This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from I Was One of My Memoriesby Laurie Blauner (Pank Books 2021).
It’s likely that something is happening
Today I’m an animal waiting for moonlight to move me, muffling my words, carving my sentences like initials in a tree. I’m bereft of children. I merge my exhalations with my husband’s breath in a city that traps shadows behind emerging buildings. I perplex my mother and use the monotonous language of cicadas with my sister. I’m in a boat, refusing to float on a startled sea with my dead father. I water withered plants. I can lure water into the shape of a glass. I feel misplaced by rain, which already knows too much about me, which might think it is me.
Laurie Blauner is the author of eight books of poetry, five novels, and a hybrid non-fiction book called I Was One of My Memories that won PANK’s CNF Book Award. Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Georgia Review, Superstition Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, and many other magazines.
Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from I Was One of My Memoriesby Laurie Blauner (Pank Books 2021).
Tahitian Sky
Dear Cloud,
I’m unfolding and refolding myself to try to force myself out of grief and back into love. I am stubborn, remembering places, events, reliving moments through cell phone photographs, memory and reenacting what happened once like postcards sent from a faraway island.
I remember how Cyrus trembled when an airplane passed overhead. Sometimes the plane tried to write something in the sky that didn’t last.
Laurie Blauner is the author of eight books of poetry, five novels, and a hybrid non-fiction book called I Was One of My Memories that won PANK’s CNF Book Award. Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Georgia Review, Superstition Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, and many other magazines.
Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from I Was One of My Memoriesby Laurie Blauner (Pank Books 2021).
Room without Space and Time, the Future
A man knocks at the door, a parade of people enter. The hands of a clock on a table wildly spin in circles. Then the clock hurls itself against a wall. Walls move themselves away, becoming taller, thinner walls. A table is swept up by a river of light and carried out the narrow door. One window always looks into dark, endless space punctuated by a few faraway stars and planets. A person sits in a chair, growing younger in the room. Neither day nor night appears consistently. Silence washes through everything and occasionally there’s a small sound like water hurrying somewhere. Sometimes a ceiling or floor disappears, reappearing later in a different material or shape. The person sits still in the chair, waiting for time, trying to decide how best it to use it when it arrives.
Laurie Blauner is the author of eight books of poetry, five novels, and a hybrid non-fiction book called I Was One of My Memories that won PANK’s CNF Book Award. Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Georgia Review, Superstition Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, and many other magazines.
Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.
Happy New Year! This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from A Registry of Survivalby Ann Tweedy, released by Last Word Press in 2020.
Gifts My Mother Has Given Me as an Adult
Silk scarf with Monet lily pad design
Silk scarf with Audubon bird design
Slate-blue, cable-knit winter hat (one of two she was wearing on top of each other when I saw her last)
Poetry books I’d specifically asked for (but months or years after asking me what I wanted for a birthday or holiday, so that I had to restrain myself in buying once asked)
Dressy brown leather gloves
Dress shirts (e.g., lavender embossed floral silk from Talbots which my feral cat later peed on, no-iron cotton lavender and sage shirts from Orvis)
A cognitive therapy book called Learned Optimism
Amber earrings
Pink quartz and hematite bracelet
A book about how not to hyperventilate
Purple cashmere sweater (while homeless)
Ann Tweedy‘s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann also has published three chapbooks,Beleaguered Oases(2nd ed. Seven Kitchens 2020), White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts 2013), and A Registry of Survival(Last Word 2020). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other places, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and three Best of the Net Awards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law.
Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.
Ed Falco’s 2022 novel, Transcendent Gardening (C&R Press), is a brilliant work of prose set in Redvale, Georgia in 2016. Though the city and characters are fictional, themes from the story such as violence, loneliness, and the spread of information are incredibly prevalent in today’s reality. The book’s epigraph is by Matthew Zapruder’s poem, “Come On All You Ghosts.” Falco invites readers to see beyond the text through the poem’s final line, “I have to say something important,” which explains the creations of the monsters that follow.
Violence infests the world of Transcendent Gardening. Falco obliterates the possibility of a story of love, joy, and human connection with the introduction of terror, frustration, and loneliness. This world eats up its characters and spits them into the mud and muck. In many ways, Falco creates monsters, leaving the reader to decide which of his creations is the scariest. The reader witnesses Angel Maso, who is aware he requires help, descend into madness. Through thought and action, Angel demonstrates the violence and chaos of the world, as well as the potentially life-altering consequences of ignoring warning signs.
