The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bath by Jen Silverman

This selection, chosen by guest editor Katie Manning, is from Bath by Jen Silverman, released by Driftwood Press in 2022.

Bath 11

On New Year’s Eve my ex’s wife tells us about giving birth
to their daughter - about the salty Hudson Valley midwives

who thronged her - the lady doctor, face carved like a river-
bed, who shouted at her What are you waiting for -

and she repeated it to herself again and again until it was a
much larger question: What am I waiting for? -

about how her one fear was pooping in the bed and she kept
asking her husband, B, Am I pooping? did I poop? -

and each time he’d tell her You aren’t pooping - but even now
she isn’t sure if he lied. They are sober, drinking seltzer,

my partner and I are drinking our last glasses of wine before
a month-long fast; the first of the year is always the moment

to set ourselves towards the people we wish we were,
hit a button, launch. We pull Tarot cards from three different decks;

one of them is blunter than the others; when I fail it gives me
the Eight of Swords; when I am afraid, it tells me: What are you waiting for.

B pulls the Eight of Pentacles, his wife the Five, and my partner
pulls the Sun. Earlier in the night we pulled a card for their daughter,

who is sleeping in our bedroom after we danced her around the
hardwood floors, held her small shocked face to the revelation of

lights stringing the tree. Sometimes I pull back and look down at us
with a god’s eye. Sometimes all times coexist, and his wife is giving birth

at the same time that all of us are meeting, at the same time
that B and I are breaking up, both of us sobbing hysterically,

and his pronouns are still she/ her, and I don’t yet have ink all over
my arms, and my partner is a bright horizon that has yet to arrive.

Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. Jen is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere. Jen’s plays have been produced across the United States and internationally. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Yale Drama Series Award, and a Playwrights of New York Fellowship. Jen also writes for TV and film.

Katie Manning is the author of Hereverent (Agape Editions), Tasty Other (winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), and six chapbook collections, including How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books). Her poem “What to Expect” was featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast, and her poems have appeared in HAD, Poet Lore, SWWIM, Stirring, Thimble, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Katie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bath by Jen Silverman

This selection, chosen by guest editor Katie Manning, is from Bath by Jen Silverman, released by Driftwood Press in 2022.

Bath 9

(New Mexico)

Mud that will rebuild your bones. Iron
richer than blood. Yellow phosphorous to

give new light to your limbs, your loins.
All signs say: NO NUDITY. There is a limit

to the fountain of youth.
We have driven for miles

past billboards starring Jesus:
a reminder of His imminent return.

You are hungover; I am bruised; the wind
flakes like mica, our skins glitter,

our hair is jeweled with sand. We made
such grand promises. But here

we are, limping toward a new persuasion.
We have so many forgivenesses to beg.

I lower myself into a steam-choked pool.
You ask

do I feel good / do I feel strange / has anything changed.
The sky is a hot blue arc.

The dust is all dust, a living chronicle of
what falls apart, and why, and how quickly.

Feeling each bone separate a little, each muscle unstring
I tell you that it all feels different, this time,

this time,
in time, we will be new.

Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. Jen is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere. Jen’s plays have been produced across the United States and internationally. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Yale Drama Series Award, and a Playwrights of New York Fellowship. Jen also writes for TV and film.

Katie Manning is the author of Hereverent (Agape Editions), Tasty Other (winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), and six chapbook collections, including How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books). Her poem “What to Expect” was featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast, and her poems have appeared in HAD, Poet Lore, SWWIM, Stirring, Thimble, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Katie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bath by Jen Silverman

This selection, chosen by guest editor Katie Manning, is from Bath by Jen Silverman, released by Driftwood Press in 2022.

Bath 7

(Boston)

That winter, the roof fell in
during one long dinner. All of us

drenched in dust and wine.
When the chaos subsided, we examined the hole.

You thought it was a great improvement.
“Like a skylight,” you said.

You give me half your bed, we sleep like sisters,
orange duvet, animals of solace.

When we cook, the house heats
with lentils and turmeric, crusty bread.

When we dance, your neighbors come over;
the surgeon can salsa, he spins us one by one.

Tea leaves accumulate, abandoned mugs
divine themselves.

It was lonelier, in my other life
but it was a thing I made.

I wear your sweaters as the air tightens.
When I walk alone at night, I become

pure Libra, each hand cupped
on a different set of promises.

