversate, both in terms of content and form?
TSB: There are many pieces in this anthology that speak to one another. I’d prefer not to point them out because first I want the reader to have room here. But, too, I want every writer and artist herein to know that I value their work, none above any other, but with immense gratitude nonetheless for each. They’re all special to me and I chose them for that reason alone.
MS: The COVID-19 pandemic is a recurring theme in this anthology. Can you expand on the intersections of disability with the pandemic and the choices you made in selecting poems relating to the topic? Also, did you have an idea of how much of a presence you wanted the pandemic to have in the book going into it?
TSB: There hasn’t yet been enough said about the impact of the pandemic on our community. Personally, I spent the pandemic with a medically suppressed immune system because it was either that or lose my ability to walk as my disease ravaged my joints. And in fact, it took multiple specialists AND me losing my ability to walk for several months to finally agree to do it because of the pandemic. But my story is far from unique or extraordinary. If you faced the pandemic with a disability, you likely had increased pressure in all of the ways that everyone else had—just more so. From loneliness to financial pressure, to physical challenges and worries amid a potentially deadly pandemic to which many of us were more susceptible—especially to the worst outcomes. I didn’t feel that I could approach the topic of disability at this stage and not also talk about the impact of the pandemic—something many of us are still facing, even if most people have decided it’s over.
MS: Several art pieces are also included in the anthology. Can you speak about your thought process in choosing these pieces?
TSB: Honestly, if it weren’t for capitalism, we’d all be able to lay around and make art and write and tell stories. And I wouldn’t want to be a part of extricating one of these from another. Wherever my writing is, there will always be room for art. And I hope to include art in every editorial effort I undertake. My thoughts in the selection process here were to include pieces that spoke to or advanced the narrative of the whole and some of those were more visual than others.
MS: Disabilities that aren’t visible are often overlooked and ignored. How do you see A Body You Talk To tackling this issue and making such disabilities, and the people who experience them, more visible and acknowledged?
TSB: For twenty years I was invisibly Disabled. My disabilities have only become really visible in the last few years, and even then, they again can be invisible to those who don’t understand what they’re seeing. Like so many of us, I have been screamed at for parking in an accessible parking space, or for using the accessible stall in the restroom. I’ve been asked by a very prominent Disability rights advocate why I was there at a disability event and how they could know I was Disabled because I didn’t look disabled to them. It’s awful to be put in these positions so I just don’t think we need to justify ourselves. We don’t owe our medical information to anyone. It’s not really for me to make other Disabled people more visible but to offer them a platform to make themselves more visible (if they choose) is something I can do. And acknowledgement might be nice but what I want is universal accessibility. I want us all to be able to get in and out of buildings and to get around the world without so much difficulty or the need to justify ourselves to others. A Body You Talk To is a place for some Disabled writers and artists to be heard and to publish their work. That alone is, I hope, enough. It’s a room. The real work belongs to the writers and artists contained therein.
Tennison S. Black (they/she), a queer and multiply disabled autistic, is the author of Survival Strategies (winner of the National Poetry Series, UGA Press 2023). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Hotel Amerika, Booth, Wordgathering, and New Mobility, among others. They received an MFA at Arizona State University. They are the Managing Editor at Sundress Publications and Best of the Net. Though Sonoran born, they reside in Washington state.
Max Stone is a poet from Reno, Nevada. He has an MFA in poetry and a BA in English with a minor in Book Arts and Publication from the University of Nevada, Reno. He was born and raised in Reno, but has lived in various other places including New York City, where he played soccer at Queens College. He is the author of two chapbooks: Temporary Preparations (Bottlecap Press, June 2023) and The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful (Ghost City Press, forthcoming July 2023). His work has been published by & Change, just femme and dandy, fifth wheel press, Bender Zine, Black Moon Magazine, The Meadow, Night Coffee Lit, and elsewhere.
Sundress Publications is seeking a social media intern. The social media internship position will run from July 1 to December 31, 2023. The intern’s responsibilities include scheduling and posting promotional materials on our social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), maintaining our newsletter, and promoting our various open reading periods, workshops, readings, and catalog of titles. This will also include creating promotional graphics, digital flyers, logos, and social media images. Applicants for this internship must be self-motivated and be able to work on a strict deadline.
