Virginia breaks the eggs open with her sketch until two nestlings spill out, their tiny bodies hunched like raisins inside the lichen-plastered nest.
She composes what she recalls: the sharp triangles of bills, the bulge of eyes beneath shut lids, the stringy down along the spine, awkward as a first mustache.
She documents the birds’ imagined growth. Their beaks lengthen and eyes open. Their quills prick through black skin. Then the greening feathers and wings that strain
against the stretched-out nest. Virginia fledges the birds out the studio window to the garden, where trumpet vine waits for the flash of still-white throats.
This selection comes from Studies of Familiar Birds, available from Able Muse Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Carrie Green’s book, Studies of Familiar Birds, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in December 2020. She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Flyway, Blackbird, Cave Wall, DIAGRAM, and many other journals. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and works as a reference librarian in a public library.
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.
The photograph once pleased Virginia: the way the light catches in Genevieve’s eyes and burnishes her curls to amber, how it blanches the stain of her rosacea to marble. The gold rosette earrings widen her slim cheeks. Genevieve made the suit herself— not with the blue silk Virginia suggested but with stiff brown tweed, the only embellishment a double row of gold buttons. They march down her bodice toward the vignette’s haze. Now Virginia can’t look at the portrait without imagining fog creeping up her daughter’s chest and throat. It smothers her mouth and nose and dims her eyes, rising past the soft down at her hairline to claim every part of her, even this relic, this trick of light.
This selection comes from Studies of Familiar Birds, available from Able Muse Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Carrie Green’s book, Studies of Familiar Birds, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in December 2020. She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Flyway, Blackbird, Cave Wall, DIAGRAM, and many other journals. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and works as a reference librarian in a public library.
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.
In high school, I was asked to write a journal for one of my classes. It was meant to be fairly simple: just talking about notable things that happened to me each week. At the time, I didn’t understand the point of writing down my own memories. It felt strange, like I was just doing it by rote, not learning anything from the assignment. It only took two weeks before I started making things up. I wrote a horror story, starring myself – not a very good one, full of silly cliches and painfully adolescent nonsense, but I wrote in that book every single day.
In retrospect, that impulse set the tone for my entire life going forward.
I’d always loved stories, mainly as a result of living in a home full of English Lit professors, but it was in high school that my focus shifted to creating stories and retelling others’ stories through theater. I loved engaging with fiction in just about every way, and thankfully I had plenty of amazing people both in grade school and my college life who helped me refine that love into something I could actually pursue as a life path. I’m still working on it – I have yet to create anything I’d be confident to describe as “finished”, but I still try to create, retell, expand, or evolve a story every day, and I’m honored to join the Sundress team to help others do the same.
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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.
Half-photography and half-poetry, Gravity & Spectacle is the killer combo that you didn’t know you needed. This collection is a truly cinematic experience made possible by a collaboration between self-professed college dropout and poet Shawnte Orion and Asian American poet and photographer Jia Oak Baker, both based in Arizona. This work seeks to make sense of its atmosphere: at times thick and suffocating, at others, colorful and intriguing. These pieces work in cohesion, like the cogs of a turning, anti-capitalist wheel, in order to critique the world in which they find themselves. As Orion writes: “we will begin by taking scissors to the strings of kites” (55).
The first half of this collection—Gravity—is filled with Baker’s photos, often featuring metropolitan locales or arid dustbowls, where light and contrast set the tone at every stage. What’s most striking is the central figure, the same in each photograph, a man (presumably Orion from interviews given), wearing a gigantic mask on his head. This almost Orwellian mask, created by Phoenix artist J.J. Horner, resembles something between a many-eyed octopus behemoth, or a mutant saguaro. Saguaros and Arizona’s Sonoran Desert feature prominently in both these photos and Orion’s own lines in the second half of the book: Spectacle. Even urban Arizona becomes some recast version of this barren wilderness: “the official / State Bird of Arizona / is the Ceiling Fan” (46). The masked figure becomes a looming presence, both speaker and spectator as the reader moves back and forth between image and lyric.
