The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Cleave by Tiana Nobile

Personal Fiction

Years later, I will tell you I remember the town made of wood, quilted houses with slanted rooftops.
I will tell you I remember the hospital, the room where I curled like a bloodless earthworm looking
for dirt, the smell of morning nesting in the window, night falling purple on the floor. You will
believe me and be jealous. I will cling to this envy, covet it, keep it in a locket that hangs around
my neck. I will tell you these things even if they aren’t true. I will convince myself late into the
night until I feel the grass grazing my toes, the sun’s heat on my back.

This selection comes from Cleave, available from Hub City Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Leah Silvieus.

Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. Her full-length poetry debut, Cleave, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 by Hub City Press. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com. Follow at @tiananob

Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere.  
She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and is currently an MAR candidate in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music. Prior to Yale, she spent several years traveling between New York and Florida as a yacht chief stewardess.

 

Lyric Essentials: Anna Meister Reads Diannely Antigua

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week Anna Meister will be reading Diannely Antigua’s work and discussing the act of reading a poem verbally, admirations, and future plans. Thank you for tuning in!

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: Why did you choose Diannely Antigua? 

Anna Meister: I wanted to speak about Diannely’s poetry because I so appreciate and admire the frank, unapologetic way her work wrangles mental illness as subject matter. I almost wrote that her poems embody a fearlessness, but I think it’s more that the poet allows fear (of stigma, of succumbing, of survival) to be in the poems, and I find that honesty very brave and refreshing.

Anna Meister reads “Variations on a Theme” by Diannely Antigua

AH: Throughout the poems, there seems to be this theme of hunger for something. As a poet yourself, would you say you feel a connection to this concept of wanting something more in your writing? 

AM: Yeah, I certainly feel like my poems tend to come from a place of not knowing, searching for answers. And in that vein, the feeling of longing or unsatiated hunger propels me forward, which I do feel moving through Antigua’s work. It also makes me think about the biblical references and imagery in Ugly Music, how the speaker’s religious history and questioning/speaking to god are connected to an erotic hunger and understanding of her own sexuality.

Anna Meister Reads “Equinox” by Diannely Antigua

AH: Listening to you read these poems and actually reading them on the page was a completely different experience. How was the act of verbally reading these poems? Did it change anything for you?

I always like to hear things aloud as I’m reading; there’s such joy in how differently a poem’s music comes through when read versus on the page. And yes, her book is titled Ugly Music, but Antigua really does have such a musical ear and there’s a lot that’s just sonically delightful about these poems. Something else I noticed in reading them aloud is that, due in part to all of the poems being in first person, their vulnerability (and mine as the reader) felt amplified. The term “confessional poetry” can get a bad rap (which is pretty sexist), but I think Diannely is absolutely showcasing the power of the poem as a space for confession and saying the “unsayable” thing.

AH: Your poetry collection recently came out with Sundress. Got any exciting plans coming up in the near future? 

AM: While this isn’t related to What Nothing, I was just able to get a vaccination appointment for the end of the month and I’m pretty excited about that! I’m looking forward to the ways in which life will feel easier in the months to come, as more and more people get vaccinated and are able to be together again. I miss experiencing poetry with other people! To have my first book released during quarantine/a pandemic has been different than I’d imagined, though I have enjoyed partaking in virtual events and I’m grateful for the accessibility and connection they’ve provided. I’m hoping to travel a bit later this year to see friends, do some readings, and celebrate What Nothing more widely. I’m really proud that it’s finally out in the world!

Diannely Antigua is the author of Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which won the Pamet River Prize. Previously nominated for the Pushcart Prize and selected for Best of the Net, her poems can be found in The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, and Washington Square Review. She received her MFA from New York University.

Anna Meister is the author of the poetry collection What Nothing (Sundress Publications, 2021), as well as two chapbooks. Meister received an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Redivider, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, and elsewhere. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa with her wife and son.

