This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from We Had Mansions by Mandy Shunnarah (Diode Editions, 2025).
jesus was trans
for Shelby
To an inquisitive child, Baptists might reluctantly admit God is neither man nor woman, but I know Jesus is trans. She told me. Picked the wig out himself & everything.
I remember this when Shelby says she’s nobody’s daughter. There’s no good word for an orphan like her & I’m no parent, but, girl, we raised ourselves. So I tell her: You’re your own daughter.
You are the woman that assigned male kid needed. Time isn’t linear—you mothered & fathered & fucked yourself into being. You sacrificed your skin to an undeserving world through bodily trans-
formation & was persecuted for it. What could be more holy than that? Time loops in on itself & I see you in a sundress, beribboned straw hat, & garden gloves, planting pink, blue & white rows of roses.
Decades from now, you’ll look at your photos lining your hall: hair lengthening, skin glowing supple with care, eyes brightening with your signature shadow. At the last frame on the wall, a mirror, & you’ll stop to say,
I’m so proud of all you’ve been & all you’ve become. In another time, when you return —anticipated, rapturous, primed for worship— I hope you’ll say instead: I’m no one’s son.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer in Columbus, Ohio. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and others. They won the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in 2024 from Belt Publishing, and their second book, a poetry collection titled We Had Mansions, was published by Diode Editions in 2025. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from We Had Mansions by Mandy Shunnarah (Diode Editions, 2025).
only an american
Just like the Brits to rename our country with a P: a letter we don’t have, a sound our tongues wrestle to say. It’s not Palestine like old buddy, old pal, old friend, but Falastin. They’d know Arabic is phonetic if they could read, but that’s an occupier for you—unwelcome guest. We have names impossible to mispronounce & yet they expect the world to say it their way.
In their new country, my grandparents give their children “good American names” impossible to mispronounce by the native-born of this land. They called their first child, a daughter, Patricia—with a P. Because who would believe an umma & baba from Falastin would name their child with a letter their mouths refused to speak, damned to a lifetime calling her Badrisha.
Only an American would do that.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer in Columbus, Ohio. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and others. They won the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in 2024 from Belt Publishing, and their second book, a poetry collection titled We Had Mansions, was published by Diode Editions in 2025. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
Growing up, I watched my mom read constantly. Her shelves overflowed with well-worn paperbacks and hardcovers, the corners bent from love and re-reading. As a kid, I didn’t get it. I’d ask, “Why read the same story twice?” or tease her when she cried over fictional characters. But now, I understand. Books were her escape. Her outlet. Her way of processing a world that didn’t always feel gentle. And somewhere along the way, I inherited that same instinct.
For me, it’s romance novels and period dramas that feel like home. There’s something about getting swept away into a slow-burn love story set in a candlelit ballroom or sun-drenched countryside that makes the noise of everyday life a little quieter. Whether it’s Pride and Prejudice, Outlander, or a swoony new romance from BookTok, I find pieces of myself in each plot and prose.
Books have become more than just a hobby; they’re how I recharge, how I reflect, and sometimes, how I remember who I am. They’ve helped me put words to emotions I didn’t even know how to name. They’ve taught me that sometimes the smallest things, a glance, a letter, the way someone says your name, can carry entire universes of meaning. Reading helped me fall in love with quiet moments: the morning light hitting a coffee cup just right, the way the wind moves through the trees, the pause between words in a really good conversation.
More than that, stories gave me courage. Courage to dream bigger. To travel. To believe the world is full of people worth knowing and places worth exploring. I’ve booked flights and wandered cities alone because a character once did the same. I’ve trusted my gut more boldly because books taught me that adventure often begins with a single step outside your comfort zone.
And yes, books made me believe in love. In happily ever afters. Not in a perfect, fairy tale kind of way, but in a hopeful, deeply human one. The kind of love that’s imperfect and earned and worth waiting for. The kind my mom used to read about late into the night when she thought no one was watching.
