Tag: Queer Poetry

Lyric Essentials: Jillian Fantin Reads Shelley Feller

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Jillian Fantin joins us to discuss the work of Shelley Feller, world building, queer poetics, hybrid poetry, and how it’s all a labor of love. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Shelley Feller’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

Jillian Fantin: So I first encountered Feller’s work when my MFA thesis advisor Joyelle McSweeney (amazing poet and human person, make sure to check out Death Styles when it comes out) recommended Dream Boat. At the time, I was just beginning to experiment with queer world building, as well as popular culture(s) and what is “valuable” to be written about. Additionally, a lot of my poetry at the time began to hybridize into visuals, like emojis and doodles of noses and seahorses, and into playscript, with named characters performing and dialoguing amongst themselves. I didn’t know why, and I’m guessing that’s why Joyelle recommended this collection.

Shelley Feller’s general work—but especially Dream Boat—is now a major foundational inspiration of my poetics. In the simplest terms, my current overarching poetry project is to celebrate the queer transmasculine body, as well as what I find to be its threefold artistic potentiality: to serve as a physical site upon which to survey the degradation of the Anthropocene; to help explore the intimacy that occurs when visual art, specifically fashion and textiles, effectively “transitions” into poems (i.e., the visual subject’s new “queer [written] body”); and to reveal how the intentional writing of gibberish and sound mirrors the making of one’s own body. Without Dream Boat, I truly believe that I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Ultimately, Dream Boat totally rocked all of my worlds. It didn’t feel like I was “reading” poetry. No, Shelley Feller built this ooey gooey world full of sonic experimentation and really made me completely submerge myself into something new. I’ve read collections that excite, entice, and enamour from its page-bound position, but Dream Boat’s poetry resists these traditional boundaries while still eliciting these same emotions. Honestly, I cannot even describe this collection using written language besides encouraging you wholeheartedly to approach it with the knowledge that it will swallow you whole and ride you all the way down. I don’t know where “down” is, but “down” feels right and left an impression on me.

Jillian Fantin reads “after the fall” by Shelley Feller

RW: How has their writing inspired your own? 

JF: I think I’m a poet because I’m not funny enough to be a comedian and not silent enough to be a mime. Because of that, I gravitate towards writing like Feller’s because their unfettered sound and vision refuses to be boxed in with a qualified “enough.” Reading their poetry is the opposite of sensory deprivation. Sensory decadence, maybe? Whatever it should be called, Dream Boat really inspires me to experiment with sound and vision and to not water my work down in an effort to be palatable to an audience that wouldn’t read my work in the first place. Further, Shelley Feller expresses the tenderness found in queer decadence, and that care for every line’s position and every shadow or echo of text is something I try to imbibe within all of my writing.

The most impactful element of Feller’s writing upon my own, though, is the refusal to accept. Refusal to accept the traditional confines of the page, the line, the word, the image, everything. Now I don’t mean to say that Feller believes that there are no boundaries in the world, or that humans should be and/or are capable of anything. What I mean is that Feller’s writing seems to actively reject the humanmade values that restrict “poetry” to mean “what is saleable.” Their poetry’s disruptions of the traditional line, use of multiple font shades, and inclusion of emojis not only creates a new language, but Feller’s Dream Boat looks forward, explicating what possibilities language holds when we reject the notion of poetry as commodity (and therefore as fetish) and challenging readers to consider the inherent value of poetry in its simple identity as poetry.

All of this to say: much of my work (including my first full-length being published by y’all!) functions as an experimentation in sound and image to excavate what poetry is and what my poetry is. I used to corral poetry. Now, I let poetry take me where it wants to go.

Jillian Fantin reads “on our first date he says he’s poz & asks if i’m scared, if I still wanna” by Shelley Feller

RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically? 

JF: Admittedly, I just wanted an excuse to jump back into the collection. No big rhyme or reason in the decision-making process: I really just wanted to share some of my absolute favourite poems from one of the poets most impactful to my life. I apologise that this isn’t exactly a verbose answer, but honestly? Feller’s brilliant poetry makes up for all that I lack.

RW: Your debut chapbook, A Playdough Symposium, is published with Ghost City Press. What was the process of creating this collection like? Any specific writing rituals or things you were surprised by as this book was coming to life?

JF: I’m very much a proponent of CAConrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry rituals, so even when I’m not explicitly creating and performing a bodily-involved ritual, that sort of corporeal embodiment of poetry never fails to come out. The concept literally came about while reading Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and I just sort of rolled that name around in my mouth until it birthed sissyfist. After sissyfist came two-piece suitor, and they sort of just fell into their roles from there. After that, A Playdough Symposium came about within my chapbook manuscript young velvet porcelain boy. Eventually, it slowly but surely funked its way right off those pages and demanded the attention of a Platonic dialogue. Much of my current writing process involves recording myself or literally speech-to-texting my thoughts, and most of sissyfist and two-piece suitor’s conversations came from conversations I had with myself.