Preferred qualifications include:
Familiarity with Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and/or Canva
Familiarity with social media scheduling tools
Ability to work under a deadline and multitask
Strong written communication skills
Knowledge of and interest in contemporary literature a plus
This is a REMOTE internship with the team communicating primarily via email and text messages and is therefore not restricted to applicants living in any particular geographic area. Interns are asked to devote up to 10 hours per week to their assignments.
While this is an unpaid internship, all interns will gain real-world experience of the ins and outs of independent publishing with a nationally recognized press while creating a portfolio of work for future employment opportunities. Interns will also be able to attend all retreats and residencies at the Sundress Academy for the Arts at a significantly discounted cost.
We welcome, encourage, and are enthusiastic to see a diverse array of applicants in all areas, including race, ethnicity, disability, gender, class, religion, education, immigration status, age, and more.
To apply, please send a resume and cover letter detailing your interest in the position to Staff Director Kanika Lawton at sundressstaffdirector@gmail.com by May 18, 2023.
Sundress Publications is seeking editorial interns. The editorial internship position will run from July 1 to December 31, 2023. The editorial intern’s responsibilities may include writing press releases, composing blog posts and promotional emails, proofreading manuscripts, assembling press kits, collating editorial data, research, managing spreadsheets, and more. The intern may also be responsible for writing copy, conducting interviews with Sundress authors, reviewing newly released books, and promoting our catalog of titles.
Preferred qualifications include:
A keen eye for proofreading
Strong written communication skills
Familiarity with WordPress, Microsoft Word, and Google Suite
Ability to work under a deadline and multitask
Knowledge of and interest in contemporary literature a plus
This is a REMOTE internship with the team communicating primarily via email and text messages and is therefore not restricted to applicants living in any particular geographic area. Interns are asked to devote up to 10 hours per week to their assignments.
While this is an unpaid internship, all interns will gain real-world experience of the ins and outs of independent publishing with a nationally recognized press while creating a portfolio of work for future employment opportunities. Interns will also be able to attend all retreats and residencies at the Sundress Academy for the Arts at a significantly discounted cost.
We welcome, encourage, and are enthusiastic to see a diverse array of applicants in all areas, including race, ethnicity, disability, gender, class, religion, education, immigration status, and more.
To apply, please send a resume and cover letter detailing your interest in the position to Staff Director Kanika Lawton at sundressstaffdirector@gmail.com by May 18, 2023.
What does it mean to inhabit a woman’s body in a world that tries to break it? This is what Zoë Fay-Stindt explores in their poetry chapbook, Bird Body. Fay-Stindt weaves intricately between birds and the stories of women to shine a light on women’s and femme’s experience in our misogynistic world. Fay-Stindt writes of the speaker’s emotional pain and exhaustion following their sexual assault. Here, healing can take the form of being picked apart by birds even as our speaker is devastated by their own inability to help others with their pain.
Birds, Fay-Stindt appears to say, have levels of meaning and such a depth of representation that even we are birds. Sometimes we are brutal, then too-easily crushed by the world, yet containing within the cages of our ribs wrathful howls and cries of mourning and the ability to, despite it all, keep “opening [our] eyes every morning.” In such exploration, Fay-Stindt offers us the great gift of understanding what it is to survive in our problematic world.
Much of the chapbook is around the assault of the speaker and the emotional aftermath, although the assault is itself never described in much detail. Instead, much of the focus is on the effects and the ways that society compounds them by teaching the speaker to invalidate her own experience, even telling her (when she does begin to write about it in poetry) that she speaks of it too much. Bird Body dives deep into the emotional effects of something that is so innate to many women’s experiences, as 1 out of 6 women in the U.S. face sexual assault in their lifetime and 90% of sexual assault victims are women (“Scope of the Problem: Statistics.” RAINN).
In “that’s it, now” Fay-Stindt compares the speaker to the mourning dove in her grief and exhaustion, imploring the reader to not pity the dove (or, perhaps, the woman) as she weaves laments yet still opens her eyes each morning, holding her “tremor and her great loud voice / in the same body.” This emotional depth and exploration makes clear the impact of an event that many still invalidate, bringing forth shockwaves from the event in all directions so that it can be fully felt—and understood—by the reader.