Now, as a 20-year-old senior at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville—majoring in English and minoring in Advertising and PR—I look back and see how those pages shaped me. I don’t just want to read stories anymore. I want to write them, share them, and help others feel seen by them, the way I’ve always felt when I turned the final page of a book that mattered.
My mom gave me that without even trying, and I like to think she’s excited that I finally understand what she was chasing in those quiet hours with a book in hand.
Savannah Roach (she/her) is a senior at the University of Tennessee, where she majors in English with a concentration in technical communication and minors in advertising and public relations. She is a travel enthusiast, bookworm, amateur baker, and nature lover. While she enjoys books of all kinds, she’s especially drawn to the haunting beauty and rich atmosphere of Southern Gothic literature. With a great love for Knoxville, she looks forward to serving the writing community in this position.
My name is Penny Wei and I am from Shanghai, China, currently living in Massachusetts. I am a Virgo, slow-walker, and an admirer of lakes, botanical gardens, and cherries.
Ever since I was a child, I loved to do two things: daydream and write.
Adults often scolded me for staring too long at what didn’t exist. I would nod, turn away, and return to the plot unfolding in my head. Words on a page became my bridge to imagination — only through the exertion of language could I give shape to the formless, wandering visions inside me. I rooted myself in paper; the page drank my ink, and I drank what later shaped my soul.
For a long time, I was a prose writer — I even despised poetry. To me, poetry felt like nonsense: strange metaphors merging things without reason. Why should my mother be a tree if her skin wasn’t bark? Why should poppy seeds overtake eyes? I was raised in a world where everything had to have meaning, where blue curtains meant sadness because blue meant sorrow. But then I read a poem where blue glowed holy, and suddenly, the rules no longer held.
Poetry became my emancipation — a place where empathy sprawls like vines, where I can mourn the trivial and praise the fleeting. It’s where I can say my mother is a butterfly rinsing black-blooded toenails, and that image is its own truth.
I’m thrilled to join Sundress Publications as an editorial intern, where I can harness this love for language, prose and poetry alike, into supporting others’ work. I look forward to helping writers bring their voices to the page and sharing that joy for the literary arts with our community.
Penny Wei is from Shanghai and Massachusetts. She has been recognized by the Longfellow House, Cafe Muse, and Just Poetry, amongst others. Her works are up or forthcoming on Eunoia Review, Inflectionist Review, Dialogist, Aloka, and elsewhere.
Alison Prine’s latest poetry collection, Loss and Its Antonym (Headmistress Press, 2024), adeptly explores themes of grief, time, and sexuality with extreme precision through an autobiographical lens. Winner of the Sappho’s Prize of Poetry in 2024, this collection synthesizes Prine’s experiences of grief with those of coming into her sexuality in a way that lends space to the natural world, as well. Loss and Its Antonum provides a gateway into the past and navigates the complex webbing that surrounds grief and all its antonyms.
The speaker’s own experience being gay dynamically provokes the conversation of grief towards one of healing. With multiple narratives occurring simulaneouly—the speaker’s relationship with her wife, the grief of her mother’s death and brother’s suicide, and the processing of her father’s mother’s death—readers glimpse Prine’s powerful journey through her sexuality alongside her grief. It is in these ways that the enigma of grief reaches a compelling climax in Prine’s latest poems.
Prine’s latest poems are unmistakably brave and bold. Her titles alone showcase a great deal of vulnerability and a commitment to storytelling: “Lesbian Child,” “Mother Who Never Grew Old,” “Bomb Drills of Childhood.” Prine’s life is wide-open for readers to peer in and learn from, the many ways grief can impact us on full display. Grief is also intimately connected to the speaker’s relationship with her sister in Prine’s newest collection. The carefully curated order of these poems traverse through girlhood to womanhood, offering a quiet celebration of sisterhood.
