Aiyana Masla wrote her first full-length poetry collection, The Underdream (Conerstone Press, 2025), during and after her struggle with Tuberculosis, to which she almost lost her life. The Underdream is a precious celebration of the sort of triumph that settles into the bones, that is punctuated by lines like “I have to taste the ocean again, I still have to do/big more generous with joy”( Masla 26). And while The Underdream is a book of struggle, it is not a battle cry, it is not boastful.
The Underdream is a recommitment to a life, a life of miracles, such as “oranges in February…dipping my fingers into fleeting/ethereal honey” (Masla 27). Masla writes toward this dedication through quiet revelation and vivid imagery. In “Dew & Dirt” Masla writes,
“Every morning, so far, I am alive.
Every morning, as if out of a thicket
or fog, the world returns, slowly seeping;
wets my skin with color. Life rushes in.” (Masla 49)
Here, Masla invokes life, a life of bounty, and communion with loved ones, of time that is not measured with an unrelenting hand. Her poems often unfurl like spells with repeated lines: “I am not ready,” “I will not,” “I want one more” (Masla 26). She invokes a life heavy with fruit, flower, longing, and color; “marigold,” “husky purple,” “yellow shimmer,” “winded pink,” “spring cream lavendered” and “persimmon yawn” (Masla 19, 18, 33, 38, 64). Though what she speaks of is ordinary, the language she uses to conjure everyday color, the beauty of being with ones you love, of wishing for a body that is healthy and whole, drips with juice, with flower, with the glitter and grit of desire, giving each poem a sheen of mysticism and magic.
The Underdream is a book of quiet holiness, of soft glory, of embodied worship. Aiyana Masla moves into a place familial and liminal, touched by dream, honeyed by grief. Broken into three sections: Night, Between Rooms, and Thaw, The Underdream moves between hospital rooms and gardens. Masla takes her time in each place, her eyes trained to see the almost infinitesimal as valuable and worth noticing. In “Savored” she writes:
“Two blinking stars, tiny petals
small fires in the blackness
your toes, cold
your breath, butter in your mouth
the blossom, now crushed in your pocket
salty, a pollen stain you couldn’t see,
but smelt. Small ceremony
you almost didn’t stop for.” (Masla 19)
Masla’s book is full of such “small ceremonies,” the measuring of precious ritual, and reminds us of the art of living a life of careful attention and awe. In “Savored,” she writes of pulling over near an empty soccer field, the “pink day fading.” And it is in this simple moment of stillness that a ceremony of noticing occurs, a moment is transformed and marked, stained by pollen, and is made memorable.
Masla deftly weaves jubilation and desolation. She names this emotion, “griefjoy,” in her poem, “Letter from my Lungs to My Legs” (Masla 28). She writes of “panging, irridescient,” the pain of sirens and needles, yet ends with a wish to be “winged and whole…To concave the sky into clean sound fingerprints of sleep” (Masla 28, 29). With her, we too, move through pain, through joy, through ecstasy, into clean air, to breathe and to sleep.
It is rare to find a book so complete in spirit, of prayer, and spell, and yet so grounded in the physical. Much of the movement of the book is of the sort done from a bed, or in a state of dreaming, lying in the tall grasses, or on a blanket, “half-asleep under a purple sweater” (Masla 13). Masla writes:
“I don’t want to brush. Let me tell you
about stretching out, then, into the fresh, fragrant
after driving and dangling my fingers
through an almost warm wind. The open window,
as if summer —as if not sick—as if almost carefree.” (Masla 13)
One is reminded that this is a book of convalescence, and the title itself, The Underdream, implies both spirit and earth, how dreams can lie with us, that they are not just lofty things, but that which stays with us in the bed, that which follows us into both “soil and sky” (Masla 58).
At the end of The Underdream, in “Returned,” Masla states,
“Hey,
I can learn
imperfect holiness.
I can learn this
dappled afternoon.” (Masla 66)
And longer after reading the book, we find our afternoons more dappled with sunlight. At the end, I couldn’t help but repeat Masla’s last lines out loud, “I have never been / so thankful” (Masla, 66 ). The Underdream is a collection of poetry of light that lingers, a book of afterglow.
Hannah Yerington is the author of the chapbook Sheologies, published by Minerva Rising Press in 2023. Her first full-length poetry collection, Garlic Moon, is forthcoming with Monkfish Book in Fall 2026/Winter 2027. Some of her awards and recognitions include being a finalist for The Peseroff Prize, one of the winners of the 2024 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest, and a winner of the Minerva Rising Dare to Be Chapbook Contest. She is the director of The Bolinas Poetry Camp for Girls and received an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her work can be found inLilith, Porkbelly Press, Prism, Room Magazine, Half Mystic Press, Hey Alma, andCascadia Daily News. She writes about Jewish magic, teenage prophet babes, and plant ancestors. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her imp puppy, Poe, her priestess kitten, Tala, and her warrior-chef husband, Kris. Find her on Instagram @hannahyerington.
Last September, I finally bought a new bookcase: white, the kind you buy from IKEA and assemble in twenty minutes. The promise of organization was a refreshing change to the lugging of books across continents every time I traveled to Bristol and back.
For years before university, across childhood and through my teenage years, I had organized my books on the wooden shelves above my desk. I had started with one shelf, stacking some of The Magic Tree House books, lone copies from A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Matilda. There were other books too, like Tell Me When? whose content I still vividly remember, especially the page about the invention of paper, and another book about space that my brother had gifted me.