At the same time these characters emerged, I’d been diving into different forms of masculinity in performative spaces and the intersection of production and laziness—which is sort of a fancy way to say that I was watching a lot of Jackass reruns. I’m really fascinated by Jackass, the way that these men did so much to themselves, their bodies, their total psyches, and in doing so kind of managed to game capitalism and own their own means of production within their labour—i.e., their bodies. I dare anyone to say that they’d be in a state of immediate awe upon seeing Plato and Phaedrus talking beneath a tree. Instead, I think most people would assume that sitting under a tree and talking isn’t anything but nonproductive. I argue that it’s antiproductive and, thus, pretty radical in practice. And what makes it more radical to me is the simplicity of the “because,” i.e., the reason for talking under a tree. Which is, they wanted to talk under a tree. Though of course this is a relatively simplistic take on both Platonic dialogues and Jackass, but I wanted it to be simple. I like simple.

TL;DR: A Playdough Symposium is mushy, formless dialogue of lazy erotics between a pair of beings oscillating between Socrates/Phaedrus and Johnny Knoxville/Steve-O. Nothing happens, but so much happens, too. Without knowing, they explicate the different classical ideas carried in the titles. It’s a love story about a love I’m new to knowing.

One last note because I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it to anyone before: I still don’t know Holographic Will and the Cemetery Flamingo that well. I feel like their appearance as a sort of Sunday Funnies, Calvin and Hobbes-esque dynamic pairing serves more as a conversation starter/extracurricular excursion for sissyfist rather than a totally-autonomous pair of beings. Perhaps a sequel? Or a prequel? Who knows, honestly. They do, but certainly not me!

Read more from this interview on our Patreon

Shelley Feller holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their work can be found in Interim, Puerto del Sol, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

Purchase Dream Boat

Jillian A. Fantin is a contemporary court jester with roots in the American South and north central England. They are the author of the prose poetry micro-chapbook A Playdough Symposium (Ghost City Press, 2023) and the vessel for transmission of the forthcoming full-length, hybrid poetry-play THE DOUGHNUT WORLD (fifth wheel press, 2024). With writer Joy Wilkoff, Jillian co-founded and edits RENESME LITERARY, a shortform Twilight-inspired online arts journal. They also serve as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications’ Best of The Net Anthology and a blog curator for Querencia Press. Connect with Jillian on Twitter (@jilly_stardust) or Instagram (@jillystardust). If you enjoy their work, they encourage you to either make a donation to the Indigenous nation upon whose land you work, send virtual SIM cards to Gaza via esimsforgaza.com, or contribute to their personal creative and educational work via Venmo @Jillian-Fantin.

Visit Jillian’s website

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

Sundress Reads: Review of The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful and A Playdough Symposium

Former Sundress Editorial Interns Jillian A. Fantin and Max Stone were messaging on Instagram and realized they both have micro-chapbooks being released by Ghost City Press in their 2023 Summer Series. They decided it would be fun to review each other’s micro-chapbooks. Though seemingly dissonant in content and form, Stone and Fantin’s micro-chapbooks support each other with their complementary takes on queerness.

Max Stone’s The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful

‘Oh my God, look.’ … [He] show[ed] them something in his hands…a handful of dust. ‘There’s glitter in it!’ he said. A man Fiona didn’t know peered over Yale’s shoulder. ‘That’s not glitter. Where?’ It just looked like dust.” —Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

In The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful, Max Stone worldbuilds their queer experience through the words of a speaker sculpting their human and planetary body. Through personal, intimate experiences with moment(s) of anti-queer political and social violence, Stone’s speaker fleshes themselves into a queer corpus containing the delicate anxiety and the search for kinship that is the human experience. As the collection continues, so does the speaker’s development into an active, wise, and nearly eternal observer of the beings and bodies within their orbit, akin to the experience of a planet’s moon.

Max Stone opens his chapbook concretely by establishing the speaker’s queer identity and physical presence(s) within their world. In “Coming Out Ad Infinitum,” the speaker’s words in the coming out cycle disrupt their oral communication before forming their body: “Throat all choked up, / too much bread, something” becomes “Tight corset chest. Heartbeat extra violent” (Stone 3). Stone’s recalling tense, painful moments is especially masterful because of the way the “you” directly speaks to the “I” of their same body. Coming out is repetition in a world where you “can’t be open… / Not yet” (Stone 3). Meeting “a new person” or “a new doctor” implies the queer speaker’s ceaseless sculpting of their physical body (Stone 3). The intensity of this repetition is driven home with a final disruption of any created rhythm: “Again and again and again… / You’ll come out and come out / And come out and—” (Stone 4). Stone continues building solid ground with an explication of a public tragedy in “Waking up to News of a Mass Shooting at Club Q on Trans Day of Remembrance” and “Beaux,” which features a figure both grounded in human reality and elevated to nearly-unattainable ideal of transmasculinity. In just three poems, Stone establishes a distinct speaker while also leaving room for further self-transformation.

