Sundress Publications 2023 AWP Off-Site Reading

Sundress Publications is pleased to announce that the readers for our 2023 AWP off-site reading include Barbara Fant, Kimberly Ann Priest, Stacey Balkun, Athena Nassar, jason b. crawford, Sunni Wilkinson, Nicole Arocho Hernández, Amanda Galvan Huynh, Cynthia Guardado, Dani Putney, and Donna Vorreyer. The reading will take place on March 10th, 2023, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM PST at Old Stove Brewing Co, 600 W. Nickerson St., Queen Anne, Seattle, WA 98119.

A brown woman with dark black-brown hair smiling against a blue and green backdrop. Her arms are crossed over her knees, and she is wearing a white blouse with two strings hanging down from the collar. The top of a reddish-brown pair of pants or skirt is visible.

Amanda Galvan Huynh (She/Her) is a Xicana writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of Where My Umbilical is Buried (Sundress Publications 2023) and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics (The Operating System 2019).

A brown woman with long black hair gives a small smile as she sits on the edge of a black chair. She is wearing a black top, a black jacket, and black pants against a grey vignette background.

Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet, essayist, and short story writer from Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of the debut poetry collection Little Houses, published by Sundress Publications. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets, The Missouri Review, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, The Chattahoochee Review, Salt Hill, Lake Effect, New Orleans Review, Zone 3, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, and elsewhere. 

A Black woman sits on top of a wooden stool against a grey and white background. She has black hair and wears a yellow top, a pendant necklace, blue jeans, and a pair of brown heeled shoes.

Barbara Fant has been writing and performing for over 15 years. She has competed in nine National Poetry Slams and is a World Poetry Slam finalist. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Paint, Inside Out (2010) and Mouths of Garden (2022). Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets, McNeese Review, Button Poetry, and Def Poetry Jam, among others. She believes in the transformative power of art and considers poetry her ministry.

A black and white portrait-style photo of a woman. She has long hair that starts off black and the roots and grows lighter as it continues down her shoulders, a hexagon-shaped earring visible with her hair as well. She has a tattoo on her one visible hand and is wearing bands on her wrist.

Cynthia Guardado (she/her/hers) is a Los-Angeles born queer Salvadoran poet and professor. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Cenizas, (University of Arizona Press 2022) and ENDEAVOR, (World Stage Press 2017).

A portrait-style image of a person smiling against a background of a white column and greenery. They have short dark hair, a visible earring, a green shirt, and a red jacket with a light pattern on the front.

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Their debut collection, Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. They’re also the author of the poetry chapbook Dela Torre (Sundress Publications, 2022).

A selfie-style photo of a white woman with short whitish-blonde hair in large teal glasses and a bright blue t-shirt. She is smiling and standing against a background of flags and a dirt-covered ground.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.

A selfie-style photo of a Black person wearing a pale pink beanie-style hat, glasses, dark blue lipstick, and a black sweatshirt with white letters on the front. One hand is up on their cheek, and they have a small amount of black facial hair.

jason b. crawford (They/Them) was born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut Full-Length Year of the Unicorn Kidz is out from Sundress Publications. They are currently an MFA Candidate at The New School in Poetry.

A white woman with reddish-brown, windswept hair looks into the camera against a blurred, wheat-coloured background. The photo is taken from a nearly fourty-five degree angle looking down at her face, and her black shirt is also visible.

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird, finalist in the American Best Book Awards, and chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place, Parrot Flower, and Still Life. She is an associate poetry editor for Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and assistant professor at Michigan State University.

A brown woman with dark brown hair and black wire glasses smiles. She is leaning against a tree, and she is wearing a purple and white striped top with a pendant necklace on black chord.

Nicole Arocho Hernández is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. Her poems have been published in The Acentos Review, Electric Literature, Honey Literary, The Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, I Have No Ocean, was published by Sundress Publications. She is the Translations Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review and an MFA candidate at Arizona State University.

A black and white portrait-style photo of a woman with dark wavy hair wearing dark framed glasses. The top straps of a dark top are also showing, and she stands against an outdoor background..

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest, her creative work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State & teaches online at The Poetry Barn and The Loft. 