There were other books, somewhere, split between my desk and a smaller unit my family used for our printer. It wasn’t until I was a teen that I began to become more curatorial.
I vividly remember reading The Book Thief for a book report assignment in eighth grade. Death as a narrator was unusual, interesting, but also a little disconcerting. I read Little Women for the first time the same year and became obsessed with it. I’ve gone back to it time and time again since then, as a girl, then as a young woman, the book transforming as my perspective did.
With the literary world’s dystopian and sci-fi phase, my shelves also housed books like Divergent, Delirium, Replica, and Carve the Mark. Before that was the Nicholas Sparks phase (which I blame on my sister—I first borrowed The Last Song from her) with books like Safe Haven, Two by Two, and At First Sight.
Occasionally, a nonfiction or literary fiction book, like The Art of War for Women or Men Without Women, would nestle itself among the rest.
What I became certain of, however, was that throughout my life, the right books seemed to find me at the right time. Or maybe I sought them out subconsciously. It was hard to say, but just like I had read Divergent at a time when I needed a push of courage, my first dive into fantasy books in years was during the initial months of Covid. Unable to leave the house and terrified the virus would steal my first year of university as it had my high school graduation, I found the perfect escape in fantasy worlds.
My shelf welcomed Six of Crows, The Folk of the Air, Shatter Me, Sorcery of Thorns, An Enchantment of Ravens, and many more. I was on the brink of starting my degree at a really chaotic time, and my reading, though mostly an escape and a way of improving my writing, later proved useful to my understanding of YA fiction and my interest in the wider age-genre from a publishing perspective.
Now that I have more shelf-space, I’ve been adding more books to both my collection and my TBR list. Among my recent reads are Babel and Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (my new all-time favorite—brilliant in every way!), and several short stories from The Best American Short Stories 2021 (special shoutout to “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog” by David Means).
Up next on the TBR list are Hamnet, The Poppy War, We Hunt the Flame, The Davenports (which I bought along with The Marriage Portrait and several other books at the latest Jeddah Book Fair), The Da Vinci Code, and An Ember in the Ashes.
So, if you need me, you’ll probably find me lost between the pages!
Tassneem Abdulwahab (she/her) is an aspiring writer and editor with a BA (Hons) Creative and Professional Writing from UWE Bristol. With a strong interest in culture, history, and psychology and a love for fiction, her writing often draws on one or more of these threads to tell character-centric stories. Trained in oil painting, she recently exhibited and sold two portrait paintings in February 2025. In her free time, you can find her buying more books (no, seriously—she owns three editions of Little Women), snapping pictures of the little details, or sitting at her easel!
Every year on my birthday, I write a letter to my future self. The tradition started when I was eight – I remember curling up under the heat of my hand-me-down Dell laptop in a windowseat, and determinedly introducing myself to 9-year-old Catie. I write these letters to dream, and to remember. I share my hopes for the upcoming year, and my triumphs and regrets from the receding one. Reading these letters feel like tossing of a baton across time, self to transitive self.
This example comes as close as I think I can get to a thesis for “why” I write. My letters blur the barriers between the struggles of my past and those of my present; much of my poetry is a similar act of reaching across time, in search of companionship. I also think these are the stories that I am most drawn to engage in this kind of timelessness, and embrace the non-linearity of the human experience. Every self who has written those letters sits at a computer, typing away in some corner of the universe, just as every author bemoans their writer’s block somewhere in our space-time continuum. As usual, I think James Baldwin summed it up best: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
There have been times in my life when I naively thought that nobody could fully understand the way I felt. Sometimes, a journal entry from several years back proves me wrong, and reminds me of my own resilience, reminds me that whatever insurmountable thing I’m facing, I have gotten through before. More often, though, I read a poem that encapsulates a feeling I thought couldn’t even be put into words. One of my favorite poems of all time, by the late, great Louise Glück, contains the lines “Whatever/returns from oblivion returns/ to find a voice”. I think reading, and writing, is me trying to find my voice—either in this timeline, or another.
It probably seems hippie-dippie, but in exceptionally happy or sad moments, I sometimes close my eyes and picture reaching my hand out to another self. I try to share my joy with another version of myself who is grieving, and I exchange my sorrow with a Catie who has stability to spare. I like to think of writing as another manifestation of this metaphorical hand—authors across time reaching out to ask Do you see me? Can you feel this, as I feel it and put it down in ink?
Needless to say, much of my favorite writing revolves around the idea of change and transformation – striving for a new future while retaining some kind of connection and tenderness to a past self. This is why I’m so passionate about Sundress’ mission to spotlight trans poetic voices. Trans people struggle with this tension and ceaseless tether between the old self and the new, and navigate it with more depth and gracefulness than most anyone else. I am inspired daily by the excellence and profound insight of these poets, and it is an honor to work with their holy words as an intern here at Sundress.
I’ll close the same way I closed my most recent letter, saying goodbye to my 21-year-old self and greeting my 22-year-old one:
“I hope I keep loving, and healing, and bouncing back. There are glimmers of such light. I wish I could send some back to the author of my last letter. And I hope I get some, on my bad days, from future selves who share my planetary place in the sky.”
Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.
backed with silk that is wet, that is dark, that is stained or snagged, its ribbon-edge
singed. If she weren’t spilled gold what would we see. If she weren’t
burned or strewn or gilt. If she weren’t
closed to us as though reachable only as the story.