Certainly, these connections are distinct and vibrant. In Baker’s “Elliptical Proximity,” the masked figure takes a selfie at a fairground, mid-air with just a few inches of himself in the frame, a disconnected father and son in the background, lit by brightly colored bulbs that juxtapose a sense of American nostalgia beside many of the more muted photographs (29). This same photograph is nodded to in Orion’s poem “You’ve Gone Supernova but Nothing Burns Brighter Than Itself,” where he alludes to the discovery of Neptune: “like how the presence of other people in your elliptical proximity is the only way to understand that you are alone” (56). Many of the poems contain winks, nudges, and nods to the images that precede them. There is something both cheeky and somber about Baker and Orion’s united perspective.
Orion’s poems are as close to punk rock as we can get in 2021. When he isn’t taking shots at a certain former president—“Make Orwellian Dystopia Science Fiction Again (79)”—he’s unspooling social and class commentary: “a guide to which fifty states in America / women who care about their rights should avoid / ranked in no particular order” (64). This collection is witty and wry even as it is biting. In a piece where the speaker wonders about the flat earth conspiracy, Orion grounds us in reality, back to blue-collar workers and the mundanity of the everyday:
My supervisor still believes the earth is flat and we fall off the edge every night when we clock out (59)
It is the outliers who are the key players for Orion and Baker. The reader cannot take their eyes away from the masked stranger in the grayscale laundromat (18) or under the lit-up letterboard at Phoenix’s Rebel Lounge (5). With short clipped consonant sounds that call to mind the grinding skaters who are dotted throughout these pages (perhaps pro-boarder Rodney Mullen, whose name and words crop up once or twice) as well as piled-on metaphors that are somehow both sumptuous and gritty, every Arizonian doldrum is made sharp, funny, and irreverent.
Should you read this collection? If not for the strangeness of Baker’s composition, or Orion’s “Desert Tarot Six-Card Spread”—first in Spanish and then in English—that so perfectly recalls that familiar, rehearsed mystic phrasing, then do it for those striking, heartbreaking moments tucked away amidst the cleverly virgule-d prose poems:
don’t wait for second responders / like you waited for dad to return from the bar with that elusive gallon of milk / like you waited for mom’s hair and smile / to return from the oncologist’s office don’t wait for the world to stop spinning (53)
You might end up with repetitive strain injury after flipping back and forth so often to search for the photographs that link to the poems you’re immersed in. You’ll find yourself unable to forget that alien-headed man under the fairground lights. Orion writes that “The eye is the quickest muscle” (49). It’s clear that in Gravity and Spectacle, perspective is everything.
Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Louisiana. She is currently a joint MA-MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. She is the Non-Fiction Editor of The McNeese Review and Social Media Intern for Sundress Publications. She also holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge and Great Weather for Media, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.
I once organized my aunt’s library room by color when I helped her move, sweeping ROY G BIV around black shelves and bubble-wrapped packages I was expressly warned not to touch, much to her irritation. I was young, so I didn’t quite understand how or why that might be annoying, but now that I have bookshelves of my own to place, it makes more sense. I have three wide rows of a living-room-turned-office bookshelf that I share with my girlfriend sorted by genre: notebook, cookbook, scientific nonfiction, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. In a perfect world, each genre would be organized by the author’s last name, but I once forgot how many letters are in the alphabet while I was teaching, so that dream hasn’t been realized just yet. For the most part, this system works. I do love that most of the books I’ve found and adore have brightly-colored covers. They are little gems, bright pops of jewel tones nestled together like the world’s best literary supermarket.
Most of my favorite fiction novels have been passed down to my youngest sister, a bookworm after my own heart, but I’ve kept a few close to me—a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s best gifted to me by my childhood best friend, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz—and am regrowing my collection as I stumble upon more. I’m always trying to find and read more creative nonfiction, and gems like Sarah Minor’s Bright Archives that play with form are what keep me going as I test out my own form-based experiments in essays. My sort-by-genre system has been falling apart the more I learn about and invest in non-traditional literature, however. Where does a hybrid chapbook go? What about an essay collection that braids pedagogy with real science? If it exists outside of formal constraints, does it have a home? I don’t have a solution for this yet, as silly as that sounds. I’ve been trying to make gradients between genres, like one big loop, where teal fits between green and blue, and it’s both working and not.