Bird Body also looks at the way terrible events echo backward, affecting the speaker long before it even happened through the fear women must live with. Through such writings, Fay-Stindt connects us in community, building bridges between us in order to share often overlooked and unspoken experiences. Fay-Stindt writes of the prelude to the rape, “I’ve been training for a lifetime—my body / knows the drill: I won’t yell. Instead, / offer a bargain: not tonight, or I promise / I’ll make it better next time, or I owe you one.” As a woman, this line had a profound effect on me because it touched on something not often discussed; the way that we spend our lives preparing for the possibility of an assault, finding responses to catcalls and men who approach us, finding the ways to battle our own instincts of rage in an attempt at survival. And this prevalence makes it all the more necessary to discuss.
Fay-Stindt expands the examination to include our human fallibility, broadening the chapbook’s relevance for all potential readers. They write in “a robin at the bus station” of the devastating inability in the face of others’ pain to do more than “build beds, soft spaces to land,” and show how our best attempts at help can make matters worse when the speaker accidentally kills a robin in “swallow.”
Yet, as the chapbook explores, there is so much more to a woman’s experience. From their relationship with their mother, to breast cancer, to pap smears, to finding a connection with and healing in nature, to having one’s body picked apart and prodded like it’s nothing more than a vessel, Fay-Stindt touches on much important and often-overlooked aspects of what it means to be a woman or femme in their poems.
But let us not evade how the speaker’s body is treated as a visceral vessel throughout. Their body is picked apart by a heron, washed clean, then squeezed and entered by a doctor during a pap smear. In this way, although both situations are geared toward healing, a comment is made on the objectification of women and femmes as nothing more than a body, how they are treated as such by society.
Bird Body is a vital read since it shows these experiences without flinching away, and makes obvious that you cannot completely tell a woman’s story—or understand it—without showing the grief, the connection to nature, our helplessness to aid each other, our objectification by society, and so much more. Fay-Stindt creates a vibrant, moving ode to women, femme people, and our bodily experiences by shining the spotlight on aspects of our lives that are often overlooked, and in so doing allows us to understand ourselves, and even humanity in all of its cruelty and struggle.
Solstice Black (she/they) is a queer poet and novelist living in the Pacific Northwest. They are currently undertaking a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chautauqua, The Fantastic Other, and A Forest of Words, among others. They hope to pursue an MFA in creative writing and a BFA in visual art in the next few years. Her cat is both her greatest joy and torment.
In an interview with Jerrod Schwarz included at the end of the collection, Jen Silverman explains that she “wanted to contend with a multitude of possibilities” surrounding baths. “You can be immersed or submerged. You can be bathed in sensation, you can be deluged in light.” Water surrounds us in bathtubs and fills us as we drink; the language of Jen Silverman’s Bath(Driftwood Press, 2022) similarly surrounds and fills.
The purpose of water and other liquids shifts throughout Bath. Water may “quiver like a fugitive” as it flashes a reflection. Speakers are “treading water” or use “each hand cupped / on a different set of promises.” Water creates “ocean-memory / sharp as brine” and sparks “the fountain of youth.”
Nevertheless, “the fountain of youth” has “a limit” and is described as “a steam-choked pool.” In Bath, water is not only a regenerator or refresher; baths are threatening and ominous, even deadly. This subversion is seen most clearly in Silverman’s twisting of baptism, a holy and divine type of bath. In “Bath 6,” “they dropped you in the river. They said / Praise Jesus, Praise Him. You bobbed up / half-drowned… Somewhere in / the river mud, you lost your God.” Or, similarly, in “Bath 3,” “you baptize yourself in sorrow, again and again. / You baptize yourself with bourbon and brandy.” Here, baths are not spiritual experiences, but a destructive power that traps and chokes.
Most poems take place in a specified location, like “Boston,” “Louisville,” or “Cairo.” These locations help differentiate poems that investigate similar themes and often include nameless characters. Silverman explains that “there’s a lot of truth to be found in the details—what a place looks and smells like, the quality of its light—but also the specificity of… language.” The setting, like water itself, is fluid and changing. The reader can’t know where the speaker most belongs, where they are most at home, or where they were raised.