Ready to sleep. I fell for women because I could read.
Because women were sleeping and I wasn’t, because women were speaking
and I wasn’t, because stories were telling to me. I fell for what they gathered
and kept gathering. I believed.
Rae Gouirand is also the author of two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (2018) and Open Winter (winner of the Bellday Prize, 2011), the chapbooks Rough Sequence (winner of the Keystone Chapbook Award, 2023), Little Hour (winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, 2022), Jinx (winner of the Summer Kitchen Competition, 2019), and Must Apple (winner of the Oro Fino Competition, 2018), and a short work of nonfiction, The History of Art (winner of The Atlas Review’s Open Reading Competition, 2019). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Bateau, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Foglifter, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, Michigan Quarterly Review, [PANK], Quarterly West, The Rumpus, Spinning Jenny, Under a Warm Green Linden, VOLT, ZYZZYVA, two volumes of the Best New Poets series, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide. She leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, including the cross-genre workshop Scribe Lab, and lectures in the Department of English at the University of California-Davis.
Shira Leah Haus (she/her) is a queer, antizionist Jewish writer from Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and wildness, among others. She has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and placed third in the 2024 Pinch Literary Awards for poetry.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Shira Haus, is from The Velvet Book by Rae Gouirand (Cornerstone Press, 2024).
The Velvet Book
Texture draw us back into one place.
Draw the autumn its certain pictures, ones that establish
what to solve for want. The landscape spectral behind us.
It reduces. Step into it, acquire that drape.
Fascinate. Become subject.
To be subject is to disrupt, to injure the tender onlooker.
Good luck getting past the center of the shot. It baits you
neither flame nor extinguishing.
You call the surface mine as it digs deeper the well sounding
mine mine mine. As though consenting.
Velvet give me sonorousness. Leave me rung. Beyond amorous.
I’ll travel the longing until it becomes the dress.
Rae Gouirand is also the author of two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (2018) and Open Winter (winner of the Bellday Prize, 2011), the chapbooks Rough Sequence (winner of the Keystone Chapbook Award, 2023), Little Hour (winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, 2022), Jinx (winner of the Summer Kitchen Competition, 2019), and Must Apple (winner of the Oro Fino Competition, 2018), and a short work of nonfiction, The History of Art (winner of The Atlas Review’s Open Reading Competition, 2019). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Bateau, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Foglifter, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, Michigan Quarterly Review, [PANK], Quarterly West, The Rumpus, Spinning Jenny, Under a Warm Green Linden, VOLT, ZYZZYVA, two volumes of the Best New Poets series, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide. She leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, including the cross-genre workshop Scribe Lab, and lectures in the Department of English at the University of California-Davis.
Shira Leah Haus (she/her) is a queer, antizionist Jewish writer from Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and wildness, among others. She has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and placed third in the 2024 Pinch Literary Awards for poetry.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Shira Haus, is from The Velvet Book by Rae Gouirand (Cornerstone Press, 2024).
The Velvet Book
Velvet was someone saying yes, the room beyond this door, the space
between your ribs, where between rib and rib darkness holds itself
compact as a line pressed from the white. Velvet was the heaving, always
closing what could not stay open: we were supposed to die out. / You had your face
pressed up against the coarse dyed velvet / Of the curtain, always looking out for your own
transmigration: / What colors you would wear, what cut of jewel posed the one whose lines
my hands horizoned. So many kinds of pages.
Rae Gouirand is also the author of two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (2018) and Open Winter (winner of the Bellday Prize, 2011), the chapbooks Rough Sequence (winner of the Keystone Chapbook Award, 2023), Little Hour (winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, 2022), Jinx (winner of the Summer Kitchen Competition, 2019), and Must Apple (winner of the Oro Fino Competition, 2018), and a short work of nonfiction, The History of Art (winner of The Atlas Review’s Open Reading Competition, 2019). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Bateau, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Foglifter, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, Michigan Quarterly Review, [PANK], Quarterly West, The Rumpus, Spinning Jenny, Under a Warm Green Linden, VOLT, ZYZZYVA, two volumes of the Best New Poets series, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide. She leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, including the cross-genre workshop Scribe Lab, and lectures in the Department of English at the University of California-Davis.
Shira Leah Haus (she/her) is a queer, antizionist Jewish writer from Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and wildness, among others. She has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and placed third in the 2024 Pinch Literary Awards for poetry.
I can’t fit all the books in my personal collection in one photograph. Some of them are stacked in my television console while others are on my counter, and the majority are shoved onto two bookcases: a larger one downstairs, carefully organized into genre, and another in my bedroom that I’ve dubbed “The Romance Shelf” for all my favorite romance and Young Adult novels.
Even with all these books scattered around my apartment, I still have another full bookshelf in my childhood bedroom in Texas, filled to the brim with all the books I couldn’t afford to house here in Tennessee once I moved for college. And once a book becomes mine, it’s hard for me to let go. While most readers are incredibly careful with their books, trying their best to keep them pristine, I view the imperfections on my books as a badge of honor. Almost all of them have signs of love, even if they’ve barely been touched. To me, the wear and tear of a book can show you how much it means to its owner (as seen by the tear stains inside several of of my favorites).
Many people would hear that information and assume that I’m incredibly well-read. While that is correct in some aspects, there’s a lot more to the story. In truth, I love to collect books. There’s nothing quite like the rush of going into a bookstore, whether it be a Barnes and Noble or a well-used thrift books establishment, and finding a title that you want to dive into. The issue for me is that I can never say no. So, the book ends up coming home with me to collect dust on a shelf until I find the energy to pick it up.