This is the story of a lonely man. One who becomes so disconnected from reality, so involved with the dismemberment of his life and psyche, that he becomes separated from all humanity. When Angel drifts far from the ground, his daughter can no longer see him in his eyes (Falco 208). Falco offers a fresh perspective on the intersections between mental health and violence and reminds his readers that tools of violence are superfluous solutions to many of the issues that arise from these intersections. In the end, the reader grieves Angel’s mental health alongside the victims of his actions.
One continues to become immersed in Falco’s world, keenly aware of the palpable suspense he creates. Falco fosters a familiarity with his characters, an understanding of them as thinking beings, and, at the very apex of the reader’s love for these creations, he drops a bomb. The result: the reader’s world rocks in time with Falco’s plot. Escalation and suspense are as present in this Transcendent Gardening as the characters themselves. One trusts Falco to deliver on the promises he makes early in the book—words and thoughts foreshadow the kinds of violence that result in loss, but no one can prepare for the heart-wrenching catastrophe that is this book’s climax.
Falco also offers a brilliant depiction of the modes by which history is recorded. Media reports, eyewitness testimonies, and fantastical speculations in Transcendent Gardening often obscure, and in some cases even erase, the truth. For example, the media labels Angel the “Angel of Death” (Falco 184). By glorifying the perpetrator rather than relaying facts and causes, those involved are swept into fantasy, creating stories and motives from thin air. Some even claim to have seen ISIS at the incident and to have heard yelling in Arabic, which the reader knows to be untrue (Falco 185). Such idolization of extreme acts of violence and assignment of terror to a group of unseen individuals leads to the ignorance of historical facts. These stories often excuse the need to look into structural issues that may require attention. In other words, Falco’s novel is a portrait of a leaky house. One may blame water for the destruction of the house and, once a villain is named, see no need to inspect how the water entered. Falco sparks a brilliant discussion on how to prevent future damage by patching cracks in the foundation.
Transcendent Gardening isn’t all doomsday-level crime and terror. Falco is skilled in depicting deep human connection. His characters fall in love; they make impossible decisions; they become elated and embarrassed and empathize with one another. Angel uses gardening to ground himself to the Earth. Doll squashes her morals for her career. Claire forgives her father for heinous acts of violence. Falco handles potent feelings such as grief, hatred, fear, and loneliness with grace. He paints a best-case scenario in a world where violence is a given, and he gently offers a refreshing perspective on reoccurring problems. That said, this book is potentially triggering to many, especially those who have been affected by gun violence. Falco wants his readers to sit in these uncomfortable feelings. A call to action lurks beneath one of the novel’s concluding lines: “Nothing…was ever going to put an end to the violence in men’s hearts, but you could at least limit their access to the weapons that encouraged it” (Falco 207). If read with care and interest, the book offers hope that our world may contain more balance and empathy in the future.
Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Z Eihausen. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, January 21st from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”.
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!
Z Eihausen (she/her) is an emerging writer from Tennessee. She is currently a senior at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville studying creative writing and philosophy. She previously interned at Sundress Academy for the Arts and is now Staff Director. She also likes bees.
While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.
Each month we split any Xfit donations with our community partner. This month, we are accepting donations for a support grant for the winner of our Summer 2024 Fellowship for Palestinian Writers. This grant will help to fund travel expenses for said writer to attend our residency program this summer.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Remi Recchia joins us to discuss the work of Timothy Liu and the ways in which poetry is just another word for love. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.
Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Timothy Liu’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?
Remi Recchia: I first encountered Timothy Liu’s work in 2017. It was the second year of my MFA program at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), and in an effort to expose myself to more poets, I subscribed to the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day newsletter. Liu’s poem “Winter”—most likely appropriately sent in one of the long, cold months in Northwest Ohio—mesmerized me. I couldn’t stop reading it. I think what really struck me was that it was a love poem; young poets tend to be cautioned against love poems due to the risk of cliché. I printed out the page and taped it to my office wall. Then, in a weird moment of serendipity, Liu was invited as a visiting author for BGSU’s Prout Reading Series. I remember him being a very interesting person. His reading began with him shirtless, holding a spear, with his chest covered in body paint. I don’t remember the rationale behind this act. Maybe it was just a poet being a poet. During the book-signing, I blurted out that I had a printout of his poem on my wall, which he humored in good taste.