In “The Devil Dogs My Steps, but if it Weren’t Him, it Would Just be Someone Else,” the speaker of the poem is “living in Cincinnati.” She isn’t sure that Cincinnati is home—she even asks “if you can call this living.” But, in Cincinnati, the Devil “calls” and “lingers.” The Devil and the speaker walk and talk together, even as he oversteps and complicates. “He isn’t invited per se, / but also, / he isn’t not.” “The Devil says: / I like to come home because it reminds me / what a disaster we make / of what’s ours.” But where is home for the speaker of this poem, or the speakers of Bath? Does the speaker avoid home to avoid her created disasters, as the Devil suggests, or is home found in relationships, in all their chaos and their miracles? As “a beefy woman at the bar says: / I like to travel because it reminds me / how great it is to be home.”
From this perspective, the role of water seems to foster connection. For example, “when I shower, you sit on the floor, / only steam between us.” Water fills the space between people, and a father’s love for his newborn daughter in “Bath 8” “becomes a weather-system / of love.” A few weeks later “he has panic attacks / all the time.” Relationships, and the delight and terror they cause, are as necessary as drinking water. The speaker explains that they “can’t stop thinking / that I’m going to die.” “Groceries, laundry, / bills of course, / but even the good stuff / …that stuff too: / gonna die.” Death anxiety follows the delight of interpersonal connection; this becomes a metaphor for humanity’s relationship with water, where the very thing we need to survive can kill so easily.
In “Bath 11,” the final poem of the collection, the speaker wonders “how strange it is: all the ways we are given to make / family.” For all the heartache of community, the speaker does not isolate herself. She spends New Year’s Eve with a kind of family, and her “ex’s wife tells us about giving birth / to their daughter.” On one hand, the scene seems full of fractured connection: the ex that married someone else, the foreshadowing of “B and I… breaking up,” and “my partner… that has yet to arrive.” And yet, when asked “to explain all this, / …what could I say but: Love.” In all of this, Silverman keeps bathing, even in the face of every potential loss.
Hailey Small is based in Wilmore, Kentucky, where she writes lyric prose and watches gingko leaves turn soft each November. Hailey is a junior at Asbury University, working towards a BA in English and History. She enjoys working in Asbury’s writing center, where she partners with remedial English students to make academia and creative writing more accessible. Most recently, Hailey was published in The Asbury Review, where she also serves as the creative non-fiction editor, and anthrowcircus.com.
Are there nuanced steps—complicated travels—between the shapes of vulnerability and viciousness, prey and predator? How do we, as humans, form these shapes when we face loss? These are only a few questions that arise from Reese Conner’s debut poetry collection, The Body He Left Behind (Cider Press Review, 2021). An homage to Conner’s father and his cat Lewis, The Body He Left Behind provides a unique space where animalistic movements initiate a poetic voice that calls attention to the way grief, love, or violence can shape us just as tangibly as our own bones.
The Body He Left Behind pulls from a kaleidoscope of observances about human and animal nature that weave together so interchangeably throughout the collection’s five parts that they seem causal and interdependent. In repeating images of toothpicks, rubber bands, spillages, and balsa wood, Conner constructs human and animal bodies according to a material vulnerability, thus exposing the way that humankind stands to bind both themselves, and the nature surrounding them, to a physical compartmentalization and self-imagined organization. “The Rapture”, for instance, illustrates a vomiting ocean as analogy to our view of an exposed human materialism: “a gentle murmur / spread in the bellies of the observant, / who saw even the ugly things begin to ascend—blobfish, Smart Cars, murder weapons, every issue of Us Weekly—and they began to think: / What about us?” In “The Necessary”, Conner points to the losses that occur at the intersection between nature and humanity’s material constructions: “if roads, cars, and quick commutes / mean one, two, one thousand dead cats, then / the choice is still clear: It would be far too expensive, / not to mention logistically irresponsible, / to make cat-retardant roads, so, of course, / a run-over tabby or two is necessary / unpleasantness.” By so clearly pointing to the downfall of human efficiency, Conner makes congruencies between human and animal survival—both of which, at times, reach towards the same beauty—the same menace.