Told in four subsections, Prine’s poems are each distinct in voice, though some converse with one another. For example, in the latter half of the collection, there are five poems each titled “Letter to Time.” These poems hold the crux of Prine’s study on grief, one that reveals time as a key component to healing and moving forward. Prine delicately plays with and pushes the boundaries of time in Loss and Its Antonym by utilizing complex metaphors on time. Some of the more striking of these metaphors, with time as the tenor, are “Time swings around like a shadow” from “To My Brother on the Anniversary of His Suicide” (33), “Can you see how time is tearing through me like a storm” from “Carry” (40), and “Time grows between us / with a mechanical agency” from “To My younger Self” (42). Prine’s verbiage is potent in these metaphors as she nearly personifies time, making it one of the most important features in the collection. Time continues to appear throughout the collection, a motif that reflects moments of the speaker’s past.
While there are many poems to celebrate among this gripping collection, such as “Strayed” (3), “Close” (39), “Yahrzeit” (42) and “The Good Summer” (58), one in particular stood out to me: a pantoum titled “Mabel.” The decision to use the pantoum format, one in which the second and fourth lines of a stanza are repeated as the first and third of the preceding stanza, allows this poem to transcend. Here, lines “her face stiff as a cupboard” and “her hands blue with stillness” are among the many repeating refrains (32). This poem illustrates the speaker’s father’s relationship with his mother and her death. Prine is not only concerned with her grief, but of her fathers’, making it a multigenerational matter. The repetitive nature of grief, and its boomerang tendencies, are characteristics of grief that Prine hones in on, making the use of a pantoum format wildly satisfying. Repetition emerges as one of the modes grief operates alongside. This purposeful form selection remains one of my favorite hidden nuggets in the collection.
Nature is yet another agent in Prine’s work that distinctly comments on grief in nuanced, less tangible ways. Nature is robustly described, as Prine gives us clues and emblems to hold on to as she discovers true grief. From rabbits, wasps, woodpeckers, and dogs, to a “carpet of flowers”, Prine’s impressive vocabulary of the natural world is an anchor in this collection, a point of grounding for readers to rest upon (20). The uniquely lyrical nature imagery in the collection allows grief to not only pass through the speaker, but rather, float, reflect and breath through us. Though lyrical and whimsical, Prine’s nature imagery isn’t just aesthetic, but works to create a melancholic, pensive mood: “the milky dark of the night sky hanging close” (37).
The fourth sub–section of the collection guides readers into hope and the ways one can move forward when enduring grief. Reaching its zenith in the titular poem, grief is never more tender as it is in this poem:
“That winter we proved that being terrified
doesn’t prevent you from being happy—
…
”I want to learn to write about the loves
that haven’t died.” (51)
By the end of the collection a deep sense of truth is established with the reader and the speaker, one that opens up a channel for the healing and processing that grief may require. One that mourns while still hopeful for the future.
Devoted to kinship, memory, and empowering one’s embodiment and sexuality, Loss and Its Antonym speaks on grief’s fluency in new and original ways. It will leave you speechless and wanting to share it with those you love who have gone through similar experiences. Containing vivid sensory experiences, indulging in the sounds we remember people by, the tastes that linger, and the smells that pair themselves with grief, Prine’s poetry glimmers in an otherwise melancholic literary space. You will leave this collection with a heavy heart and a compassionate soul, maybe one that will attempt navigating time without the ones we love just a little more easily.
Emma Goss (she/her/hers) is a senior English major with minors in Film and Linguistic Anthropology. A passionate reader, she prefers to always be juggling a poetry collection, a literary fiction novel, and an audiobook. Emma is especially drawn to poetry rooted in nature symbolism and metaphor. Some of her favorite collections include The Tradition by Jericho Brown, War of the Foxes by Richard Siken, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, and Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson. Her poetry has been published in Pangyrus Magazine and by the Princeton Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Poetry Contest. Originally from Los Angeles, she spends her time hiking local trails or browsing the poetry shelves at Barnes & Noble Studio City when not at Vassar.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
Jessica Manack’s Gastromythology (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024) is an astonishing debut that redefines hunger and girlhood. Each of this poetry collection’s three sections has a theme: being fed, resistance, and becoming nourishment. Throughout, Manack discusses many adversities women face in day-to-day life, like food, motherhood, and professional careers, in beautiful metaphors and intricate punctuation usage.