The trolley clattering past in the night,
the old windows creaking, a pharmacy of shampoo bottles

lining the bathroom window.
When I shower, you sit on the floor,

only steam between us.

Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. Jen is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere. Jen’s plays have been produced across the United States and internationally. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Yale Drama Series Award, and a Playwrights of New York Fellowship. Jen also writes for TV and film.

Katie Manning is the author of Hereverent (Agape Editions), Tasty Other (winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), and six chapbook collections, including How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books). Her poem “What to Expect” was featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast, and her poems have appeared in HAD, Poet Lore, SWWIM, Stirring, Thimble, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Katie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Sundress Reads: Review of Glass Essays

Sundress Reads black-and-white logo with a sheep sitting on a stool next to the words "Sundress Reads." The sheep is wearing glasses and holding a cup filled with a hot drink in one hoof and holding an open book in the other.
Cover of J.A. Bernstein's Glass Essays. Stormy blue, black, and white watercolors with a grown up spinning a child in a dress around by the arms. The title is at the top in clear block letters and the author's name is at the bottom.

J.A. Bernstein’s Glass Essays (Variant Lit, 2023) centers on a man’s experience in the liminal spaces between soldier-hood and parenthood.

This short essay collection opens with a brief two-page vignette recounting a time when the speaker’s wife bough overpriced watercress at a farmer’s market. The speaker then recalls the Oxford English Dictionary page for watercress, writing, “what a study in contrasts: water and cress; soothing and pain, as it were” (Bernstein 1). Thus begins a meandering thirty pages. Flashing between sweet moments of fatherhood and uncomfortable memories of life or death conflicts, the collection is its own study of moments of soothing and moments of pain.

In the essay “In the Lake, Before Dark,” a Jewish-American foreign volunteer in the Israeli Army describes the world around him in which he is deeply uncomfortable, in which fellow soldiers share explicit videos of women performing sex acts and brag about how many “Arabs” they’ve “gotten” (read: shot or killed) over McDonald’s burgers. In the same essay, fifteen years later, the speaker sits at his kitchen table while his toddler daughter eats breakfast. When her spoon hits the floor, the “discordant clanging” reminds him of the very American-aid-supplied .50-caliber rifles he himself used to fire (Bernstein 4). The reader is transported to the world of armed conflict with the speaker. Just two lines later, separated by a roman numeral, we are with the speaker and his toddler wading naked into a lake somewhere in Wisconsin, his wife looking upon them lovingly. These echoes of war contrasted with what would otherwise be normal, happy parenting moments resound throughout the entire collection.

As the speaker continues meditating on mortality, a new collective trauma unfolds on the page: the COVID-19 pandemic. In the essay “Bug,” which takes place early in the pandemic, he reflects on the fleetingness of childhood memories with his oldest daughter, now three. “‘I’ll always remember you,’ she says. ‘And I’ll always remember this, too,'” he says back (Bernstein 20). Again, speaker finds that performing fatherhood is a welcome distraction to the tragedies he’s hearing on the news. As a reader, I find this essay extra eerie; I know that the pandemic in Italy he only hears of on the news will soon become a reality in his own family’s life too. Thinking of the news, he says, “I remember how desolate the world is, and uncertain and afraid, and I fixate now on [my daughter’s] eyes: the way they almost glow there, so quiet and amused, so contented with the world, and alive” (Bernstein 20). Here, the speaker juxtaposes parenthood, the impending pandemic, and the passing of time so fluidly that it reads with ease. There are no lead pens here, rather a light airiness to the writing in stark contrast to the heavy subjects dissected and examined.

Meditations on the passage of time recur throughout these essays, in part thanks to their structure and placement. Time goes back and forth, ranging from 1984 to 2021. Not every essay is denoted with time, though. In this way, Bernstein potentially lets readers get lost, or perhaps, makes them work harder while reading.

The collection opens with an epigraph from its namesake, Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay:

            It is dawn.
            They are leaving Dover for France.
            My father on the far left is the tallest airman,

            with his collar up,
            one eyebrow at an angle.
            The shadowless light makes him look immortal,

            for all the world like someone who will not weep again.