A white woman with straight red hair. She appears seated on a white-grey background with a black bar fence. She is wearing a black and dark green garment only visible from the torso up, and the garment has a small greenish-white pattern on the dark green parts of the clothing.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Prize).  Her work has been awarded the New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, and the Sherwin Howard Award.

Doubleback Review is Seeking Short-Form Previously Published Works

Doubleback Review is currently seeking submissions for issue 3:2! We are a part of Doubleback Press, a small press specializing in republishing creative works that were originally published by now-defunct journals and presses. Doubleback Review has also had a special edition for conscientiously withdrawn pieces—works that were withdrawn from journals because of harmful behavior from an editor. We are a home for your retired darlings, and we are also committed to uplifting the voices of marginalized creators.

We are open for submissions year-round and accept poetry, short stories, artwork, and more short-form work. Poets should send up to five poems and prose writers should send up to 4,000 words total—one story or essay, or up to three shorter flash pieces—in one document (Word preferred). Please begin each piece on a separate page. Include your name and email address at the top of each page. Below each piece, specify where it was previously published.

Artists may send one high-resolution image in .JPG, .JPEG, .PNG, or .PDF format, up to 25 MB in size. Please include an artist statement and specify where the piece was previously published in the cover letter field.

Our full submission guidelines can be found here.

Sundress Releases The Tripart Heart by Sarah Einstein

Sundress Releases The Tripart Heart by Sarah Einstein

Sundress Publications announces the release of Sarah Einstein’s new chapbook, The Tripart Heart. The chapbook follows three distinct chapters in Einstein’s life, proving that within every individual experience is room for growth.

tripartIn The Tripart Heart, love lays within the grooves and shadows of personal discomfort and there settles into the knowledge that the most important part of love, regardless of form or reason, is that it exists. The woman of Einstein’s stories longs to make an impact on the world. Her relationships echo her revelations as she moves through hospitality, transience, and honesty. A willingness to love guides her on a journey of change as she breaks rules for a dying man whose version of home is a tar paper shack and topples social barriers defining who-reaches-for-whom in a marriage, all amid the fleeting drug-magic of tie-dyed days spent at Rainbow Gatherings. Enlightenment through love traverses each complex facet of Sarah Einstein’s The Tripart Heart, as the woman’s battles with heartbreak and loss cause her to confront the naïveté of widespread affection and reshape it into concentrated moments of intimacy.

Penny Guisinger, author of Postcards from Here called the chapbook, “ … wise, witty, sharp-eyed, and full of compassionate heart. [Einstein] takes a hard look at how we treat and accept each other, how we overlook and discard each other, and how we revere and love each other. The Tripart Heart asks us to work a little harder at the job of being good humans.”

And Alex DeFrancesco, author of Pscyhopomps said, “Walking a line between deeply-felt memory and tender nostalgia for hard-scrabble times, Sarah Einstein’s chapbook delineates the path from trying to change the world to letting the world soften and make fertile the heart.”

Sarah Einstein is the author of Mot: A Memoir (University of Georgia Press 2015), author imageRemnants of Passion (Shebooks 2014). Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Sun, Ninth Letter, PANK, and other journals. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Best of the Net, and the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction.

The chapbook is available at http://www.sundresspublications.com

Sundress’s Favorite Essays of 2017

sundresslogo

We’re already a few weeks into the new year! For word lovers like us, a new year means new prose. As excited as we are at Sundress to see what amazing work will come in 2018, we still find ourselves awed by some of the things we read last year.

The Sundress staff took some time to reflect on those essays that resonated with us in 2017. Below are some of our favorites:

 

hunger“‘My body is a cage of my own making'” by Roxane Gay. (CW: sexual assault)

The author of Bad Feminist and Hunger discusses how she overate to cope with childhood trauma, and the trials she faces today occupying an overweight body in a fatphobic society.

 

 

 

Body of a Poem: An Essay About Being a Non Male Non Female Person in the Literary World Written in the Form of a Dream” by Moss Angel

Paints a vivid picture of what it can feel like to exist outside the gender binary in a world that constantly [rein]forces one.