As a mood reader, I find it very difficult to stick to a pre-planned “To Be Read.” To choose a book to read, I have to ponder on what I’m currently feeling, what I want to feel, and how much is going on in my life. However strange this may be, I have noticed that waiting to read a book you’ve been anticipating adds an incredible amount to the experience. In fact, most of my favorite novels are ones that I put off reading for months or years. So, this list of novels on my shelf falls in that category. Each of these are books that I had been wanting to read before I actually picked them up, whether by force through classwork or my own volition. Now, they sit on my shelf with pride, and I am all the better for the knowledge they’ve brought me.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
I anticipated this book for a year before I read it. The first time I had heard of it, I was a junior in high school, and I watched as the seniors filed into my AP Environmental Sciences class with tears on their faces. When I asked what was wrong, they just shook their heads. Later, I would learn that each of them had just finished reading The Kite Runner in Mrs. Bing’s AP Literature and Composition class, which I knew I would be taking next year. Fast forward a year later, and the book was already sitting on my shelf, begging to be cracked open. Throughout the course of reading this novel, I shed several tears and felt things I didn’t know books could make me feel. For the first time, I felt like the class discussions I was having with my peers meant something important, and I knew they all felt it as well. To me, this book is a beginning. It started my love of literary analysis and discussion, my craving for knowledge about worlds outside of my own, and made me wonder if I could ever be as good of a teacher as Mrs. Bing was one day (still to be seen!). Even more, it was a revelation that opened my eyes to the world around me and changed the way I viewed the world.
The Kite Runner perfectly blends themes of friendship, family, and political conflict, highlighting the effects of the Afghan conflict on Amir, our main character. More so, it tackles the ideas of forgiveness and atonement, painting a beautiful picture that allows readers to both understand and identify with Amir. Plus, the novel’s rich descriptions of Afghan culture, both in Afghanistan and as refugees in America, are absolutely amazing. I truly recommend this book to everyone, no matter who you are!
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
This one is a little more embarrassing. When I was in middle school, I was obsessed with Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices trilogy. In the trilogy, two of the main characters bond over their love of Dickens, particularly A Tale of Two Cities, and constantly make references while using themselves as metaphors for the characters in the novel. I begged my mom to take me to the mall, where I bought a Barnes and Noble Classics edition of the novel. But the moment I cracked it open, I couldn’t read it. For years, I tried to get past the first few pages, but I could never understand what exactly Dickens was trying to say. It felt too profound, so I gave up, resolving to read it eventually, whenever that may be. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I walked into Dr. Nancy Henry’s 19th Century British Literature course at the University of Tennessee and saw A Tale of Two Cities on the syllabus! Reading it as an adult and finally understanding those small references that I wanted to know so desperately as a child healed me, but it also opened my mind up to a world of new history and literature. Once again, I felt connection with my peers through class discussion, and I firmly believe those discussions and interactions are the reason it is cemented as my favorite classical novel. Well, other than the fact that I cry every time I read the last few paragraphs!
Before reading this book, I didn’t know much about the French Revolution. However, Dickens’ use of imagery and metaphor, especially in the scenes with Madame Defarge, are insightful into the conflict itself. Each character is so lovable in their own ways, even the “bad” ones! They make you root for them and sympathize with them, and by the end of the novel, I was fully invested into each and every one of them. I never wanted it to end!
The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin
I felt the opposite of anticipation before reading this book. I had only ever heard of it in spaces that praised incredibly complex fantasy, and quite frankly, I never thought I would get into it. Knowing that a third of the book is in second person point-of-view intrigued me, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt too intimidated to actually purchase it. Imagine my surprise when I saw the syllabus for my Science Fiction and Fantasy class in college, and The Fifth Season was the second to last book on the list! I was told by my professor, Dr. Amy Elias, that it was one of the best books she had ever read, but I couldn’t get rid of the dread lingering in my stomach leading up to the moment I cracked open the novel. But from the moment I read the first page, I was hooked. Each line brought more questions that I needed answered, and the only way to get them was to continue reading. By the end of the novel, I was left with even more, yet I was still completely satisfied with everything I’d read.
It’s difficult for me to talk about how much I love this book without spoiling it, so I’ll be brief. Jemisin does something so beautiful with her writing, and each point of view is so rich and vibrant. The way she tackles oppression and family throughout the entire series is masterfully done, and although it is confusing at times, I have never felt more satisfied by learning the answers I’d been longing to know by the end. Even better is the worldbuilding and intricate magic system, using the earth and magic in a way I’ve never read before. For those who love fantasy and are looking for something new, this is my number one recommendation!
Turtles All The Way Down by John Green
When I was younger, I was an avid fan of John Green. Like most people my age, The Fault In Our Stars was one of my first heartbreaks caused by a book, and I read the rest of his repertoire rather quickly. When Turtles All The Way Down was finally published, though, I had moved on to other things. I had always wanted to read it, but I never had the chance. In fact, I was told not to read it. Because I am someone who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) like the novel’s main character, several people told me that reading it would do nothing but trigger a mental spiral. However, that made me want to read it more to see if its depiction of OCD was realistic.