Here, Carson describes her father as only an airman who is immortal, someone who will never cry. But the speaker in these essays is not immortal, noting that time and time again. He is certainly not someone who holds in his feelings; he pours his emotions onto the pages in this collection. Bernstein’s vulnerability on the page pushes back against Carson’s idea of a hardened soldier, as he shows us that there are other kinds of soldiers too: softer ones who feel conflicted about their violent actions, love for their families, and anxieties about the past, present, and future.

Glass Essays is available for purchase at Variant Literature.

Heather Domenicis (she/her) is an Upper Manhattan based writer and editor moonlighting at a tech startup. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from The New School and her words appear in Hobart, JAKE, and [sub]liminal. Born in a jail, she is writing a memoir about all that comes with that. You can follow her on Instagram @13heatherlynn1.

Sundress Reading Series Seeks Readers for Spring 2024

From February through May of 2024, the Sundress Reading Series will be back in person at Pretentious Beer Co. in the Knoxville Old City. This year’s iteration of the reading series will feature two headlining poets with an open mic to follow.

The Sundress Reading Series is an award-winning literary reading series previously hosted on-ground in Knoxville, TN, just miles from the Great Smoky Mountains. An extension of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Sundress Reading Series features nationally recognized writers and performers from around the US while also supporting local and regional nonprofits. 

Our events will take place on Thursdays from 7-9PM EST. The Spring 2024 series run during the following dates: February 22, March 21, April 18, and May 16. 

Performers will receive publicity across Sundress Publications’ social media channels in the lead up to their event, an opportunity to sell books, and a $100 honorarium thanks to generous grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Tennessee Arts Commission. We are currently seeking readers for our series with an emphasis on marginalized voices; you may note in your cover letter if you identify as a writer of color, a trans and/or nonbinary writer, a queer writer, and/or a disabled writer. 

To apply to perform for the spring, send 6-12 pages of poetry, a 50-100 word bio, CV (optional), a brief video of you reading one of your poems, and a ranking of preferred reading dates to sundresspublications@gmail.com. Please make sure the subject line reads “Reading Series Application – Your Name.” 

Applications to participate as a performer are open and the deadline to apply is November 15, 2023. Those selected will be notified by early December. 

Find our more or to view some of our past performers and schedules, visit our website.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents “Writing the Grotesque: A Generative Poetry Event” with Hannah V. Warren

Knoxville, TN—Sundress Academy for the Arts is honored to present, “Writing the Grotesque: A Generative Poetry Event,”’ a workshop led by Hannah V. Warren on October 11, 2023, from 6:00-7:30pm. This workshop will take place over Zoom. Participants can access the workshop at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (case-sensitive password: safta).

This generative writing event and short included lecture aim to encourage writers to explore the joys of incorporating traditionally displeasing aesthetics into their poetry. How can we beautify the non-beautiful? When should we let it remain hideous? Famously, aesthetician Wolfgang Kayser defines the grotesque as the “monstrous fusion of human and nonhuman elements.” With poets such as M. NourbeSe Philip, Danielle Pafunda, Selah Saterstrom, and Frank Stanford as models, this workshop offers composing methods to poets who seek to develop their use of bodily imagery.

Rather than viewing poetry as a genre with one lineage, participants will consider a variety of grotesque, abject, and sublime texts—including monster theory, art-horror, and fairy tales—as tools in poetry-writing. We’ll determine how a body can find power and reclamation in grotesquery. Participants will leave with written drafts and an expanded knowledge about what it means to embody and embrace the grotesque.

Photo of Hannah V. Warren

Hannah V. Warren is the author of Slaughterhouse for Old Wives Tales (Sundress, Winter 2023) and two chapbooks. Her works appear in Gulf Coast, Passages North, Crazyhorse, THRUSH, and Fairy Tale Review, among others. Currently a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia and a Fulbright scholar, Hannah’s writing and research interests center monstrous aesthetics, post/apocalypse literature, and representations of alterity.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to the workshop leader, Hannah V. Warren—Venmo: @hannahvwarren; PayPal: hannahvwarren@gmail.com.

This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bath by Jen Silverman

This selection, chosen by guest editor Katie Manning, is from Bath by Jen Silverman, released by Driftwood Press in 2022.

The Devil Dogs my Steps, but if it Weren’t Him, it Would Just Be Someone Else

1.

The Devil visits the weak of heart.
The Devil makes threats and proposals.
The Devil updates his resume and applies for positions.

2.