 

“Dragons Are for White Kids with Money: On the Friction of Geekdom and Race” by Daniel Jose Ruiz

Geek/nerd culture along with the canons of science fiction, fantasy, and adjacent genres are overwhelmingly white in representation and in racial coding. A Chicano writer explores some of the challenges that arise for him as a fan of these exciting but problematic parts of our culture.

 

To Vibrebrate: In Defense of Strangeness” by Johannes Gӧransson

In a letter to the editor, Johannes Göransson critiques Matthew Zapruder’s New York Times article, “Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think” and argues in favor of embracing the enigmatic, esoteric nature of poetry.

 

Asian Persuasion” by Isabella Dia-Tsi-Tay

A writer discusses her anger at racial ignorance and the oppressiveness of Eurocentric ideals of beauty.

 

Body of a Poem: The Public Won’t Let Me Be Personal” by Kenyatta JP Garcia

Learning, and now unlearning, the act of quietly suppressing their true identity outside of cisnormative familial and societal demands.

 

A Lyric Video Essay”  by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal​

Filmed in the writer’s childhood home, this work touches on themes of immigration, assimilation, family, memory, and more.

 

Reports from the Field: Good Intentions: What Being Disabled at #AWP17 Was Like” by Cade Leebron

A writer recounts her encounters with ableism at last year’s Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference.

 

her bodyThe Trash Heap Has Spoken” by Carmen Maria Machado 

With references to real-world and pop culture, Machado tackles her relationship to her body, along with media portrayals of women with bodies like hers.

 

 

Our Lady of Complicity” by Laurie Penny

A scathing review of Ivanka Trump’s book Women Who Work, which is described, among other ways, as “about as feminist as a swastika-shaped bikini wax.”

 

Making a Marriage Magically Tidy” by Helen Ellis

A self-aware, self-proclaimed “recovering slob” chronicles her journey from messy spouse to a wife with neater habits.

 

Commentary: Finding strength in saying ‘Me too’” by Megan Louise Rowe (CW: assault)

Touched inappropriately by her journalism teacher, Rowe retreats from writing following the assault but manages to find her voice again, both on and off the page

 

Growing up Queer in Appalachia” by U.J. Wood

Coming of age and finding solidarity with other members of the LGBT community. The struggles are universal, but especially fraught in socially conservative areas.

 

How to Stop Apologizing for My Stutter, and Other Important Lessons” by Rachel Hoge

The essay visits the author’s relationship to her speech impediment, reflecting on memorable events of the past and present.

 

soraya robertsThe Personal Essay Isn’t Dead. It’s Just No Longer White” by Soraya Roberts

Roberts asserts that people lamenting the death of the personal essay are actually lamenting the death of something more akin to kyriarchy.

 

 

2016’s 30 Most Transformative Essays

Screenshot 2016-12-21 12.43.40.png

We asked our staff, editors, and authors to name the essays, published in 2016, that were most transformative and significant to them. The following essays represent a sampling of favorites.

We hope you find them as exciting, inspiring, and essential as we do.

A Tape Doesn’t Change a Goddamn Thing
by Karrie Higgins for Full Grown People

“I can no longer distinguish between the Trump campaign and sexual abuse. I can no longer distinguish between the past and the present.

just, adj:

based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair.

just, adv:

barely, by a little; very recently, the immediate past

I can no longer distinguish between tattling on my hometown’s Jerry Sandusky and voting for Hillary.

I am going to talk to that reporter. I am going to name names. I am going to say what I want to say. I am going to let the words fall out.

How We See One Another: Our Guest Editors Castro and Sukrungruang in Conversation

by the editors of Brevity

“I prefer compression.  I like the way compression and short forms are more possible, more available, for writers in straitened circumstances.  If you’re doing manual labor all day, or taking care of a child or elderly person, your mind can be turning over sentences and paragraphs; you can revise and revise and revise.  But you can’t hold long texts in your head—at least, most of us can’t.  Then, when you have five or ten minutes at the end of the day, you can write down what you’ve been composing in your head.  You can produce small gemlike pieces far more readily than long texts, which require—at least in my experience—more time, more solitude, more peace than poor people are usually afforded.”