This book did trigger a mental spiral for me, but I think that shows how good of job Green did with his depiction of OCD. I found myself relating to every sentence and every thought. Although it is easier for me to control my obsessive-compulsive thoughts than Aza, I could complete understand the way her mind works, as it is the same as mine. It almost scared me to see my own thought processes reflected in a novel not written by me. I truly would recommend this book to anyone who knows someone with OCD or obsessive-compulsive tendencies. It will make you understand them and their brain a lot more!
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
I first learned about Malcolm X in high school, but he was characterized as “the opposite of Martin Luther King Jr.” My peers and I were told that he had more “radical” ideas and that he supported the use of violence during the Civil Rights Movement. Immediately, I was intrigued to learn more about him, but I was never a big fan of autobiographies. Once again, I was gifted the pleasure of reading this novel through a class syllabus, for Dr. Urmila Seshagiri’s memoir course. Opening those pages and reading their contents was one of the hardest things I’ve done. I had to come to terms with a lot of information that made me feel sad, uncomfortable, and downright angry, but it helped me gain a new perspective into this integral part of American history. I am so grateful for the chance to glimpse into Malcolm X’s mind, and I feel that it helped me understand so much more about the Black experience in America, both in the past and today.
The thing that shocked me the most about this novel is how much of Malcolm X has been erased or dimmed in current American history classes. It spans all the way up to X’s assassination, and Alex Haley chronicles some of the time afterwards. Through the entire memoir, one thing is obvious: Malcolm X wasn’t a man that craved violence, he was a man that craved change and autonomy. Because of the gross mischaracterization that mainstream society places on X, I believe every American should read this memoir.
The Poppy War by RF Kuang
I had this book endlessly recommended to me before I read it. Everyone told me it was one of the best fantasy books ever written while also warning me about its dark nature. “This isn’t what you normally think when you think of fantasy,” they said. “It’s hard to read at times, but it’s worth it.” Eventually, I bought it, and like several other books, it sat on my shelf collecting dust for a few years. It wasn’t until a very close friend of mine sat on my couch and finished the third book in the trilogy with tears streaming down her face that I knew I needed to pick it up immediately. Turns out, everyone was right. Immediately upon finishing it, after I had already cried three times, I knew that this book had dethroned another and taken the spot of my Favorite Book.
Much of this novel is heavily inspired by Chinese history, the Sino-Japanese War, and acts of genocide. As the main character, Rin, learns more about the world around her, she becomes entangled with the empire’s gods, realizing that the line between the spiritual and physical world is thinner than she previously believed. When war comes to Nikan, she is forced to throw herself into battle at the cost of her own mind and sanity. I feel like Kuang perfectly uses history and mythology together to create a story centered around incredibly complex characters. Truly, her writing perfectly blends plot with character in a way that I’ve never seen before. I felt like reading it helped me understand what I want to accomplish in my own fantasy novel, and I believe it made me a better writer. I want everyone under the sun to read this book!
The Pairing by Casey McQuiston
Casey McQuiston is an author I’ve loved for a long time. Red, White, & Royal Blue and One Last Stop were both five star reads for me, and I consistently reread them when I want to feel something again. Their novels center around some of the most beautiful and difficult parts of queerness, and I’ve always appreciated their ability to make me laugh and cry two pages apart. The Pairing was a novel I had been looking to read since its publication, but I wasn’t able to get to it until a month ago. However, I was shocked (in a good way) by how different this novel was compared to McQuiston’s others.
I enjoyed every part of this book. The writing made me feel like I was truly traveling across Europe with Kit and Theo, and the different foods and wines they tried made me desperate to take my own trip across the sea. Queer culture is littered throughout its pages, and Theo’s gender identity struggles in learning they are nonbinary were included in such a natural, raw, and beautiful way. However, the main reason I am including this book is because it changed and reframed my perception of love. Kit and Theo are exactly what I believe love should be— they see every single part of each other, including their flaws, and love each other because of them rather than in spite of them. The way that Theo and Kit talk about each other in this book is magical, poetic, and realistic all at once, and I feel that everyone should aspire to find this kind of love. If you want to read the happiest ending, pick this one up immediately!
Shelby Hansen (she/her) is a creative writer and self-proclaimed fantasy maestro hailing from the northern plains of Texas. She recently graduated from the University of Tennessee’s English program with a focus in Literature and Creative Writing, where she won several awards for her fiction. Her writing often focuses on womanhood, identity, and the reclamation of the self. This is reflected in her debut novel, which she hopes to publish soon. When she is not writing or teaching today’s youth, she enjoys reading, crocheting, swimming, and spending time with her two cats, Stella and Gemma.
Ahead of the 2025 release of her fourth poetry collection, Unrivered, Donna Vorreyer spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Lizzy DiGrande. Here, they discussed the beauty that grows from grief and resilience, the complexities of fertility in humans and nature, and how we learn to live inside bodies and lives that are always shifting.
Lizzy DiGrande: The title “Unrivered” appears in various forms throughout the collection, such as in “Blood Line,” where you write, “I wanted there to be a rivering, a signal.” Can you talk about what “rivering” means and how you feel it encapsulates this poetry collection?
Donna Vorreyer: There is a reason civilizations were built around rivers. Fresh water for drinking, for cooking, for planting, for animals. Food sources. Transportation. So when a landscape is “unrivered,” through drought or sprawl or natural disaster, everything around it also becomes lost. I started to think about the idea of droughts in a lifetime, how we are drained of certain things that have defined us.