To the right of my desk, opposite the big bookshelf, are two floating shelves. My “academic bookshelf” lives on the bottom. This is where I keep books that I’m actively reading (Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Lavery) that aren’t on my bedside table (currently The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang), composition and rhetoric books I’m teaching, and books that I need for my own MFA classes. Right now, most of these books are for my thesis—Queer Phenomenology, Pale Blue Dot, Assuming a Body, and more—whether I am drawing inspiration from their form, style, or simply trying to wrap my head around the theory. The “dog” plant pot and tiny hand are for keeping the books upright and me smiling, a simultaneous bookend and serotonin slot machine. The shelf above keeps my mug collection in one place, because what is an office corner if not also a coffee station? I use my mugs as decor, in teaching my freshmen about twisting genre and tone, and for their standard purpose as drink vessels. If I think about it hard enough, they become part of my bookshelf gradient, tying the corners together by wrapping up all of my loose ends.
I keep two books on my desk with my darling marble queen pothos, color-coordinated calendar, and peach rings always in reach. Despite not being a poet, the beauty of poetry is so concentrated that it is my favorite way to re-inspire myself. Mary Oliver is one of my all-time favorites, and her anthology Devotions has enough familiar and new material that opening to a random page, reading the poem(s), and sitting with the images for a few moments is enough fuel to keep me going on long nights. I’ve done this recently with torrin a. greathouse’s new release Wound from the Mouth of a Wound and Clementine von Radic’s Mouthful of Forevers, too.
If poetry can’t save my writing brain when the wiring is faulty, though, my tarot cards can. I have a deck themed after the 2013 movie Pacific Rim, each card painted by a different artist, and take a moment, shuffling them through my hands, staring up at my big bookshelf until it feels right. I draw a card, read the interpretation from Michelle Tea’s fantastic Modern Tarot, and watch how adjusting the placement of my perspective gives me the opportunity to try again.
Lee Anderson is a nonbinary MFA student at Northern Arizona University, where they are the managing editor of Thin Air Magazine. They have been published sporadically but with zest, with work appearing or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, and Back Patio Press.
I grew up reading and writing at any chance. From my first memorable encounter with the written word—my first grade hands clumsily flipping through Valerie Worth’s All the Small Poems—I knew, but couldn’t yet express, the magical potency of poetry.
As I went through high school, what guided me was writing poems about my personhood and journalistic articles about my surroundings. Both modes of writing grounded me in their own ways, allowing me to safely negotiate a new environment and my ever-changing relationship to it. I was lucky enough to find others who wanted to hold onto that same feeling, meeting them at summer workshops like those at Kenyon and Sewanee, as well as literary organizations and magazines, both on-campus and in the real world.
A breakthrough moment for me came recently, in realizing that my interests in creative writing and longer-form writing were not mutually exclusive. Instead, I’m interested in how this work informs each other, how language both describes but also helps shape our realities.
To me, writing has always been a reminder of plurality—a small way to reflect the world’s wholeness. I like to think of writing as a dispatch from a new, self-created space. That’s why publications feel so sacred; they serve as an embodiment of this space, enclosing and protecting the world generated by words. For that reason, I’m so looking forward to this opportunity with Sundress, to continue understanding the role of writing in my life, and conversely, the contributions I can give back to the literary community.
Claire Shang is a freshman at Columbia University, where she is an editor with The Columbia Review. She is a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, and a reader of mostly everything. Her work has appeared in or been recognized by Peach Mag, No, Dear Magazine, and Smith College.
We walked the hammock to the shell mound, my father first on the hard-packed path. Shadows of palms and oaks slanted like rungs, the path a shining ladder through trees.
My father led us on the hard-packed path, head down, sharp elbows swinging. Did he see the path shining like a ladder through trees? We followed him through the hush of fronds.
Head down, sharp elbows swinging, did he see the red lichen bloom like cells on trunks of trees? We followed him through the hush of fronds and the trunks’ stains, bright as open wounds.
The lichen bloomed like cells on trunks of trees. The sabal palms curved and leaned, their red stains bright as open wounds. Trail ends here. We needed to be told.
A sabal palm curved and leaned into the wide arms of a dead oak. Trail ends here. We needed to be told. The midden sinks into swampy ground.