But We Never ask Why Rapists get to be Anonymous Gorillas

by an anonymous contributor for Entropy

“Public conversations relentlessly revolve around the well-being of the rapist and not us: Whether or not he is believed. Whether or not someone is oppressing him by accusing him. Whether or not he was abused, too, and whether or not he was troubled with depression, oppression, or social problems. Public conversations demand we take every last step to understand and be empathetic to his psychology, even though he is an autonomous adult, fully capable of making the choice not to rape.”

When you Handle Poison

by Jennifer Tamayo for Mice Magazine

“Sitting with a group of women and sharing, one-by-one, our stories of abuse and assault and harassment in NYC’s poetry circles was upsetting though, at moments, empowering too. Voices cracking open a room saying you are not alone. And yet, later, walking home from the meetings, living with those accounts while doing dishes or taking the train, I felt and feel demoralized. Of course you are not alone. The proof is your bodies. There are many of them. Many more of them than you even know about or will know about.”

You Will Find me in the Starred Sky

by Keema Waterfield for Brevity

“You break teeth and dislocate your jaw in your sleep. Grinding, your dentist says. But: There might be more to it, your hypnotherapist says when you go in to quit smoking. So you regress to your three-year-old self and remember the first time you bit down. You were waiting for Ray to come back. You were ready to bite his throat out. Ready to protect yourself and your sister, one year younger, and you knew he would kill you for it. He never came back, but there you were with your jaw clamped ever after.”

10-sky

On Coupling: An Inventory

by Melissa Mathewson for Guernica Magazine

“I look to animals for proof that monogamy is an unnatural arrangement. I want their stories to align with mine, to find that they wander and digress so I can say, “See, I’m not wrong! All animals like to screw around.” It’s difficult to work out this complicated mess of biology, emotion, sexual freedom. There must be some kind of instinctive or innate justification that what’s real and true is our fundamental nature to roam and multi-partner.”

Not Wanting Kids is Entirely Normal

by Jessica Valenti for The Atlantic

“Today, American women have more public images of themselves than that of a housewife. We see ourselves depicted in television, ads, movies, and magazines (not to mention relief!) as politicians, business owners, intellectuals, soldiers, and more. But that’s what makes the public images of total motherhood so insidious. We see these diverse images of ourselves and believe that the oppressive standard Friedan wrote about is dead, when in fact it has simply shifted. Because no matter how many different kinds of public images women see of themselves, they’re still limited. They’re still largely white, straight upper-middle-class depictions, and they all still identify women as mothers or non-mothers.”

I Am Not Muslim But

by Ayşe Papatya Bucak for Asteri(x) Journal

“My mother is American; my father is Turkish. He is not a Muslim either. If they reopen and we are taken at least we will be in the camps together. My brother, too. I suppose I should wish for their freedom, but instead I wish for their company.

I don’t speak Turkish or Arabic, don’t know how to pray, don’t know how to be anything other than American; internment will be its own foreign country. But maybe I’ll have a lot of time to read, to study Turkish, to learn to pray.”

Papatya-Islam-booklet-1-1050x615.jpg

The Mule Deer

by Debbie Weingarten for Vela Magazine

“Perhaps because I am an almost-mother, I do not think before scaling the fence. I am running into the open desert surrounding the farm, stepping across deep grooves the water has cut. The creosote bushes wear layers of sparkling silt. By the time I reach the clearing, the dogs have torn a hole in the side of the baby mule deer. Her round glassy eyes are wide, and she is screaming. The sound is almost human. She goes silent when she sees me.

Our dogs loll their pink tongues at me, sides heaving, drunk on the chase and the catch. They are saying, Aren’t you proud of us? Aren’t you? The alpha female, a gangly white giantess, stands nearest to the deer. Our two beloved mutts stand a few feet back in the brush, watching.”