For me, it started with early menopause. My body literally stopped flowing, and the thing that I had been taught made me a woman was gone. And of course, I’m aging and all the fun physical things that come with it, so vitality and youth are ebbing. Then in 2018, I lost both of my parents, to whom I was very close. That loss led to a lot of questioning of the faith I had been raised in. Then lockdown came. Then I retired from teaching, the only job I had ever known as an adult for 36 years. With that retirement also came the loss of relationships I had thought were friendships, but were merely relationships of proximity and convenience. So when I was reaching for a concept, a word that would encompass the feeling of losing the most grounding elements of identity, “unrivered” seemed correct. In the poem you mentioned, “rivering” is a direct reference to menstruation/menopause, but the idea of being unrivered hopefully resonates in multiple ways as a reference to loss in general, to what is drained from you as you age. And so, how does one reroute the waters? Come up with new ways to see the self and the world? You “salvage a self, unrivered.”
LD: Religious imagery is a strong, recurring theme in this collection, as evident in the mentions of transubstantiation, stigmata, apostasy, and even snakes. How has your own relationship with Christianity or Catholicism shaped the way these themes appear in your work?
DV: My relationship with faith changed while caring for and then losing my parents during lockdown, which happened shortly after. I struggled (and still do) with how to reconcile the faith I was raised in with the harsh realities of grief and isolation and global loss. I still find solace in and seek out places where I feel the pull of the spiritual—sometimes in expected places, like churches, and sometimes in unexpected ones, like viewing a bank of clouds or watching the movement of light on water. When the concept of self is wavering or uncertain, the desire to connect or reconnect with something larger than the self becomes very strong. A desire for connection with the divine, however one defines it, can be a grounding force.
LD: In “Coppering,” you highlight Dorothy Hood’s 1977 painting Copper Signal as the inspiration behind this ekphrastic poem. How did you build on this piece of visual art to bring a deeper meaning to it? How is the poem interacting with Copper Signal, and what are you hoping your poem adds to the conversation?
DV: I first saw this painting in San Antonio while attending AWP. The painting is mostly rust/red with a split or chasm of those colors that leads to a jagged brilliant blue that then fades into a deep midnight in the bottom left corner. One of the phrases I wrote in my notebook in the museum that day was “blood-rock/blue-vein,” and the poem builds from a description of the abstract landscape in the painting to a reference to the menopausal body, still “thick with life and howling.” Copper is often associated with blood—the color, smell, and taste—and it seemed like a natural progression as I drafted the poem. There is also a deep rift in the painting, something divisive that separates one side of the canvas from the other. To me, that seemed like a clear image of a breakage, a major change. I don’t know if it adds anything to the conversation about Hood’s painting. I only know how it felt to me in that moment.
LD: In your acknowledgements, you mention how Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve in DuPage County, Illinois, almost plays a character in many of these pieces. How has this place worked to ground your poems and shape the collection?
DV: I love being outdoors (though not sleeping there—I’ll hike all day, but I want a bed and walls at night). We are lucky to have a 2500-acre forest preserve about a mile from our home, and it is the place where we most frequently walk (and, during the pandemic, the only place we went outside the house). After spending hours and hours there, I continue to make discoveries (like a small waterfall whose force varies with the weather or a gully that looks like the perfect place for someone to die in a Decemberists song). I also continue to be delighted by its small pleasures—a family of deer running across the trail, the mosses that grow on the rocks, the thunderous frogsong in the spring. A forest is also the perfect place to observe a constant state of change and cycles, a type of reinvention that mirrors the changes and cycles of aging in the book.
LD: In “I Contest My Body’s First Eviction Notice,” you break words across lines, even starting a new line with a singular letter from the previous word. How does intentional fragmentation work to reflect this poem’s subject matter?
DV: I remember that I wanted those fragmented lines to be able to be read in two ways, for the reader to think, “Wait a minute, I thought it was this, but it’s this.” The mid-word line breaks move the meanings from broad to more specific. The stairs are a subtle swell, but then, oops, they cause swelling. The damage can refer to the body as a whole, but the addition of the d on the next line allows it to be a specific part that is damaged. There is a sort of disorientation when the body starts to refuse tasks that used to be easy or starts to exhibit new and troubling symptoms. I wanted to try and mimic that confusion with the structure of the poem. And I do love a poem that resists being read aloud, that wants to be seen on the page.
LD: There is tension between the idea that one’s imagination remains fertile, but the physical body is barren. How has this juxtaposition shaped your own sense of identity? What do you hope readers take away from this concept and its relation to womanhood and resilience?
DV: I think that tension is true for anyone, regardless of gender. Everyone has a body, and every body ages, though aging as a female brings different expectations from the world, particularly regarding appearance and worth. And the imagination can be both a refuge and a very unwelcome generator of maybes that can make reality seem even more difficult. So I think that specific word as it relates to the book, to being unrivered, is more related to losing a sense of usefulness, a sense of purpose, a sense of value as a person in the world, and imagination is key to seeing new versions of a self that has changed. I would hope that readers see themselves somewhere in these poems and know that they are not alone in their self-criticism and their raging against time, but also not alone in their turn toward what is beautiful, toward desire and joy.
LD: The concept of “dropping breadcrumbs” is scattered throughout the collection. What does that image mean to you, and why do you think it recurs?