Throughout The Body He Left Behind, the tricky intersection between nature, nurture, and survival becomes the similarity between humans and animals. The need for humans to build their world, to frame the bodies of other people, holds the same mindset as a cat with a dying chipmunk, urging its prey “[t]o move differently, / willing her back to the life he took / so that his purchase / might be made again”. Similarly, the way emotions are sharpened, changed, and buried within a person’s mind holds the same survivalist instincts as a cat licking the cyst on his forepaw: “It is the logic he knows, but it will not work. He’ll lick. It will blue… He’ll lick. It will burst”. The speaker of this collection not only acknowledges these similarities, but takes ownership in the connection, confessing, “I am the reason / the cat, domestic and heavy / with wet food, still kills the cockroach—tears it limb by limb by limb, by limb… Forgive him, he is a violent shape.” In weaving between these images, Conner grants all the room necessary to air the true dichotomy of violent shapes in our world, creating ruminations that ask whether, “desire, even with menace / has meaning”, “how many monsters suffocate / the things they love, and how many / call it kindness,” or if “Frost was right about gold, / about every type of happiness ending / in a quiet violence.”
The dichotomies in The Body He Left Behind not only lead to a forgiving tone throughout the collection, they contribute to a dynamic contemplation about the self and its relationship to loss. As the speaker ruminates on the death of their father and the passing of their cat Lewis, they also question how one reacts to an encounter with impermanence, and how there could ever be a right way to do so. This is particularly prominent in the poem “Thank You,” when the speaker notes that their father: “received the bag / full of Lewis, / who, / like all dead cats / that are carried, / became broken rubber bands / heavy as ball bearings, / and said thank you / as if it were a kindness / to yank a dog / from the cat it killed, (13-21).
Speaking to another loss in the title poem “The Body He Left Behind”, the speaker moves from the act of politely concealing emotion in “Thank You” to describing the adamant desire to let go of a loved one’s image: “It’s time to let go / of the body he left behind, / the one that’s lodged / in your eye like a floater…Yes, it’s time to let go / of the body he left behind. / It’s lodged / in your throat—you mistake it for breath.” It is the struggle to both intimately feel and pull beyond the absence of a loss, the stress in both knowing of an end and ignoring it, that Conner places as a centerpiece in his work. In recognizing the loss of their cat Lewis, for example, the speaker comes to the bittersweet understanding that, “My father told me the saddest stories / are not about broken things—no, the saddest stories are the happy ones / told in past tense because we know everything is broken and we have to see it untouched first, we have to do the breaking ourselves.” By so dynamically illustrating the feeling of recognizing a goodbye that is already in the room, Conner looks unflinchingly towards grief, while also allowing it to hold its own gentle, dismantling character—just as humans, just as animals. “I am lonely for my father,” the speaker says in “Bring Flowers to What You Love.” “I am lonely for my cat” they say in “Lost Cat”. These statements, if any, encompass The Body He Left Behind—they speak to the violent, beautiful impressions humans and animals trace into one another and the way naming that impression, claiming it, is powerful for the same reason naming a cat is: “because naming a cat / does not make him ours, / it makes him us.” Conner’s work shows us how we do that naming, over and over again.
Hannah Olsson holds a double BA in Cinema and Creative Writing English from the University of Iowa. During her time in Iowa, Hannah was the president of The Translate Iowa Project and its publication boundless, a magazine devoted to publishing translated poetry, drama, and prose. Her work, both in English and Swedish, has been featured in boundless, earthwords magazine, InkLit Mag, and the University of Iowa’s Ten-Minute Play Festival, among others.
Megan Alpert’s The Animal at Your Side(Airlie Press, 2020) is a collection that airs on the longer side for poetry books but consists of shorter, digestible poems. It is made up of five sections: Trails, Shores, Interiors, Out Further, and Ways in the Dark. These sections stitch together a multitude of narratives, where the heart of them is a longing for foundation while navigating the ways in which one becomes uprooted from a place, history, or a specific person. They read like lore, like a book uncovered by some mysterious happenstance, or like a fairytale suppressed in your memory. The themes travelled across the board but are rooted in foundation and how one rediscovers home, or a place that can resemble some consistency to such a term. Reading this collection, personally, was both inspirational and an act of discovery as someone who naturally admires poetry about yearning for a place or person, both in an erotic and mournful approach. Alpert has done both, effortlessly, and in a way that feels original.
