Drifting through extraterrestrial worlds, poet Nicole Oquendo explores the raw power of deep, yet unsustainable love. Oquendo balances tension and passion, delving into the visceral nature of desire while depicting its inherent toxicity. In these futuristic poems is a passionate but destructive alien affair, wherein love engenders chaos. The cohesion of these lovers is intimate but dangerous, and an embrace can ascend to asphyxiation.
As the two beings grow closer they are ensnared, each simultaneously metamorphosing into captor and prisoner, paramour and adversary. In these pages, vivisection is an act of intimacy, and loving someone is akin to willingly tipping one’s face to a sky that rains glass. This chapbook examines longing for someone while wishing to escape them. While these poems demonstrate that the heat of passion can transform sand from grit to crystal, they also question whether such a thing is worth the sacrifice. It seems that to love something is to kill it. To love something is to burn.
After reading this chapbook, Amy Watkins, author of Milk and Water, said, “Space Baby: Episodes I-III is violent and kinky and weirdly redemptive. Like all of Oquendo’s writing, it is clear and lyrical and just tender enough to disrupt expectations. You would be wise to savor these poems, but you may not be able to resist reading them all in one breathless go as I did.”
Nicole Oquendo is especially interested in nontraditional, multimodal compositions and translations in all genres. Their work can be found in numerous literary journals, as well as in the chapbooks some prophets, self is wolf, wringing gendered we, and Space Baby, and in the hybrid memoir Telomeres. They have also curated the Sundress Publications anthology Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities. Nicole has also been serving the community since 2000, giving time as an editor to several literary journals and presses, and has been working as a writing educator since 2008.
Sundress Releases Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities edited by Nicole Oquendo
Sundress Publications announces the release of Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities, an anthology edited by Nicole Oquendo. The anthology features the work of Jennifer E. Hudgens, Nic Campeotto, Nina Sudhakar, and Emily Corwin, along with over two-dozen writers and artists tasked with uniquely articulating what it means to occupy a hybrid identity.
In these poems, narratives, photographs, and striking hybrids of genre, Manticore compellingly reveals the ways in which the seemingly unified self is composed of infinite ways of being in the world. The anthology is not only populated with beautiful, multimodal works of art, but also includes statements by each contributor about how they conceptualize and are inspired by the notion of hybridity. Though not all of Manticore’s pieces are explicitly presented as autobiographical works of nonfiction, they each offer the honesty and vulnerability of the intensely personal. The result is an intimate, powerful, and visually striking collection that is as unique as its talented group of contributors.
“Hybridity, for me, has always equated to possibility, and the creative work I enjoy most inhabits multiple genres at once. Within the last few years, growing and changing along with the labels that make up my identity—nonbinary, disabled, queer, Latinx, brujx, and so much more—I have discovered there is a glorious intersection of identity and form when it comes to the creation of work outside the boundaries of what is traditionally accepted. In gathering the work for this anthology, I wanted to focus on hybrid identities and the hybrid work these identities inspire, and I believe this collection—in the form of various media, highlighting both the truth and what is imagined—is a fantastic representation of what we can do when we embrace possibility with ferocity.” -Nicole Oquendo, Editor
“Manticore is as surprising as it is lovely; exquisite, gut-wrenching hybridities that capture what it is to be outside. This collection of stories, poems, and images will captivate readers—its venom heady and delightful as it is deadly. A monstrous kind of magic is afoot here.” – M.R. Sheffield, author of Marvels
Nicole Oquendo is a writer and visual artist that combines these elements to craftmultimodal nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, as well as translations of these forms. Their work can be found in literary journals like BOAAT, CutBank, DIAGRAM, and Gulf Stream, among others. They are the author of the hybrid memoir Telomeres, as well as five chapbooks, including their most recent, Space Baby: Episodes I-III.
The anthology is available for free download HERE.
Knoxville, TN – Sundress Publications is pleased to announce its fourth annual chapbook contest. Authors of all genres are invited to submit qualifying manuscripts during our reading period of February 1st to March 30th, 2015.