DV: That image appears three times because it is the last/first line in the heroic sonnet crown that anchors the collection. Thus, it is an ending line in one sonnet, a beginning line in another, and then an internal line in the final sonnet that finishes the crown. The image of dropping breadcrumbs, of course, comes from Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail to follow back home. In reality, dropping breadcrumbs in a forest wouldn’t work as birds, insects, and animals would make them quickly disappear. So dropping breadcrumbs became, in the crown, once a mundane image of cooking dinner and twice a metaphor for a flawed tether to past mistakes, a false belief that one can go back and somehow change what has already happened.
LD: There are so many strikingly vivid images in this collection, such as a student carrying a lemon in his pocket, and “the intricate lace edges of kale mapping an unknown coast.” Are these images derived from observation, imagination, or a mix of both?
DV: I think it’s always a mix of both. I taught middle school for thirty years, and the lemon in the pocket was a real thing. (You don’t want to know what other things were kept in some pockets, trust me.) But the placing of it in that poem came from a flash of that memory out of nowhere, a way to connect a past experience with a certain state of mind I was trying to convey in the poem. All writers are observers, but just writing a pure description or narration of an image or event is not a poem. Observation and extrapolation combine to make the most memorable images, I find.
LD: Different sections of this collection touch on topics ranging from grieving the loss of parents, menopause, body dysmorphia, and more. Is there a significance to the order of these sections, perhaps to suggest growth in the writer?
DV: When I ordered the collection, I knew I would be splitting up the sonnets in the crown, so I first chose poems that seemed to connect to each individual sonnet in some way. (A reader may see repeated themes or diction or images, for example.) But the arc of the collection as a whole moves from grief, confusion, and fear to acceptance and rediscovery. This is not to imply that confusion and grief and fear end, but more to recognize that they have become a part of learning how to continue to grow and find joy. The heroic crown as a form is both propulsive and recursive, moving forward by throwing back to a line from the previous sonnet, and then bringing back all of the first lines at the end. Life is the same way. It is always moving forward, even while it is looking back.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Unrivered (2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016), and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her poems have been nominated for multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. Donna has also published seven chapbooks, including The Girl (2017, Porkbelly Press). She currently lives and creates in the western suburbs of Chicago, runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, and is the co-editor/co-founder of the online journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.
Elizabeth “Lizzy” DiGrandeis a graduate student in Emerson College’s Publishing and Writing program, where she also serves as a Transformational Leaders Fellow and Writing Assistant for the Emerson Grad Life Blog. She is on the board of the Women’s National Book Association, Boston chapter, and is passionate about amplifying women’s voices in publishing. Originally from New Jersey, she now resides in Boston and can often be found perusing the city’s public libraries or exploring new restaurants. She hopes to build a career as both a food writer and literary agent championing female-identifying authors.
I exhale the moment I cross the threshold. I’ve just returned from a semester abroad in Peru, and am filled with a quiet, resounding sense of homecoming as I step into the dust particles and ghosts of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. I study the new titles on the “Queer Poetry” shelf with a sense of reverence and curiosity, discovering the books that fill the spaces of those sold while I was away.
My friends, browsing the shelves of the Grolier, Summer 2024.
I’ve worked at the Grolier since 2023, and its impact on my life cannot be overstated. Some of my best friends were made as I heard the tinkle of the bell over the 100-year-old door. Some of my favorite poems were found during slow afternoons spent lounging in the spotted armchair behind the register. It feels like my home, though, because our impact on each other is reciprocal; whenever I visit the shop, as a bookseller or buyer, I swap out a book on the central “Recommended” table for a book I’m currently reading and loving. Nothing brings me more of a thrill than seeing someone pick up a new love of mine from the slanted wood, bringing Raisa Tolchinsky’s Glass Jaw, Cam Awkward-Rich’s Dispatch, or my all-time favorite Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems to the ancient cash register.
I feel like these shelves are mine, just as I am theirs. I am beholden to their words, to the pull of the poems they cradle and hold. They introduced me to my love of Spanish with bilingual collections like Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s Pixel Flesh. They influenced my tattoos and marked my body forever with Limón’s proclamation that, “I swear, I will play on this blessed earth until I die.” These bookshelves hold memories and dreams, tears and hopes, and I feel the blessed weight of it all whenever I enter the shop.
My physical, personal bookshelf also transforms because of the Grolier. It expands in new ways after every reading: Edgar Kunz’s Fixer became a staple on my nightstand after witnessing the marvel that was his poem “Piano” in a cramped corner of the shop. Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s triumphant “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern”, similarly, earned their collection Rocket Fantastic a central place on my shelf. Above my shelf hang bookmarks from all the incredible small presses and imprints that sell their wares at our shop: Analog Sea, Zephyr,and Lily Poetry Review, to name just a few. I am a better writer, reader, and person for the ways that my bookshelf mirrors the change that a poetic haven like the Grolier has sparked in me.
Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.
Bookshelves are like a vast walk-in closet, a limitless wardrobe, teeming with cotton t-shirts, vibrant knit scarves, pressed tuxedos, and polyester pajamas. And depending on your mood, a good book should slip over your skin like delicate silk. But like many things that have the power to remove us from reality, books, particularly those that find solace on our shelves, can be sacred.
For me, sometimes this ethereal closet, my books, can feel so sacred that they’re nearly untouchable. They sit on my black, wooden shelf collecting dust, like expensive jewelry locked up in a glass case.