At its core, The Animal at Your Side is a book about loss, longing, queerness, nature, and location. This collection displays ecopoetics in a way that is accessible to any reader, even one who may not have a background in poetics or environmental interest. Ecopoetics, in its simplest definition, is poetry with an ecological message; the message here being places that will eventually be impacted by climate change, more so than they already are. The Animal at Your Side exists in a surreal and confessional world, blurring the lines of grief and desire for an abundance of things.
The first section, Trails, introduces the reader to the lore of the speaker, their family, their roots… the trails one stumbles upon, and the tracks they leave behind, footprints settled in the dust. The world that is created is one of wild dogs, teeth, wars existing under tongues, bones, and the dirt these things return to. It explores and praises the undesirables. “The dark was soft. It ate / against my skin.” This line from the poem “The Wolf That Never Comes” shows one example of how this collection juxtaposes the dangerous and the inviting—something scary, like darkness or a wolf, can exist simultaneously as soft yet ravenous. Another example of this can be found in “Dawn,” where the first stanza reads: “My sister comes home / smelling of dirt she was buried in, / dandelion milk under her nails.” This poem, along with the others where the speaker grieves for the sister, are haunting and delicate within the flora and fauna planted throughout the book. We are introduced to war hidden in first love and cereal bowls, an aunt who lies and has an intuition for teeth, and a mother who doubles as a storyteller: “Said, Go down / into the earth, / the only / place I will not follow.”
This section leads to the second part, Shores, where we are introduced to a speaker exploring the waters off Massachusetts, the glassy rain in Seattle, and a yard below a purple sky, where they share a moment with their sister, prior to death. A later section eventually leads the reader to a village near the oil road, an apartment with stolen CDs, and a mountainside where a lion waits. Shores explores households, shared spaces, what it means to find home—even when that home is temporary. Despite exploring a new environment, the concerns remain the same, as does the writing—the entrapment of swaying between grief and want, because what else is there to write about? The truth of this book shares a story through new environments, persona poems, narrative tales, and curiosity of a strange eagerness that comes from intimate moments, as well as the melancholic.
One of my favorite poems, “Village at the End of the Oil Road” takes the form of one long stanza, almost looking like the image the poem is about. This narrative piece sets the scene at an oil camp, where the speaker chats on a porch littered with dead katydids while a mother holds her son in a hammock. “When I left, I could never find the text / that said in recent years the word for outsider / had changed from cannibal / to the one we have to feed so they do not starve.” The collection continues to lead toward that sentiment, the idea of being fed as not to starve. The sadness is snapped open and what remains is the fullness from the unburdening of it, or the “Desahogarse,” which “is to unburden yourself, not to undrown / or even to unhome.” The Animal at Your Side shows a world of curiosities through a voice that you can’t help but empathize for, and internally feel a kindred spirit to. Ecopoetics serving as a throughline throughout a collection whose place-based writing encourages the reader to think deeply about the places being written about in these poems. Themes of loss and longing that exist at the core of this collection feel all too real in a world being damaged by climate change, as if these poems are speaking to both ends: loss on the personal level and the concerning loss of the homes the speaker has found. The Animal at Your Side introduces these concerns through a lens that works to get every reader onboard with the fear of loss and the desire to gain.
Ryleigh Wann (she/her/hers) is an MFA poetry candidate at UNC Wilmington. Her past experiences include reading poetry for Ecotone, editing with Lookout Books, teaching creative writing, and working for the Parks and Recreation Department in Michigan. Her writing can be found in RejectionLetters, Flypaper Lit, and Kissing Dynamite Poetry, among others.
“I had to say goodbye to who I’d always been. I drove faster, rolled the window down and hung my head out and yelled it as loud as I could. ‘Miracelle Loving!’ I felt my name arc in the wind and slam back against the windshield, breaking into pieces as I drove on.”
Passages like this frame the way Miracelle Loving reaches out into the world in the novel Wanting Radianceby Karen Salyer McElmurray (South Limestone, 2020). Sinking deep into asphalt roads and long-forgotten, liminal spaces, Wanting Radiance presents the identities and secrets of its characters not as permanent fixtures, but as hollow spaces always wanting something more—a want that is tied to the past perhaps more than it rests in the future.
In introducing main character Miracelle, McElmurray constructs a woman with confidence in her own transience. A tarot reader’s daughter, Miracelle parks her life near weekly rented motels and neon-lighted bars, using a card deck to read off futures that suit the wishes of lonely women and hungry men.