RW: How has Liu’s writing inspired your own?
RR: I read Liu’s work at a time when I was falling madly in love with my now-wife, in the sticky grasp of alcoholism, during the early stages of my hormonal and gender transition. All of these things made me feel things very deeply; I was an intense person and also a little sad. Liu appears to me to be a poet who also feels things very deeply but, unlike the stereotypical masculine artist façade of blasé and cynicism, his work seems to embrace his emotional humanness, his messiness, his longing. I mean, look at these lines: “You touch my knee, and I hear / the brass weights of a grandfather clock / steadily falling in that cottage where / we met, the season’s first snow fresh / on the ground as hands ran up and down / a polished cherry cabinet built / to last” (“Two Men on a Swing Watching Their Shadows Lengthen,” Say Goodnight). Really look at them. In my mess and growth and desperation, how could I resist this language? So, to answer the question: I suppose Liu’s work has inspired my own in that it gave me permission to lean in. To write love poems. To love.
RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?
RR: As I’ve indicated earlier, the poem “Winter” is especially significant to me since it was my introduction to Liu’s work, and I’ve carried that meaningfulness with me since then. I chose the others because I feel that they complement each other. They’re thematically linked in that they’re all love poems, of course, the tone in each is different, creating a surprising juxtaposition of poetics. I find “All Trains Going Local” particularly intriguing. The lines, “you who are so used to // anything scribbled on a prescription blank” haunt me. Given my history with addiction, it’s not surprising that they stand out to me. But to any reader, addict or not, it should be noteworthy that those lines directly precede the turn of the poem: “Just want the pain to go away, you say, / surprised to find yourself // reaching for someone else’s hand.” Maybe what I’m saying is that the entire poem is full of twists and turns and revelations. That’s what all poems should do.
RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?
RR: Quite a bit, actually! My second poetry chapbook, From Gold, Ghosts: Alchemy Erasures, was released on November 1. I’ve also just published my first children’s book, Little Lenny Gets His Horns, a collaboration with the up-and-coming artist Victoria Garcia-Boswell. (Please check her out if you haven’t already.) I’m trying to publish my most recent full-length poetry manuscript, Addiction Apocalypse. In terms of other life news, I’m entering the discernment process for Holy Orders with the Episcopal Church.
Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of twelve books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Say Goodnight, a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; and Vox Angelica, which won the 1992 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. Translated into a dozen languages, Liu’s poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review.
Remi Recchia, PhD, is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a book editor and also works as a technical editor. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, and Juked, among others. Books and chapbooks include Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021); Sober (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022); From Gold, Ghosts: Alchemy Erasures (Gasher Press, 2023); and Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature & the Silences Around Us (Sundress Publications, forthcoming). Remi has been a Tin House Scholar and Thomas Lux Scholar. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University.
Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com
When I first started to pack my things to move to New York, I knew my books were going to be a problem. I had a lot because every book, even if I hadn’t read it in years, held sentimental value and I couldn’t bare to toss any of them out. But New York was going to be different from Missouri, Florida, and Colorado. There was going to be a lot less space for all my memories, so I needed to make space for new ones. I donated half of my books and yet they still took up the most space in all of my boxes that I planned to ship. I had a delusional thought in my brain that I would be able to make things work, even though I had yet to lay eyes on the apartment I was moving into properly. And the delusion kind of worked out and kind of didn’t. In the sense that my roommates didn’t mind me shoving my books into any available space.
I had windows, my roommate’s empty wine shelf, and a nightstand, so I shoved my books anywhere they would fit. Only after living in my apartment for around two years did I ever get around to getting a bookshelf.
This is just a small sample of my bookshelf. I keep my bookshelf out in the living room, and it holds a mixture of the theory books I gathered during my degree in Ethnic Studies as well as poetry and fiction. My top shelf holds the books I return to the most, both in poetry and non-fiction. I normally return to these books for inspiration like Hybrida by Tina Chang or Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo by Ntozake Shange, or for guidance like Revolutionary Mothering and Radical Dharma.