This feeling of not being able to read the books on my shelf does not stop me, however, from buying more books. I buy them nearly everywhere I go. I can barely fit more on the shelf if I try. But like the others, each new novel watches as I continuously glance past them, choosing instead to check out book after book from the public library. And so, in a sense, the entire world has become my metaphorical bookshelf. Well, at least as far as my library card can take me.
Regardless, from my physical and metaphorical bookshelf, here are some stories that have changed my life, and should be added to your wardrobe immediately.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett: This book made me yearn for a summer love I never lost. It’s the first piece of “COVID lit” (as in, a book that takes place during the COVID-19 pandemic) that I thoroughly enjoyed, as I often feel that novels centering this period can be redundant. The book is set on a cherry farm in rural Michigan in the summer of 2020, where we are introduced to Lara, a mother of three teenage/adult-ish girls. Throughout the story, the girls beg their mother to recount her summer, many decades ago, when she worked as an actress at a community theatre company called Tom Lake. It was there, in the throes of her youth and ambition, that she fell in love with a witty yet troubled future movie star, who eventually met an untimely death. While I don’t say this lightly, this book was close to perfection and the essential summer read. Patchett is known for her lyrical writing, and this novel is no exception. She was able to effortlessly move back and forth in time while making me feel deeply connected to each character, whether they were a protagonist or a simple guest on the page. Patchett mastered the essence that beauty and suffering can coexist, and through hardships come generational wisdom and quiet strength. There’s a reason this lovely, floral book cover is often on display in bookstore windows; it’s worth picking up.
We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry: Was one of your childhood fixations the Salem Witch Trials of 1692? This novel, set in 1989 Danvers, Massachusetts—the town adjacent to Salem—follows a group of high school seniors with ambitions of winning their school’s first-ever field hockey championship. When a summer training camp accidentally invites in some dark magic, it soon takes over the entire team. Laced with the town’s spooky history and tales of modern femininity, this story’s omniscient narrator takes the reader through a school year full of teenage angst, sacrificial offerings, and high school sports. All elements that make for an enticing read. As a Boston resident, I found this book’s connection to real history to be addictive, presenting a new spin on the historical fiction genre. Though surprisingly dense with lots of required attention to detail, Barry perfected the complexities in the pursuit of perfection at any cost, especially in girlhood. This story is especially perfect as we approach the autumnal months.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: How can I call myself a global citizen and publishing enthusiast without having this masterpiece on my bookshelf? This dystopian novel has found its home on the New York Times bestseller list for decades, and rightfully so. It follows a character named Offred, one of thousands of women who have had their rights stripped away and forced into reproductive servitude in a totalitarian theocracy. Atwood is one of the most impactful authors of our time, and each word in this book is extremely intentional. A prominent reason why this book will always find a home on my shelf is not only because it’s a banned book, but it is one of the best examples of how literature and publishing can be an act of resistance against injustice. There is power in education, the written word, and writing our greatest fears on the page. Don’t let this book be only a classic that you were forced to read in high school English class. It deserves so much more.
Come & Get It by Kiley Reid: This story, Kiley Reid’s second novel, released in 2024, is the true definition of women-centered fiction. Spanning several points of view, the book centers on three main characters at the University of Arkansas (hence the large pig on the front cover): Millie, an RA; Agatha Paul, a visiting writing professor; and Kennedy, a new transfer student with a complex past having trouble fitting in on campus. This novel tackled complex topics like gender and sexual orientation exploration, feelings of despair and loneliness, heartbreak, and more. How Reid explores each character inside and out makes her writing something to behold. While reading it, there were several “I never knew other people thought or experienced this” moments for me, which is my mark of an impactful book. As many writers know, by writing the specific, this book is totally universal, and a worthwhile read for all ages.
The Wedding People by Alison Espach: With recognizable cover art and a place on at least one celebrity book club’s list, I was expecting this recent summer read to fall flat for me, as several other overly hyped popular fiction books tend to me. But I was gladly mistaken. After a particularly horrible day, after a series of particularly horrible months, Phoebe Stone jets off to the scenic and charming town of Newport, Rhode Island, intending to end her life. However, when she discovers that her hotel is hosting the million-dollar wedding of a particularly outspoken bride, she is unexpectedly swept into the extravagant week-long preparation and activities. Interspersed with elements of romance, this book explores identity and learning how to love yourself and the world all over again. Like an addictive TV drama, this was a story I did not want to end. I adored how the main character, Phoebe, was so flawed and raw; it made her relatable and lovable all the same. The power of setting is shown through, almost as if Newport were completely its own character, which added to the holistic nature of the story. My only warning: this book may make you yearn for a completely unrealistic and unaffordable wedding in Rhode Island. Read at your own risk!
So, while it’s true that I read more books with a library barcode laminated across the cover than those I’ve spent $28.99 on, it doesn’t make my physical bookshelf any less sacred to me. In the corner of my room, it sits like a hand-painted mural; it’s my muse when I think about my career in publishing, a breath of relief when I need to be grounded. And these five stories are permanent staples in my “closet.”
Elizabeth “Lizzy” DiGrande is a graduate student in Emerson College’s Publishing and Writing program, where she also serves as a Transformational Leaders Fellow and Writing Assistant for the Emerson Grad Life Blog. She is on the board of the Women’s National Book Association, Boston chapter, and is passionate about amplifying women’s voices in publishing. Originally from New Jersey, she now resides in Boston and can often be found perusing the city’s public libraries or exploring new restaurants. She hopes to build a career as both a food writer and literary agent championing female-identifying authors.