Haunted by the mystery of her mother’s death in Dauncy, Kentucky, unaware of her own father’s name, displaced from her birthplace, and desperately trying to grasp the concept of love, Miracelle is a wanderer who finds permanence only in her ability to drift. However, when the voice of her deceased mother, Ruby Loving, suddenly wedges its way into Miracelle’s mind, it encourages Miracelle to find the past she has never known. Following news clippings from an odd wonders museum known as Willy’s Wonderama, Miracelle decides she cannot possibly know who she is meant to be—or who and how she is supposed to love—until she discovers everything her mother used to be.
Alongside the present, first-person perspective of Miracelle Loving, McElmurray intricately interweaves the histories of Miracelle’s mother Ruby, her father Russell Wallen, and Russell’s wife Della Branham through a third-person perspective. As the truth of Miracelle’s birth in the small town of Radiance comes to light, so too do different textures of wanting—deep, emotional desires for pre-envisioned futures—haunt each character Miracelle meets.
While describing Miracelle’s migratory movements through “smaller and smaller towns” filled with “Fresh Eggs, Jesus, One Way or No Way” signs and gravel roads eaten by dirt, McElmurray showcases the wants of each character as synonymous to the folds of mountainside towns that have decomposed under capitalist pressure, or fleeted into the skittishness of rear-view mirrors. While Miracelle’s mother wants Russell’s love, a love she finds as “water draining between my fingers”, Russell transforms love into a thing that owns and excavates, until his form of want becomes a thing which “reached inside the mountains and pulled out their hearts.”
McElmurray transforms the ideas of want and love within the character of Della Wallen, who wants a marriage with Russell in the way she can fix a car with warm, slick oil between her fingers, a love that is “the making and doing and seeing it come alive, the work of their hands.” While their definitions of love and want clash inside a depleted mountainside, Russell, Della, and Ruby lend Miracelle Loving the challenging task of finding a name for herself, rather than one that she can weld together from her past.
While realizing the truth behind her mother’s death—and all the desires which lead up to it—Miracelle speaks throughout the novel of “would” and “could.” Many sentences transition into the conditional tense throughout the novel, speaking to the way Miracelle continually works to foretell her future in a way that aligns with the lines of her past—lines which seem to rigidly anchor her body to her family history and the contours of the earth she travels through. Many times, Miracelle revises the trajectory of her future when reading her palms, falling on statements like, “By autumn, I could be standing in a doorway at night watching lightning bugs with a person I had yet to meet” or “Russell Wallen took hold of my hands, and we swung each other round and round. It could have been,” or, “I’d like to say I found just the right potion made of lavender and thyme and mystery, one to make all the world right.” However, only after finding the past, only after listening to the last echoes of her mother’s voice—“you know what to do”— does Miracelle find a new history for her name Miracelle Loving—an acceptance not based on her past, but based on something Wanting Radiance finds at its end: a feeling of present, steady reconciliation that, while not entirely full, still leaves enough space to pull one’s soul into something present and new.
While Miracelle succeeds in discovering her family history, she also realizes that it is not this history which affects the way which she now pursues her own life— her own form of loving. She concludes herself, “Miracelle Loving. My whole history was in that name. Loving I’d never wanted, but searched for like it was the last thing I’d ever find. And here I was, back from searching for the Holy Grail of family and I’d filled in a blank or two or three inside myself, all right, but a hundred more seemed to follow.” In this statement, Miracelle recognizes a new form of journey, one only she can follow; she finds freedom in traversing bravely through blank spaces that have never been defined by her past—spaces available for Miracelle to sculpt herself. Wanting Radiance illustrates a love in Miracelle Loving that arises not from grappling for a specific future, or returning to an unclear past, but instead from simply letting her soul step outside all of the seamed lines (the lines of family history and roadmaps and skin) to become something she can look at deep inside, and define as her own.
Hannah Olsson holds a double BA in Cinema and Creative Writing English from the University of Iowa. During her time in Iowa, Hannah was the president of The Translate Iowa Project and its publication boundless, a magazine devoted to publishing translated poetry, drama, and prose. Her work, both in English and Swedish, has been featured in boundless, earthwords magazine, InkLit Mag, and the University of Iowa’s Ten-Minute Play Festival, among others.
