Sundress Releases Chickenhawks & Goldilocks by Grey Vild
Sundress Publications announces the release of Grey Vild’s new chapbook, Chickenhawks & Goldilocks. Vild’s chapbook looks at the trans suicide epidemic. Vild explodes the topic with loss, rage, reverberating anguish, and fusions of love.
The honesty of Chickenhawks & Goldilocks washes in like a wild tide on grief’s jagged shoreline, embracing the confusion and complexity that accompanies losing a loved one to suicide. Instead of a one-note lament, this chapbook recognizes confusion and examines how that confusion can make a person and a relationship seem improved through absence. Chickenhawks & Goldilocks reveals how a love can fill in our cracks and seams and make us feel whole. By juxtaposing poems that acknowledge this feeling with poems that delve into flawed relationships and the abandonment the speaker cannot help but feel, Vild portrays a more complete grief. Thoughts and feelings are intertwined, wrapped in each other such that they cannot be separated. Betrayal, love, rage, anguish, and guilt all bleed toward each other, trapped in the cage of our chests.
“Chickenhawks & Goldilocks adroitly renders the liminal experience of grief, with notes of tender specificity dovetailing expressive and purposeful abstraction, each poem a shout against the silence absence carves into our lives. But make no mistake, Grey Vild doesn’t wallow in these poems, nor allow us to do so; here we, poet and reader, overcome the loss that would have us lose ourselves—a loss all too present for those in and aside the Trans community—and find resolve to carry forward in the beautiful project of living, to make the choice every day while still honoring those who felt they couldn’t, hiding nothing about how difficult, at times, the living is and will be.” —Cortney Lamar Charleston
Grey Vild is a goddamned transsexual. A recent graduate of the MFA at Rutgers-Newark, his work can be found at Them, Vetch, EOAGH, Harriet: The Blog and elsewhere.
The chapbook is available here.
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A 501(c)3 non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology.
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“epithalamium is an incredible dancer working beautifully, relentlessly, spasmodically on a stage that was constructed small enough that the artist must at some point jump into the crowd to make their work the whole scene. The poems in this chapbook are dynamic and unique. The language, music, and energy used caught me off guard many times, and I can think of no better goals than that for poetry. None of these poems are “that blushing thing.” All of them are working and questioning the archetypes and mythologies that deserve to be questioned, and through that process something larger emerges. Through that process we learn to “forget stardust. / think transit. think love.” This chapbook approaches the real world with an otherworldly understanding of its machinations, and despite that deep look into our workings it emerges with a passionate idea of where this could all be headed.”