The Devil calls on a Monday. I am living in Cincinnati -
if you can call this living. I read bad paperbacks at the laundromat,
and fall down black holes of time. When I emerge, the air is icy
and the cherry trees, bloomed early,
are regretting it.

The Devil lingers outside the CVS.
He was waiting for someone, anyone will do. He says:
Forgot my CVS card, Can I Borrow Yours?
I wait while he buys Advil and socks.
The Devil says: I’m always forgetting something.

The Devil stops by my laundromat to do a load. He says
last time his clothes got nicked. Newspaper under one arm,
he bought an iced coffee that tastes like plastic.
The Devil tells me he’s kinda down:
It just feels a lot harder than it used to.

The Devil and I are walking by my apartment.
The houses are all abandoned here, and the blossoms are deciding
to die. Just because you’re ready doesn’t mean
the world is ready for you, says The Devil.

3.

The Devil peels potatoes. He’s throwing a dinner party. He
invited my landlord and all my exes. The girlfriends and

the boyfriends. He’s serving thick beef, white chocolate,
avocado. The only drink available is rum.

The ex-smokers sit on the fire escape and re-start.
The Devil says we can only talk about religion and politics,

unless anyone wants to discuss what it was like to date me.
My college girlfriend is the first to volunteer.

“You never even know if you’re dating her,” she says.
“She’s so aloof.”

There is also a man from my early twenties. He was balding
and had sad eyes. We never dated, but he raises his hand anyway.

“Her hair just got shorter and shorter,” he tells the room.
When everyone leaves, I do the dishes while The Devil makes

suggestions. The Devil says: Are you generous enough?
The Devil says: Keep your audience in mind.

4.
I go on vacation. The Devil comes along. He isn’t invited per se,
but also,
he isn’t not.

These are the things he brings to my attention:
A greyhound in a turtleneck
A stack of pomegranates
A boy on a yellow bike.

Late at night I sit in the hotel window
and read magazines about people
who felt things,
then acted on those feelings.

The Devil likes to sit in the hotel sauna.
He goes through all the towels.
That is the week he has a bum knee.

A beefy woman at the bar says:
I like to travel because it reminds me
how great it is to come home.

The Devil says:
I like to come home because it reminds me
what a disaster we make
of what’s ours.

Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. Jen is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere. Jen’s plays have been produced across the United States and internationally. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Yale Drama Series Award, and a Playwrights of New York Fellowship. Jen also writes for TV and film.

Katie Manning is the author of Hereverent (Agape Editions), Tasty Other (winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), and six chapbook collections, including How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books). Her poem “What to Expect” was featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast, and her poems have appeared in HAD, Poet Lore, SWWIM, Stirring, Thimble, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Katie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Lyric Essentials: Subhaga Crystal Bacon Reads Ely Shipley

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Subhaga Crystal Bacon joins us to discuss the work of Ely Shipley, blending lyric with narrative, and the political power of poetry. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?

Subhaga Crystal Bacon: “Boy with Flowers” is such a poignant story of early recognition of one’s gendered self apart or aside from one’s birth sex and family expectations around that. It felt very—literally—familiar to me. The same is true of his poem “Six, which illustrates the way external forces—teachers, “the recess lady,” suppress what in us must find release. “Night around Me” leaps forward into young adulthood, navigating the secret pleasures of the queer night. It’s about queer desire, and it’s so deeply felt. 

RW: How has Ely Shipley’s writing inspired your own?

SCB: Writing my new collection, Transitory, I was delving into the life stories of trans people murdered in 2020, and it touched on my own experiences with homophobia, threats of violence, and the ways our families and society shape how we experience ourselves. Eli’s work spoke to the wounded parts of me that are finding voice and healing through writing from my own gender queerness.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon reads “Boy with Flowers” by Ely Shipley

RW: When was the first time you read Shipley’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

SCB: I first read Shipley’s work in the wonderful and essential anthology, Troubling the Line. There are so many beautiful and important voices in that collection, torrin a. greathouse, Eileen Myles, CA Conrad. Eli’s work stood out to me because of its lyricism, his way of telling a story through image and metaphor. It’s to me a perfect blending of lyric and narrative.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon reads “Night Around Me” by Ely Shipley

RW: Who else have you been reading lately and who has been inspiring you in your craft? 