Find her at:

www.annameisterpoet.com

Twitter: @annameisterpoet

https://therumpus.net/2020/09/rumpus-original-poetry-two-poems-by-anna-meister/

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi has had work appear, or forthcoming, in Into the Void Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She currently reads for Mud Season Review and EX/POST Magazine, is the Playwriting & Director’s Apprentice at New Perspectives Theatre Company, was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and is the co-Editor in Chief of Juven Press. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Cleave by Tiana Nobile

Abstract

For the first six months, I was a deferred plane ticket.

Contact comfort is a variable of overwhelming importance


The infant the pastor refused to baptize.

The development of affectional responses

I never sucked my thumb. I pulled out my hair instead.

Emotionality indices such as vocalization, crouching, rocking, and sucking


Call me Rhesus, macaque with mongolian spots.


We can be certain that

I cry with hunger but know the bottle.

Frantic clutching of their bodies was very common

This selection comes from Cleave, available from Hub City Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Leah Silvieus.

Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. Her full-length poetry debut, Cleave, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 by Hub City Press. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com. Follow at @tiananob

Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere.  
She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and is currently an MAR candidate in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music. Prior to Yale, she spent several years traveling between New York and Florida as a yacht chief stewardess.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Cleave by Tiana Nobile

Abstract

Foster Mother

The first time I belonged to a woman,
my body a fresh bulb broken off

at the root. She kept me for six months,
watched spit bubble from my pursed lips.

I wonder if she ever claimed me,
if she rocked me to sleep on her chest,

if she wiped my mouth gently saying,
There you go, there you are.

This selection comes from Cleave, available from Hub City Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Leah Silvieus.

Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. Her full-length poetry debut, Cleave, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 by Hub City Press. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com. Follow at @tiananob

Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere.  
She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and is currently an MAR candidate in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music. Prior to Yale, she spent several years traveling between New York and Florida as a yacht chief stewardess.

 

Sundress Reads: A Review of Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune

The fascinating intersection of the mythic and the mundane fills Dotty E. Lemieux’s Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune, a collection that takes great joy in observation. Nothing is below Lemieux’s notice – the subjects range from thoughts on salt in a medical context, to soup kitchens and the downtrodden who visit them, to an absolutely charming poem about prunes. The settings Lemieux presents to us are recognizably urban in nature, with some of the poems suggesting connections to San Rafael, California and Reno, Nevada. Lemieux discusses and portrays the act of watching the world, capturing moments in time, and anxiety over death, sickness, and that which came before.

The first poem of the chapbook, “Woman her World on Skids”, sets the tone nicely. The speaker watches from their car as a woman crosses the road carrying a box, described by the speaker as “bearing the world/not aloft as Atlas/but on folded boxes that can be opened/into shelter”. This juxtaposition of the highbrow and mundane continues in the next poem, where the speaker describes a man eating a bagel from a charity dining room with “hair blowing around his face/cape billowing out behind his slender frame/he is transformed into a Romantic poet”. These themes continue up to the wonderfully short but warming “The Toothbrushes are Kissing”, which brings a sense of playfulness to the fore with its inspection of what the day-to-day of a toothbrush must look like.

In the middle of the chapbook, Lemieux’s themes turn to mortality. “Ah Death” begins “Death, cut it out. Can’t you give it rest, hang up your reaper’s robes for a while”, and while none of the poems following it address death so directly, they seem preoccupied with it, as the speaker spends two adjacent poems ruminating on the experience of spending time in a hospital, first in a personal reflection on our love-hate relationship with salt, then a more sobering discussion of what it means to lose yourself to old age.

The final third of poems are the longest and most detailed, following the speaker’s experiences observing, recording, and imagining the lives of others in three connected haibun poems. The first builds on the mortality themes by centering on an overheard conversation about the draft and war, and the latter two focus more on how photographs connect us to the past. In the third haibun, “The Dress”, the speaker connects all of the prior themes together as they examine their mother’s old dress.

Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune ultimately suggests that while mortality may be fearful, the ways we look at the world around us with wonder, humor, and kindness creates a meaning for the parts of life that we may consider meaningless at first.

Gray Flint-Vrettos is an aspiring author and a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University with a BA in English and Creative Writing, and minors in Theater Arts and Film. He has a long history with theater, having appeared in multiple productions both on stage and behind the curtain. Currently, she’s focusing on getting involved with publishing and writing her first book.