We are looking for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or any combination thereof. Manuscripts must be between twelve to twenty-five (12-25) pages in length, with one piece per page. Individual pieces may have been previously published in anthologies, print journals, online journals, etc., but cannot have appeared in any full-length collection, including self-published collections. Only single-author and collaborative dual-author manuscripts will be considered. A unifying element is encouraged but not required. Manuscripts must be primarily in English; translations are not eligible.
The winner will receive a $200 prize, plus publication as a beautiful full-color PDF available exclusively online. Runners-up will also be considered for publication.
This year’s judge will be Nicole Oquendo. Oquendo is a writer, educator, and editor interested in multimodal compositions and translations of nonfiction and poetry. She is a member of the Sundress Publications Board of Directors, an Assistant Editor for Flaming Giblet Press, the Managing Editor of The Florida Review, and the Nonfiction Editor of the annual Best of the Net anthology. She is the author of the chapbooks some prophets (2015, Finishing Line Press) and self is wolf (2015, dancing girl press), and the hybrid memoir Telomeres (2015, Zoetic Press).
All manuscripts should include a cover page (with only the title of the manuscript), table of contents, dedication (if applicable), and acknowledgments for previous publications. These pages will not be included in the total page count. Identifying information should not appear in any part of the manuscript. Authors with a significant relationship to the judge (friends, relatives, colleagues, past or present students, etc.) are discouraged from entering. We are dedicated to a fair judging process that emphasizes the quality of the writing, not the résumé of its authors.
Simultaneous submissions to other presses are acceptable, but please notify Sundress immediately if the manuscript has been accepted elsewhere. Multiple submissions are allowed, but a separate entry fee must accompany each entry. No revisions will be allowed during the contest judging period. Winners will be announced in Summer 2014.
Sundress Publications is non-profit literary press that also serves as the umbrella site of The Best of Net Anthology, Stirring, Wicked Alice, Stone Highway, and more. It is a non-discriminatory publishing group focused on the creativity of all artists, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.
Lately, I’ve been losing my memory. Mostly my short-term memory, but I’m also finding myself losing older memories, too. Sometimes the images or names I’m trying to remember are just beyond my reach. I can remember the color of the walls in my room when I was three, but I’ve been losing names and numbers.
For days, I’ve been trying to remember my hairdresser’s name. I‘ve needed a haircut for weeks, but I can’t bring myself to call and fumble around asking for, youknow, the blonde, the one with the tattoos.
There are tons of essays and blogs out in the universe dealing with memory and how it plays into nonfiction. Of course memory is subjective. Of course memory can change over time. I am proof of this now, and in some ways grieve for the parts of my life I’ll never think about again.
I’ve already written a book full of memoir. I hear people talk about writing their memoirs, the plural of this word, at the end of their lives, as if they’re resigning themselves to the idea that they’ll never again have another memory worth sharing. I didn’t take this route, and instead wrote about the most challenging parts of my life right after they happened. I’m twenty-nine, and last year I finished my book full of memoirs.
If you don’t count blog posts like this one, I haven’t written an essay in over a year. The one I finished after I wrote my book of memoirs was published, and since it has floated as a disconnected memory. Over the last year, I’ve finished a book of poetry, and all of the poems are true in the sense that they came from me and it hurts to not be honest, but they are not essays in the traditional way we understand them. When I try to write an essay, I grasp at memories that have the texture of smoke. Lately, I can’t hold them long enough to write paragraphs. This is why I’ve been writing in stanzas.
I spent almost an hour this morning looking for my deodorant, late for work and tearing off sheets, throwing piles of laundry, meticulously inventorying every item in the bathroom, on the shelves, under the bed. I opened up a new one when I had given up; the memory of where I placed the object is lost. Last night, it was an hour looking for the phone I had put down minutes before. Objects, like memories, are never where I leave them.
It’s a side effect of medication, as far as I know. There’s no mystery other than what I did yesterday or the day before. I keep lists upon lists now to make sure I remember what I did each day, but this doesn’t always work. I experience events that cause excitement and disappointment more than once each, not in the way a memory will inspire a feeling.