This selection comes from Studies of Familiar Birds, available from Able Muse Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
Carrie Green’s book, Studies of Familiar Birds, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in December 2020. She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Flyway, Blackbird, Cave Wall, DIAGRAM, and many other journals. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and works as a reference librarian in a public library.
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.
Somewhere there is a river full of dead things, asking me when I will be added to their collection. My answer is always the same, I’m waiting to be enough soil to sprout flowers. A garden of geraniums bellowing from my chest. I can’t just be a list of black names we write on picket signs and t-shirts, something must grow here. Surely I was not put on this earth simply to die.
This selection comes from Summertime Fine, available from Variant Literature. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.
JASON B. CRAWFORD (He/They) is a black, nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High Shelf Press, Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, he is the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. Jason is a cofounder of the Poetry Collective MMPR, a group of poets who came together for laughs, bad memes, and nerd culture. He is also the recurring host of the poetry section for Ann Arbor Pride. Crawford has his Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University.
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.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present this generative workshop focusing on poetry of the self led by Leah Silvieus on February 10th, 2021 from 6-7:30PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress, with the password ‘safta.’
In this generative poetry workshop, which takes its title from a line in Eric Tran’s poem “How to Pray,” we will consider how what we might consider “sacred” and “profane” can provide entryways into thinking about our selves’ relationship to our identities, to other people, and to the divine or supernatural (however one conceives of them). We will look toward contemporary poets such as Tran and others as guiding lights as we work through linked writing prompts that will navigate us through the generative space that opens up among the contending forces of the sacred/profane, belief/disbelief and religious texts/rituals and their subversions/re-imaginings.
Over the course of this workshop, we will think together through questions such as, “How do poets use the profane to access the sacred and vice-versa?” “What is the relationship between the two?” “How does poetry work to draw/re-draw or dissolve boundaries between them?” At the end of the workshop, participants will emerge with a vibrant first poem draft that travels the strange space between the sacred and profane in their own poetic imaginations. Find the poems for this workshop online here.
While there is no fee for this workshop, those who are able and appreciative can make direct donations to the leader via Venmo (@Leah-Silvieus).
Leah Silvieus (she/her) is the author most recently of the poetry collection Arabilis and is the co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and has awards and fellowships from The National Book Critics Circle, Fulbright, and Kundiman. Her criticism has appeared in The Harvard Review, The Believer, and elsewhere. She is currently based in New Haven where she is studying literature and religion at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
My bookshelf is an assorted jumble of the books I’ve accumulated throughout the years from a variety of different sources, representing my shifting tastes and needs through high school and college. A revolving collection split between my home bookcases and my dorm room shelves, my books often undergo frequent purges and additions to compensate for limited space. Borrowed library books, a few old favorites, novels for English classes, and textbooks for my art history major crowd the mantel I use for storage in my dorm, while the rest of my books live year-round in two bookcases at home.
At the end of high school, I purged my bookshelf of most of my children’s lit and young adult books, saving my favorites and donating the rest to Little Free Libraries or my mother’s high school classroom. I retained my favorite books, some which were presents, and literary classics needed for my English major, many of which I inherited from the college collections of my mother and grandmother. I buy most of my books secondhand from the Internet or local used bookstores, which allows me to save money and buy more while purchasing books for class or pleasure. I also collect nineteenth-century books with embossed covers, many of which I find in antique stores or at the Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut.
Many of my books have come to me by chance, gifted by friends and relatives, foraged from Little Free Libraries, or stolen from unused piles once owned by family members. Before leaving college, one of my friends gifted me almost his entire collection of philosophy and classics, dog-eared and coffee-stained. My collection ranges from classics to contemporary, poetry to nonfiction, theory to memoir, textbooks and Andy Steves’ Europe: City-Hopping on a Budget. I hope to one day have space for my own library in my future house or apartment, allowing my book collection to further expand and grow.
Eliza Browning is a student at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she studies English and art history. Her work has previously appeared in Rust + Moth, Vagabond City Lit, Contrary Magazine, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among others. She is a poetry editor for EX/POST Magazine and reads poetry for COUNTERCLOCK Journal.