The rest of my bookshelf is fiction that I consider either on my “to read” or “to reread” and is organized by the spine. Outside of poetry, the majority of my books are fiction with a memoir or two sprinkled in. I gravitate towards queer love stories, fantasy, and family narratives. Malindo Lo is one of my favorite Lesbian fiction authors. A book I’ve beat to death that’s not fiction is Catherine Hardwicke’s Director’s Notebook for Twilight. I’m a cinephile and a Twilight stan and it was her work as a director on that film that made me want to work in film. One of my dreams is to one day write and shoot my own movie.
The books that I keep in my room are organized by what I call sentimental chaos. I say sentimental chaos because in general, I tend to be a mood reader who will return to familiar books time and time again.
The rules for the organization of my nightstand books are actively rereading/or actively just starting. I keep all my library books here as well as the books I draw up on when I need to feel grounded. I just finished rereading All About Love and Their Eyes Were Watching God (my favorite book). Currently working on my Lighting Thief reread as well as starting Lesbian Death. For poetry, I just started Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs.
In my window, I keep my journals and copies of my favorite manga series, Skip Beat, as well as books I either return to often or am working through on a recommendation. I like to keep these in my window for comfort. Skip Beat was a series that grew with me from childhood into my adulthood. I draw inspiration and comfort from the characters within those pages, and so even if I’m not actively reading them, they’re always by my side.
Zora Satchell is a Black and Chinese American queer poet and cinephile who writes about mental illness, film, family, and friendship. She holds a degree in Ethnic Studies from Colorado State University. She was awarded the Brooklyn Poets Fellowship for winter/spring 2021. She lives on the border of Brooklyn and Queens and tweets from @zora_thee_pony.
Happy New Year! This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from A Registry of Survivalby Ann Tweedy, released by Last Word Press in 2020.
Primal Scream
When I was five or so, my mother saw the Primal Scream as a way to cope. She talked about getting a person-sized wooden box to go inside and scream in. In my imagination now, the box looks like a coffin, but maybe it was more like a small closet. Since we never had much money, she just went up into the half-finished attic and screamed, sans box. The police will come, my father said, and I felt a mix of apprehension and interest. What would it be like to be questioned by police, to try to explain that there was no emergency? Would they believe us? I didn’t worry about the ripple effects of neighbors seeing the police, though I’m sure my father did. But I was curious—was he right, would they come? But they never did. Or at least not then.
Now I’m learning more—that John and Yoko both tried and liked Primal Therapy in the early ‘70s. Steve Jobs took a brief gander as well. The therapist and author–one Janov–has since been largely discredited. The therapy went on longer than he posited and didn’t suck the childhood trauma out of most patients, as promised.
You could say a lot about my mother in those days. She was susceptible to expert crackpots–no doubt. The trauma she noticed was usually inside her. Her only child, I was either indistinguishable from her or aligned with evil forces. But now she won’t take medications for fear of deadly side effects and she can’t trust a psychiatrist for more than a few weeks. After that, they start selling her confidences or plotting to kill her. I look back and think of her then–a person with hope.
Ann Tweedy‘s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann also has published three chapbooks,Beleaguered Oases(2nd ed. Seven Kitchens 2020), White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts 2013), and A Registry of Survival(Last Word 2020). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other places, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and three Best of the Net Awards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law.
Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Humanimal: Between Human Beings and Animals,” a workshop led by Si-Min Chong on January 10th, 2023, from 6:00-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).
In this online class, we will read works examining the ways animals, trees, mushrooms, the living beings around us make a home (art), gather food (sustenance), and experiment with ways of being and play. The class will begin with a close reading from writers exploring this theme, followed by writing prompts. We will take inspiration from our kin and experiment with methods such as free-writing, phonetic translations of birdsong, writing next to a tree/plant, or a body/glass of water, and more.
In the spirit of conjuring and collaborating with our kin, we will write or make work by way of prose poetry or lyrical prose, sketches, concrete poetry, or simply, marks on a page. This class is open to writers of all genres who are curious about writing alongside other humanimals.
Si-Min Chong (Min) grew up in the industrial west of Singapore, where the air smells of cacao. She makes work about vessels: women, trees, and snakes. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, she holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.