There are notes now for a book of nonfiction I’d like to start writing soon. It will be a book full of memoir in that I’m researching hard, and plan to add my observations to events I’ve never experienced. As far as I know, this book will not be about me, and I wonder, in the realm of narrative nonfiction, if that is even possible. Maybe it will always be about me; in nonfiction, my narrator’s observations characterize me, the narrator. Observations are subjective; a memorial.
The point, because I swear there is one, is that research has taken the place of memories as the foundation for my nonfiction work. And this is okay. In college we wondered as a group what we as essayists were going to write about when there was nothing exciting going on. How do you craft an essay when you have no experiences of your own to write about? Of course life is always happening, but what if what’s going on doesn’t mean anything? Research can mean digging through what’s left of what I can remember, too.
There’s no easy answer. What happens to memories when they are lost? What if who I am is a thing I forget? Right now I am focusing on memories that others have documented, and I think for now that will be enough.
–
Nicole Oquendo is a writer, teacher, and editor interested in multimodal compositions of nonfiction and poetry, including multimodal translations of both genres. She is currently an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, and serves as an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, as well as the Nonfiction Editor for Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Menacing Hedge, among others. She also runs the websitetimetopublish.com, which posts daily reviews of literary markets.
Because the absence of prettiness can lead to invisibility
she bit a clean circle in the flesh around her wrists,
ringed in red wells, used her teeth for the degloving,
veins and sinews tucked neatly under bone,
in love with her own blood.
Because the molar necklace sweltered at her throat
she held his body against a wall and outlined him
with a privet green crayon to stave off the black-luck
flickering on and off like a distant radio tower,
his red eye perched between steel beams,
while the slight vibration in the steering column under her hands
indicated imbalance.
Because it was not the first time he’d gone missing
she stretched her arms and grew oddly vast,
left no evidence behind, because at that juncture
there was only amputation. Flesh dissolved,
all the particular tricks to disappearing
down straight to the bottom of things.
Kelly Boyker’s work has appeared in many places, including, but not limited to, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Arsenic Lobster, Opium Magazine and FRiGG. Her work has been Pushcart nominated and won the Richard Hugo House Power of Place Annual Inquiry. Recently, she was honored to participate in the Fainting Couch Idioglossia collaborative anthology from Blood Pudding Press. When she is not at her mortgage-paying job she acts as as the poetry editor of Menacing Hedge. She lives in Seattle with four cats, one dog and her wonderful husband, Gio.
This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.
She meets you at the door draped in white fur, animal tails dripping
all around her ankles and asks if you have the right address. As she
turns away you see just the red tips of her nipples and needle marks,
like badger bites, down her neck. She smiles and beckons you to the
living room where young men slumber naked, coiled in bear, rabbit,
and fox. This is not night but a brilliant day in which a gorged fly
taps at the window and pale water laps against the levy. She rubs her
face against your wrist and something inside you turns over. Amber
lights wink over rising water. Warning or promise, all shimmery
and glistening, her teeth stitch patterns impossible to unravel. Later,
you’ll retrace you steps to the point before you unwound to the girl
in the coat, rank with fish stench, who invited you in with a turn of
mink and copper hair.
Kelly Boyker’s work has appeared in many places, including, but not limited to, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Arsenic Lobster, Opium Magazine and FRiGG. Her work has been Pushcart nominated and won the Richard Hugo House Power of Place Annual Inquiry. Recently, she was honored to participate in the Fainting Couch Idioglossia collaborative anthology from Blood Pudding Press. When she is not at her mortgage-paying job she acts as as the poetry editor of Menacing Hedge. She lives in Seattle with four cats, one dog and her wonderful husband, Gio.
This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.
The Child Cyclops The famous child of Tourcoing, France, was born with only one eye located in the
center of her forehead. She was perfectly normal in every other way, and lived to
the age of fifteen. –Robert Ripley, 1929
At first it was easy
hiding the child from the light,
lying in her bassinet,
her one eye tracking a mobile
of Hydra, Griffin, Hippogriff, Roc,
her laughter only detectable by creatures
thick with impossible claws.
But as she grew and wandered the village
the whispers became a swallowed nosebleed,
thickening in her throat as pudding skin.
She beseeched the sky
which would not be sated
by her flooded head,
by the loathsome eye.