Gastromythology immediately drew me in with its world-building. “Archaeology” explores nostalgia and food, examining how the senses contribute to memories and how we recall our childhood. Reading “Archaeology” feels like getting a whiff of something sweet in the air, reminding me of a random day in my life ten years ago. There’s a secrecy in this poem, one that intrigues the reader and draws them into the story. I want to know the secrets being burned in this garbage fire Manack describes. This make me question the truth in memory—if no one else remembers, what is stopping one from creating a false memory? What we remember, the smells, tastes, feelings, are what create our memories, become the artifacts that create the stories we call ours. “Archaeology” is a skillful poem that joins the reader and speaker in an intimate setting, as if sitting by a campfire and sharing ghost stories. Perhaps, these ghost stories are stories of our past selves, and create who we currently are.
“Perilous Figures” is feminist in nature, exclaiming what girls are instead of what girls aren’t. The metaphors used throughout this poem are beautiful and at times, dangerous. One of these metaphors I adore reads:
“At once girls are saints and hurricanes:
performing miracles, feeding two thousand
with one loaf, turning disgust to combustion,
moving steadily, messes of blurry lines, and aerobic activity.
Deeming their silhouettes happy accidents,
not carefully crafted works of art and violence.” (Manack 21)
This strikes me as powerful: the idea that a girl can be simultaneously destructive and nourishing is interesting, as there’s an incredible amount of stigma surrounding young girls being dramatic. Manack reconstructs what girls may see in themselves, not only in a reflection but in the construction of their future. If someone had told me as a young girl that I was a “smoking motor” (Manack 21), perhaps I would’ve been more eager to pursue my interests, an education, and things that aren’t “feminine.”
“Dad Visits Me at College” is incredibly ironic for me to read. On my 21st birthday, my dad visited me at college with “pants [were] ripped / down the ass crack / with nothing underneath” (Manack 27). It was a case of unfortunate timing for my father to show up with a six-inch rip in the backside of his pants, not because he had been drinking like the figure in Manack’s poem. I this poem to my dad for him to read, because I can’t believe another person had experienced a situation like this, one where you had to become your parents’ parent and try to find a solution for a problem they caused. His embarrassment both humanized him and made me see the boy inside the man that is my father. “Dad Visits Me at College,” I feel, is the perfect ending to the first section, showing the tip of the iceberg when a girl realizes age doesn’t always equal wisdom. Sometimes, seeing your parents “fucked up” (Manack 27) makes us see that the people we’ve idolized or held to a high standard are also fragile humans who make mistakes.
Section II is what I like to imagine as a rejection of feeding. This section seems to have larger “bites” of words in the sizing of stanzas, a shift from some of the previous poems that flowed with brevity. For example, “Saffron” is constructed in two stanzas, both thick and meaty. I adore the sensory imagery in this piece, imagining “the jiggles of custard” (Manack 38) or peanut butter sticking to the roof of my mouth. This poem, in turn, stuck with me. This section is the denial of nourishment, but the speaker seems to struggle with feeling fulfilled, despite eating five times a day. Seeing how the speaker eats often, but is never full because of someone else’s broth of a personality, makes me wonder: at what point do relationships and friendships become a form of self-harm, due to their lack of nutrients?
Manack’s ability to verbalize how aging impacts confidence is inspiring here; Section III speaks to me as a section showing how women themselves become nourishment for others. “Breastfeeding at Forty” feels like coming to terms with aging. The variety of punctuation in this poem makes it such a pleasure to read. In one particularly inspiring line Manack writes, “I try to see my wealth and not my dearth” (47). Beyond the uniqueness of the word “dearth,” the vocal rhyme doesn’t exist, but the eye rhyme here indicates some sort of synonymity. This skillful wordplay found in Section III ties the collection to a close.