Arabian-desert_Bill-Strain.jpg
(Source: Bill Strain, via Vela Magazine)

I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump

by Jonna Ivin for Stir Journal

“I understood their fear and frustration. I’ve spent a great deal of my life living in poverty. It’s scary being poor, worrying that one parking ticket would mean I couldn’t buy groceries, or deciding whether I should see a dentist about a toothache or pay my trailer park fee. It’s humiliating and terrifying, but sitting around and crying about it isn’t an option because we know that the only thing more pathetic than someone living in poverty is someone living in poverty and crying about it. How many times have we been told to get a job, or that if we just worked harder we could improve our situation? Work harder. Work harder. Work harder. American society has made it perfectly clear: if you are poor, it’s your own damn fault.”

Arizaboesu

by Elizabeth Miki Brina for Hippocampus Magazine

“My mother’s name is Kyoko, which means “respectful” or “apricot” or “echo” or “from heaven” in Japanese depending on how it’s written. My mother was born in Okinawa in 1948, three years after the end of WWII, three years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, three years after the horrific Battle of Okinawa that destroyed one quarter of the island’s population and ninety percent of its buildings and infrastructure.”

Picture-1.jpg

Marilynne Robinson talks religion, fear and the American spirit

by Michael Schulson for Salon

You write sincere books. What does it mean to be a sincere novelist?

I don’t know, I’ve never been called that before.

You’ve never been called that? Okay, am I totally misreading you here?

I tend to mean what I say. I think there is a self-protective impulse that takes the form of cynicism very broadly in the culture now. You make yourself vulnerable by suggesting that there’s anything you actually believe in.

People talk about American values. Yes, there are American values, things like democracy and generosity and so on. If we cannot say that these things are possible or characteristic, we don’t have them to orient ourselves by.”

US author Robinson smiles during an interview in central London
(Source: Reuters/Dylan Martinez, via Salon.)

Poetry Betrays Whiteness

by Lucas De Lima

“To inherit this blood-soaked history means many things.  As a writer, I need to go beyond the narratives of immigration or U.S. imperialism that are expected of me.  But neither is it enough to acknowledge my colonial lineage.  The guilt of proximity to whiteness is not enough.  White guilt is no recipe for aspiring race traitors.  What I need is something most of my elders don’t have.  I’m talking about a blueprint for solidarity and transformation.”

Gratitude is my Terrain: Maybe:”

by Renée E. D’Aoust for Sweet

“Sample of my daily list:

○    Do Chris Pei QiGong
○    Post review of Valerie Fioravanti’s book Garbage Night at the Opera
○    Faccio i compiti per il corso d’Italiano
○    Walkies
○    Finish Rain Taxi book review of Sarah Einstein’s Mot
○    Write
○    Grade papers from ENGL 101 & 102
○    Buy plane tkt MXP > AMS > MSP > GEG
○    Drink 2 cups of coffee max
○    Cuddle Tootsie”

My President was Black

by Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic

“In our conversations, Obama said he didn’t doubt that there was a sincerely nonracist states’-rights contingent of the GOP. And yet he suspected that there might be more to it. “A rudimentary knowledge of American history tells you that the relationship between the federal government and the states was very much mixed up with attitudes towards slavery, attitudes towards Jim Crow, attitudes towards antipoverty programs and who benefited and who didn’t,” he said.”

55bff0d18.jpg
(Source: Pete Souza / White House, via The Atlantic)

Apocalypse Logic

by Elissa Washuta for The Offing

“From 1953 to 1968, the U.S. government tried to wipe out some tribes by ending their relationships—withdrawing federal recognition of these tribes as sovereigns, ending the federal trust responsibility to those tribes, allowing land to be lost to non-Natives. The tribes terminated, for the most part, were those the U.S. government considered to be successful because of the wealth within their tribal lands: timber, oil, water, and so on. Terminating a tribe meant fully forsaking all treaty responsibilities to them.”

aunt-virginia-miller

(Source: “Aunt Virginia Miller” by Edward Curtis, 1910 courtesy of Library of Congress, via The Offing.)

Collection

by Chelsey Clammer for Hobart

“The concept of dust collecting on ashes intrigues me. Dead human skin cells accumulating on dead human body ashes. Fascinating. Mirroring my reaction to dust, I become curious about the story of what’s inside that little wooden box—the ashes, their abstraction. What parts of my dad—his body—I now keep near me. This time, my intrigue isn’t rooted symbolism or metaphor. This isn’t about religious beliefs or spirituality. It’s not about the cost of burial, or where we can go and what we can do to remember our dead.”