Her single suitor held her
in the darkness of the henhouse,
slipped his hands beneath her bodice
and when the tentacles of his tongue
circled her ears
she admitted everything:
the small fires licking the floorboards,
the rat she accidentally swallowed, the narrow fissures between the monoliths, and that she was perhaps not a fully mortal girl.
In the end there was no real confession,
only her mouth like an entry wound
ringed with infection, the tiny taking teeth, the rotten hooves,
and her single eye
unmaking even as the stones commenced,
adding and subtracting.
Kelly Boyker’s work has appeared in many places, including, but not limited to, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Arsenic Lobster, Opium Magazine and FRiGG. Her work has been Pushcart nominated and won the Richard Hugo House Power of Place Annual Inquiry. Recently, she was honored to participate in the Fainting Couch Idioglossia collaborative anthology from Blood Pudding Press. When she is not at her mortgage-paying job she acts as as the poetry editor of Menacing Hedge. She lives in Seattle with four cats, one dog and her wonderful husband, Gio.
This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.
Of course the story begins with a wolf
who carries enchantments stuck in his coat as burrs
and curses he can dispense with his teeth,
ruby collar glittering between the forest snags.
This is what he says to me: I will not eat you, but if necessary I promise to make it painless, a gentle de-boning, the place the mouth goes — your wet and messy entrails. You shall float near the tree canopy, ecstatic as I pull your entire body through my teeth.
My heart is a muscle pendant, swinging,
adorned in an argument of everything
that has gone missing in this thin limb of all
that remains. I ask only that he reconsider
the cone I have placed around his neck,
the way he walks into walls, confused,
the way my bitten-off fingers
can no longer stroke his ruff, and reconsider
the elegance of his need.
Kelly Boyker’s work has appeared in many places, including, but not limited to, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Arsenic Lobster, Opium Magazine and FRiGG. Her work has been Pushcart nominated and won the Richard Hugo House Power of Place Annual Inquiry. Recently, she was honored to participate in the Fainting Couch Idioglossia collaborative anthology from Blood Pudding Press. When she is not at her mortgage-paying job she acts as as the poetry editor of Menacing Hedge. She lives in Seattle with four cats, one dog and her wonderful husband, Gio.
This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.
My first experience with Amy Watkins’ poetry was the Milk and Water preview “Never Never.” I try to approach every poem I read with a distant objectivity, but there was something about the experiences of the I in this poem that rang out as fact to me. The more I read, the more connected I felt to the poet and her real life beyond the page. Every word felt true.
This is not a common interpretation for me. I’ve studied both nonfiction and poetry extensively, and something that has stuck with me over the years is the rigid objectivity I mentioned previously. I work hard to not impose my own idea of the author speaking each word. I couldn’t avoid it with this poem, though, because of the connection between the speaker (the I), her mother, her daughter, and the rich undercurrent of fear. I came away from each read tenser than the last.
After completing Milk&Water, I had the privilege of asking Amy Watkins about the possible nonfiction elements in her writing directly. She confirmed my original suspicions, but her own words represent her work much better than I ever could. I’m not sure which one of us suggested the idea of recording our interview rather than relying on traditional distant Q & A, but I feel that hearing Amy speak about her poetry in her own voice is its own work of art. I hope that you excuse my nervous laughter and “ums,” and enjoy listening to our conversation about family, locality, and feminist rants.
Amy Watkins grew up with the alligators and armadillos in the Central Florida scrub, the oldest child of a nurse and a carpenter. As a kid, she wanted to be an artist, a doctor, a teacher and a contestant on Star Search; she became a writer instead. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Small Poems, BloodLotus, and Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine. She lives in Orlando with her husband and only child, Alice.
This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.
Amy Watkins grew up with the alligators and armadillos in the Central Florida scrub, the oldest child of a nurse and a carpenter. As a kid, she wanted to be an artist, a doctor, a teacher and a contestant on Star Search; she became a writer instead. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Small Poems, BloodLotus, and Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine. She lives in Orlando with her husband and only child, Alice.
This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.
Sundress Publications announces the release of Nicole Oquendo’s chapbook, Space Baby: Episodes I-III.