Gastromythology is applicable and relatable in many different ways. The personability Manack shows throughout the collection is admirable, and this debut ties together many themes of womanhood into one beautiful binding.
Caroline Eliza is a poet and writer from Asheville, North Carolina, currently completing her degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College with minors in Pre-Law and Poetry. Her creative and academic work explores the intersection of poetry and movement, often blurring the lines between the written word and physical expression. Her work can be found in The Poetry Lighthouse and Sundress Reads by Sundress Publications. Beyond the page, Caroline finds joy in crocheting and dancing, grounding her artistic life in tactile practices and performance. She will graduate in December 2025 and plans to further her education, continuing to explore the connections between art, advocacy, and embodiment.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from Dogwitch by Catherine Rockwood (Bottlecap Press, 2025).
The fifth thing
I love about hounds is their living skulls. Short glossy hairs lie close to the bones of their faces so the orbital socket of each active eye casts shadows. A hound is a moving sculpture of appetite.
I cherish the points of their cheekbones, almost as sharp as the white teeth that lie behind generous curtains of muzzle above long jaws with flews like opera capes. Where you like to see excess expressed is a personal thing. I prefer when it’s pointing toward the gullet.
I suppose there’s something in this of my twentieth century. The thin, knobby noses of father, grandfather. A wiry white arm bulked up at the top-browned forearm and heavy on elbow-joint. That tells me I’m home, had better watch out for what might, or might not, come.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
I wrote my first book when I was six years old. Of course, this was not what you would typically think of when someone says they’re writing a book. This was a stack of printer paper that I had stolen from my mother’s printer, folded in half, and stapled carefully down the spine to make a book-like shape. Then, I wrote the story of a troublesome kid named Henry inside, affectionately named after my kindergarten best friend. By the time I was done, the pages were riddled with misspelled words, badly drawn stick figures, and accidental pen markings. But I had finished a book, and that was the first time I felt like I had actually accomplished something.
For years, I continued this pattern, making my mom viscerally angry by “wasting” her perfectly good printer paper. Then, I found out that I could use spiral notebooks instead, and I began to write there. Most of the time, these little stories were never finished. My brain was always swirling with ideas, and each time another would come up, I would think it was better than the last and immediately get to work on it instead. It wasn’t until I discovered my very first book while cleaning out my desk one day that something clicked. I had loved that story so much because it had someone I loved in it. I had used my own experiences, as well as his, to create a story that meant something to me. And when I showed the original Henry, several years after they had already moved to a different school, the tears in their eyes showed me that it meant something to them, too.
From that moment on, my approach to writing changed. I was no longer looking to empty the contents of my brain’s creativity on the page; I was looking to make people feel, to find a way to evoke the same feelings I had when I read my favorite books. Even before I could analyze literature properly, I knew what their authors were trying to say. Every novel that I loved and cried over had a message, and I began to find ways to put my thoughts and opinions into my own stories.
Now, I find that writing is power. In an era where critical thought and originality is shunned rather than celebrated, all I can do is write. Sometimes, that means writing think pieces that will never see the sun in my journal. Other times, it looks like poring over the third draft of my debut novel, looking for meaning in every word. Either way, the writing I do alone empowers me to write for others, to share stories that makes people think, feel, and see themselves represented in a space where they may not have been previously.
If you take one thing about me away from this post, let it be this: my writing is my activism. The world can be an incredibly dark place, but it is up to us to not only find the pockets of light but to create them and share them. In truth, my writing has never been about me; it’s been about the people I love, the people I have met and have yet to meet, and those who cannot write or speak for themselves. It’s been about you, the person who is reading this blog post, and those who have already passed and will never get the chance to. The written word has a long history, one full of pain and joy. I aim to tip the scale and make the joy a little bit greater than the pain.
“There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
— Edith Wharton
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.