On Slaughter and Praying: An Essay in Two Parts

by Carol Ann Davis for The Georgia Review

“Again we’ve dragged the boys to midtown Manhattan, the both of them inclined instead toward the park or street food, toward anything else, but we go to Picasso Sculpture at the MOMA, explaining that rather than the flat paintings they critique as not as good as what we do they’ll be seeing sculpture, ideas made plastic. Some of the pieces, I’ve heard or read somewhere, are just folded paper napkins Picasso made to please a bored sister at a restaurant, the kind of thing the boys do when they’re feeling generous. I say this partly to entice and partly to annoy them. We’re inside an ongoing debate about the efficacy of modern art in general; their interest in winning it means they will be quiet through the rooms, assembling arguments for the drive home.”

What it Really Means to Hold Space for Someone

by Heather Plett for Uplift Magazine

“To truly support people in their own growth, transformation, grief, etc., we can’t do it by taking their power away (ie. trying to fix their problems), shaming them (ie. implying that they should know more than they do), or overwhelming them (ie. giving them more information than they’re ready for). We have to be prepared to step to the side so that they can make their own choices, offer them unconditional love and support, give gentle guidance when it’s needed, and make them feel safe even when they make mistakes.”

holding-space_circle-1.jpg

Consider the Lobster Mushroom: being a brief theory of the craft of creative nonfiction

by Heidi Czerwiec for Brevity

 “Remind yourself of two things:

1.If you can’t deal with the mushroom now, it will come back. It will always come back, popping up whether you want it to or no, because it’s part of a larger system, mycelia feeding on what’s rotten, what lurks, always, beneath the surface. If you decide in the future you’re ready to pluck it and make something of it, it will be there, mushrooming.

2. You don’t have to reveal the source of your mushrooms. Few enthusiasts do, going to great lengths to conceal their sites by lying, covering their tracks. But most are happy to share the fruits of their labors, the fruited mushroom, the finished product, however fraught. You can share, without sharing everything.”

Watching And Reading About White People Having Sex Is My Escape

by Esther Wang for Buzzfeed

“I still don’t know what drew me in. It could’ve been boredom: I was a voracious reader, having little else to do but read, as my parents eschewed things like television, pop music, and movies — not out of any sort of cultural elitism or skinflint immigrant desire to deprive their children of as many opportunities to waste time as possible, but simply because they were too broke and too tired from working 12- and 15-hour days to think that we might want those distractions.”

Coming Apart

by Rebecca Solnit for Harper’s Magazine

“For many longtime residents of the Mission District, the fires, the evictions, the exploding housing prices, and the police killings of brown, black, poor, and homeless locals are not arbitrary events. They are instead related forces, all meant to drive out people like them. The anguish is so intense that five people camped in front of the Mission Police Station this spring, refusing to eat a bite, as part of a protest they called Hunger for Justice. The fast, which obliged throngs of restaurant and bar patrons to walk past starving, outraged people for several weeks, took place almost directly between Foodhall and the former food hall.”

I was Raped / I was Battered

by Kelly Sundberg and Melissa Ferrone

“Survey of the Damage:

One ceramic bowl shattered.

One busted foot.

One marriage over.

One fatherless son.

One homeless mother.

One career ended (hers, not his).

One yellow flier with a list of services available to victims.

One phone call to the community domestic-violence shelter.

One email from the director of residential services. She wanted her parking permit back.”

A Politics of Mere Being

by Carl Phillips for Poetry Magazine

“There are countless aspects to a self; race and sexual orientation are only two of them, it seems to me, neither the least nor the most 
important. It’s more accurate to say there’s a constant shifting of 
hierarchy, depending on any given moment in experience. Am I a gay black man when roasting a chicken at home for friends? Sure. But that’s not what I’m most conscious of at the time. Am I necessarily, then, stripped of political resonance at that moment? Or is not the sharing of food with others a small social contract analogous to the contract of giving and taking — of interaction — that we call citizenship in a democratic society? Is this a stretch? Can we only be political when we are speaking to specific issues of identity, exclusion, injustice?”

armando-veve
(Source: Armando Veve, via Poetry Magazine.)