SCB: I read a LOT. Diane Seuss, Maggie Smith, Paisley Rekdal, Jennifer Martelli, Eduardo C. Corral, K Iver, Paul Tran, Eugenia Leigh. I return again and again to Plath, Hopkins, Stafford. I find reading to be very generative. I think most poets would say the same thing. If you’re having a block, just read. Seuss’s frank: sonnets has really shaped me. When I draft a poem, it’s often a ramble to try to get down the sound and the feeling. I often try to shape it into the American Sonnett—seventeen syllables per line. Seuss says in frank “the sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do/without.” Hitting those syllabics requires rethinking wording and phrasing, and then sometimes after I get it into the form, I undo it and see if a different form will suit. It’s a process of shaping, though I do recently have a lot of new sonnets! Doing the Sealey Challenge every August is a great way for me to expose myself to poets whose work is new to me, and I often find myself turning back to the blank page to digest what I’ve read and see what it resonates with inside me that wants to come out. Poetry inspires poetry.

Read more from this interview at our Patreon

Ely Shipley is the author of Some Animal (Nightboat Books), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Trans and Gender Variant Literature Award and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; Boy with Flowers, winner of the Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips, the Thom Gunn Award, and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; and On Beards: A Memoir of Passing, a letterpress chapbook from speCt! Books. His poems and cross-genre work also appear in the Western Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Interim, Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Witness, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Fugue, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

Puchase Some Animal.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon (she/they) is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her latest book, Transitory is the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, from BOA Editions, and was listed in the Library Journal’s list of Books to Read in 2023. She’s the author of Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, 2023, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, Blue Hunger, Methow Press, 2020, and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, winner of the A. Poulin New Poetry America Prize, BOA Editions, 2004.  A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she’s a teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Her work appears in a variety of print and online journals including the Bellevue Literary Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Indianapolis Review, Rise Up Review, Ghost City Review, and others. 

Pre-order Transitory.

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bath by Jen Silverman

This selection, chosen by guest editor Katie Manning, is from Bath by Jen Silverman, released by Driftwood Press in 2022.

Bath 6

(Louisville)

They dropped you in the river. They said
Praise Jesus, Praise Him. You bobbed up

half-drowned. You had seen clearly from
the bottom. Through the silt. Somewhere in

the river mud, you lost your God. So here
we are. And your long bones are light.

You are no longer tethered to this world.
You have un-believed yourself into liberty.

It does not feel like victory, you say,
to go from believing everything to nothing.

You doubt the reality of the sun, the wine,
your own long fingers, the rich moss, ice.

You return to water. Always, the water’s edge.
And I trail after, afraid you’ll stumble in,

reel yourself back to the bottom, back to a
reckoning, your face against the silt, your fingers

combing river-weed. I run you a bath.
I step into it in your stead. I lie at the

bottom, staring up through clear water, toward
the windows. I see nothing,

I see nothing but light.

Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. Jen is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere. Jen’s plays have been produced across the United States and internationally. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Yale Drama Series Award, and a Playwrights of New York Fellowship. Jen also writes for TV and film.

Katie Manning is the author of Hereverent (Agape Editions), Tasty Other (winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), and six chapbook collections, including How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books). Her poem “What to Expect” was featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast, and her poems have appeared in HAD, Poet Lore, SWWIM, Stirring, Thimble, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Katie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs, released by Mayapple Press in 2021.

Lavender

I grow among the bitterness of brambles,
unholy desires of fireweed, the silver plan
of hornets. I grow among a gathering
of gladiolas, swelling crowns
of bee-balm, blushes
of the scentless, the psychoses
of roses. I feel the fevers
of lilies, peer inside the freckled throats
of foxgloves. I listen
to the impatience of asters,
the hum of milkweed, troubles
of the snowball flowers,
ginger syllables of zinnias. My loves
lean toward my evergreen, for what
I will remember. I will
remember.

Nancy Takacs’s poetry awards include The Juniper Prize, the 2018 and 2016 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, Weber’s Sherwin W. Howard Award, a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and a runner-up for the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. She is the author of three other books of poetry and four chapbooks. Nancy lives most of the year in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah, and spends time in Bayfield, Wisconsin, near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in a small cabin with her husband, poet Jan Minich. Their son Ian Minich is a photographer in Salt Lake City. Nancy is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Utah’s art hub: Helper City.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.