Meet Our New Intern: Xuan Nguyen | FEYXUAN

Immersive storytelling is my life’s work, and graphic design is one piece to this particular puzzle. As an independent experimental game developer, I do illustration, design, poetry, prose, orchestral composition, and just enough coding to glue it all together. I started out as a writer when I was a child, dreaming of fantastical worlds I never did leave behind. When I turned fifteen, and my mind began to change in ways I couldn’t anticipate, I found myself drawn to experimental long-form prose. My first novel was a queer, dreamlike, and experimental poetry-prose hybrid in stream-of-consciousness form.

What my friends said about my work then is the same as what they say now: This makes me feel something, but I don’t know what it is.

Then I grew up and went to college for a degree in English, but I got accepted into an exclusive program for English majors that was called a sub-concentration, which required a 100-page creative writing thesis and a certain amount of creative writing credits. It basically required you to take all the levels of workshop available, and then some. Those workshops were never designed for people like me. They told me that experimentation is largely undesirable, impossible to parse, and if everyone can’t relate to it, there’s something wrong with it. The university workshop taught me that my voice, my vision, and my audience didn’t matter: the writer was never permitted to speak during criticism.

It took me some time to unlearn that—not as long as it could have, thankfully—but longer than it should have. It took me up until last year, just after I turned 23 as the world burned, that I came to understand there was more to the world than what everyone had always said to me. When I traced my way back to the experimental hybrid work of my painful adolescence, I found incredible, shocking joy and relief. And once I broke that first boundary, other boundaries started to break as well.

In my mind, there is not much difference between the instinct for visual balance required for white space in poetry and the same instinct when it comes to design and aesthetic composition. The same applies for the rhythmic and tonal musicality of poetry and developing an ear for rhythm and tone in musical composition. Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion, but I feel like the divisions between artistic disciplines are regarded as far more ironclad than they need to be, and hybridity of form can really open up your imagination, letting you see past so many more doors that were closed before.

I found my way to graphic design when I rediscovered who I was as a storyteller. What formal creative education told me was this: The literary world has to be this way because it always has been. That’s just how it is, and you have to accept it if you want to survive. But I am thriving now, and what I want to say is, Just because it “always” has been like this doesn’t mean it should be. It doesn’t mean it has to be. And there is more than one way to survive, artistically and otherwise.

Xuan Nguyen | FEYXUAN is a disabled fey orchestral music composer, writer-poet, and illustrator-designer. Their recent projects have involved the solo development of aesthetic interactive fiction games exploring the nuances not exclusive to the following: power, trauma, madness, nonbinariness, divinity, and monstrosity. LIAR, LIONESS (Feb 2021) and the demo for OCHITSUBAKI【落ち椿】(March 2021) are out now. Their books include LUNG, CROWN, AND STAR (Dec 2020, Lazy Adventurer) and THE FAIRIES SING EACH TO EACH (Feb 2021, Flower Press). Xuan Nguyen is the Art Director of Lazy Adventurer Publishing, and they help Grimalkin Records as a Graphic Designer.

Sundress Announces the Release of Esteban Rodriguez’s The Valley

Sundress Publications announces the release of Esteban Rodriguez’s The Valley. Rodriguez’s poetry asks readers to consider what is real and what is home, when borders carve deep sections out of us.

In this visceral collection, poet Esteban Rodriguez introduces the voice of a boy straddling the valley between two geographies, two generations, two languages. Under the relentless Texas sun, these poems traverse desert landscapes and moonlit fields carved by an aching loneliness and gentle laughter. Here, a father crosses a river of starlight and corpses, a child is awed by a mirage-like circus and the gilded rims of lowriders, and a mother travels home to Mexico to heal the decay of her body. The Valley explores the tenuous boundaries between citizenship and belonging, memory and tradition, silence and forgetting. Rodriguez’s poems take us through stories of survival and violence as the young speaker’s imagination tries to make sense of these ruptures. Tender and searching, The Valley offers solace to those of us who must navigate silences and cross borders in order to survive.