“All the Fierce Tethers

by Lia Purpura for the New England Review

“Often, however, the most intricate systems are identified first by way of their ruin. One comes to know them only briefly in their magnificence, before news of their loss takes up its platform, then overtakes the conversation—and rightly, since the conversation is finally urgent.

The snowshoe hare once lived by a system perfectly emplaced, a fluent method, ardent, elegant, brimmed with muscle, cunning, and flight.

Stay with me now. I’ll slow it way down.”

Of Mice and Memory

by Staci Schoenfeld for The Manifest Station

“When you get home (after a stop at the bakery for cupcakes), you open the package and pull open the back of the trap, and proceed to slather it with the name-brand peanut butter you have always loved. Only the real thing for this Midwestern mouse. If you were in San Francisco still, you would have gone for the organic stuff. After you maneuver the back panel back into place, a feat requiring more intense hand-eye coordination than you would have expected, you set the trap on the stove where you last saw the poop and you wait.

You expect the mouse will be caught that evening.”

bottles-331753_1280.jpg

Untethered from Product or Object: An Interview with Diane Seuss

by Emilia Phillips for 32Poems

“When I sit to write, my body/mind seems to naturally visit this pool, and others like it, spring fed sites that have garnered the energy of archetype through years of revisiting. Even if I am not writing that scene, it primes me for a dive, and I guess, for me, that is the source of everything, where the unbearable gives birth to language and imagination. Maybe that’s the baby my father’s ghost is carrying. This is probably less muscle memory than the figurative poetic muscle you reference. It represents a memory site of complex, incompatible feelings—tenderness, resistance, fear, love, horror, sweetness—that the language in poems can approach.”

Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid

by Rufi Thorpe for Vela Magazine

“It was pure joy to see my friend after so long. Just laying eyes on him made me glad; he had grown a Freddy Mercury mustache and was wearing a weird child’s size sweater and I loved every inch of him. Out of our mouths flew sentences too fast to filter, so desperate were we to tell each other everything, to make clear what had happened in the last ten years. I found myself, as I crammed my thighs into my shapewear, saying, ‘Oh, well, I love my husband, he is the perfect man for me and it was love at first sight, but I would never willingly enter into this state of servitude again.'”

mother-billboard.jpg

(Source: Siestas, via Vela.)

Literary Juneteenth (or Why I Left The Offing)

by Casey Rochetau for The Offing

“Later that same day, I went out to dinner with two other black women poets, one of whom had invited Darcy to join us. I was wearing a shirt that reads “Ratchetness as Praxis” and, in all likelihood, talking too loudly in mixed company — go figure. At a audible downslope in the conversation, someone asked what praxis meant. I offered an adequate definition that included a Foucault reference, but Darcy still insisted on looking it up on her phone. I guess she thought I would wear a shirt emblazoned with something I couldn’t define, or maybe she assumed my field of expertise was ratchetness. Her behavior may sound minor, but evidentiary information sometimes does. In that moment, I barely batted an eye. In fact, it was only upon reflecting on all the instances that led up to the tweet, and my subsequent resignation on Twitter, that it even struck me as out of pocket.”

Black in Middle America

by Roxane Gay for Brevity 

“Friends in cities have long asked me how I do it—spending year after years in these small towns that are so inhospitable to blackness. I say I’m from the Midwest, which I am, and that I have never lived in a big city, which is also true. I say that the Midwest is home even if this home does not always embrace me, and that the Midwest is a vibrant, necessary place. I say I can be a writer anywhere and as an academic, I go where the work takes me. Or, I said these things. Now, I am simply weary. I say, “I hate it here,” and a rush of pleasure fills me. I worry that I can’t be happy or feel safe anywhere. But then I travel to places where my blackness is unremarkable, where I don’t feel like I have to constantly defend my right to breathe, to be. I am nurturing a new dream, of a place I already think of as home—bright sky, big ocean. I know the where and the why and even the who might be waiting there. I just need to say when.”

C201405-C-Roxane-Gay-6778f8dd.jpg

(Source: Chris Strong, via Chicago Magazine.)