Steve Scafidi, author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer, said of The Valley, “Esteban Rodriguez knows that the valley of the shadow of death is where we all grew up, where there is a river and someone swimming to cross. The Valley is that rare collection of poems where, over and over again, the mythic shimmers in and illuminates the real. The woman in her nightgown is your mother, the man in his garden is your father. They are ordinary, they are divine, somehow. How does it happen we survive this place? ‘In each of us there is a river,’ he writes, ‘and it’s long gone.’ What remains is this ghost, this river of language we chance and cross as we read. What an achievement, this lovely beguiling book.”

Order your copy of The Valley today!

Esteban Rodriguez is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press, 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press, 2019), In Bloom (SFASU Press, 2020), and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press, 2020). His poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for PANK and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

Call for Applications: The Wardrobe Managing Editor

Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing collective founded in 2000 that hosts a variety of online journals and publishes chapbooks, full-length collections, and literary anthologies in both print and digital formats. Sundress also publishes the annual Best of the Net Anthology, celebrating the best work published online, and the Gone Dark Archives, preserving online journals that have reached the end of their run.  

The Wardrobe, a feature of Sundress Publications, showcases the outstanding published or forthcoming work of women and nonbinary authors. Editors promote a single author by reprinting a selection of work from their published collection. Editors work with poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and multi-genre books. 

Our managing editors’ responsibilities primarily include maintaining the submission database with email submissions, loading selections onto The Wardrobe website on a weekly basis, and helping with publicity of posts. Managing Editors also have the opportunity to read for other Sundress projects, including Best of the Net, our open reading periods, or any of our contests. The position will require approximately two hours per week. 

Required qualifications include:  

  • Submission Management 
  • WordPress Experience 

Preferred qualifications include: 

  • Database Management and/or experience in Microsoft Excel 
  • Staff Management 

Applicants are welcome to telecommute and therefore are not restricted to living in any particular location. 

Sundress Publications is staffed entirely by volunteers, so this position, as with all positions at the press, is unpaid. 

To apply, please send a CV and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in the position to our Managing Editor, Erin Elizabeth Smith at erin@sundresspublications.com. Applications are due by April 1, 2021. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Cleave by Tiana Nobile

/ˈmīɡrənt/

Of an animal, especially a bird. A wandering species
whom no seas nor places limit. A seed who survives despite
the depths of hard winter. The ripple of a herring

steering her band from icy seas to warmer strands.
To find the usual watering-places despite
the gauze of death that shrouds our eyes

is a breathtaking feat. Do you ever wonder why
we felt like happy birds brushing our feathers
on the tips of leaves? How we lifted our toes

from one sandbank and landed – fingertips first –
on another? Why we clutched the dumb and tiny creatures
of flower and blade and sod between our budding fists?

From an origin of buried seeds emerge
these many-banded dagger wings.
We, of the sky, the dirt, and the sea. We,

the seven-league-booters and the little-by-littlers.
We, transmigrated souls, will prevail.
We will carry ourselves into the realms of light.

This selection comes from Cleave, available from Hub City Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Leah Silvieus.

Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. Her full-length poetry debut, Cleave, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 by Hub City Press. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com. Follow at @tiananob

Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere.  
She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and is currently an MAR candidate in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music. Prior to Yale, she spent several years traveling between New York and Florida as a yacht chief stewardess.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Wider than the Sky by Nancy Chen Long

Altered State at the Grocery Store

By myself at that late hour, I study the uniformed rows—
months and months of potential meals boxed and lining the freezer.
I fling open the glass door. It’s not only the burst of cold
that’s so startling, but a kiss, warm at the nape that makes me

flush, and two arms around my waist pulling me in against
the sleepy memory of one man’s body. There’s no time
to be afraid. The best way to remember is to forget. Glancing
over my shoulder, I recognize the familiar outline

of a face, a quirky grin. Pressed against him, my back is warm,
my face, cold—too close to the frozen door. He hugs me tight.
I feel a rhythmic thud, the battering knot of his heart.
“There are no fres to winnow,” he says as if he’s been gone a while,

which startles me awake. The bedroom window is wide open.
Winter washes over me, frost on the glass pane.

This selection comes from Wider than the Sky, available from Diode Editions. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. nancychenlong.com Follow at @NancyChenLong

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.