By the time we reach the micro-chapbook’s end, the speaker completes their aforementioned transfiguration to a body that is both fully man and fully moon. Like our moon, the speaker remains bound to the tides of a planetary body’s unique orbit and thus may only observe, act, and experience within those orbital boundaries. To be a moon is to contain billions of years, to be cratered with time and knowledge.

Nevertheless, the titular poem, “The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful,” is the true moment of corporeal and cosmic transformation. In a final scene, the speaker and their queer friends move from the domestic party sphere into the memory of a woody naturescape:           

Everyone else was in the river,

I was on the bank, watching

the moon reflecting on the water,

watching their limbs stir

up the light. (Stone 10)  

The speaker leaves us to consider their queer duality and the implications of that existence. Stone’s speaker seems to reside on the fringes of their community, a lonely existence of distance and observation. Still, The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful is nuanced in a final depiction of its speaker who refuses to stay in shadows. “Watching” becomes an act of love, like the dependable orbit of “the moon reflecting on the water” (Stone 16). Further, Stone’s speaker isin the water within everyone else. Their human body may be on the bank, but their planetary body is clearly reflected in the water and, thus, illuminated by the same titular beautifying light. And unlike “everyone else,” Stone’s speaker can see the light that reveals everyone’s beauty! Ultimately, Max Stone’s The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful ends with a speaker’s self-made dual existence as fully human and fully moon, allowing them to balance experiences of queer oppression and systemic bigotry while still knowing and hoping for the beauty inherent within the true queer experience.

At the start of this review, I quoted a scene from The Great Believers, wherein a woman watches a video featuring Yale Tishman, a gay man who died decades earlier from AIDS-related complications, eagerly showing the camera and his onlookers the glitter in the dust. Max Stone sees the glitter in the dust. He knows beauty because he is beautiful. He sees beauty because everything this bisexual lighting touches is beautiful. And he writes the beauty of the queer experience while still delving into public and personal pain and oppression because he knows the true queer experience is inherently, definitionally, and fundamentally beautiful. Stone and his micro-chapbook do not ignore the existence of the dust. By identifying the dustier aspects of his worlds and treating his work with formal and thematic care, Stone makes the glitter that is queer beauty and queer experience sparkle even more.

I remain shocked at how consistently buoyed I felt upon starting and finishing The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful. Very rarely does feeling “beautiful” elicit positivity given imposed cisheteronormative connotations of appearance and identity. Stone, though, makes me and my poetry feel beautiful—that is, “masculine but in the peacock way” (8)—and I truly believe that every queer reader will shine a little brighter after basking in the light of Max Stone’s queer poetics.

The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful is available from Ghost City Press

Jillian A. Fantin (they/them) is a poet with roots in the American South and north central England. They are a 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poet Fellow, a 2020 Jefferson County Memorial Project Research Fellow, and the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of RENESME LITERARY. Jillian received an MFA in Poetry with a minor in Gender Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Their writing appears in American Journal of Poetry, Spectra Poets, Barrelhouse, and poetry.onl.

Jillian A. Fantin’s A Playdough Symposium

Jillian A. Fantin’s micro-chapbook Playdough Symposium (Ghost City Press, 2023) is a queer, contemporary re-imagining of Plato’s dialogues through a series of prose poems. The collection features two main characters that appear in each poem and engage in conversation, sissyfist (a play on words of Sisyphus) and two-piece suitor, who are based on Socrates and Phaedrus from Plato’s dialogues combined with Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O of the Jackass franchise. Sounds weird, right? Well, it is weird—in the best way. With two epigraphs, Fantin sets up a dichotomy between Ancient Greek philosophy and modern pop culture, the first being a quote from Plato’s dialogues and the second from Steve-O. The epigraphs set the stage and tone for the symposium, which is a delightful intermingling of so-called high and low culture as complicated philosophical concepts are superimposed on contemporary culture.

Each poem’s title is a concept from Greek philosophy, such as “Xenia,” the Ancient Greek concept of hospitality; “Eudaimonia,” the condition of human flourishing; and “Kleos,” which means eternal glory. Beneath the framework of these ancient philosophical concepts, sissyfist and two-piece suitor engage in strange, stimulating, and often crass dialogues.

Playdough Symposium is an apt title, as the world and characters are highly malleable and mercurial—nothing is stable. The reality of a liminal world both timeless and of the present day is constantly created, shaped, and re-shaped through the dialogue between two-piece suitor and sissyfist. For example, in this world, “AD means After Diane that is After Diane Keaton’s Bowler Hat,” (Fantin 5) which weirdly makes sense. Fantin’s work is deeply intelligent and sharply funny, packed with clever turns of phrase such as “so Medusa just made men rock hard?”, “hydraplaning,” and “Ice capades” (9). Nouns are used as verbs like “embryoing;” familiar phrases and cultural markers like brands are turned on their head, including when “sissyfist sucks two-piece suitor’s tootsies like he rolls his pop,” (Fantin 7). So much is packed into this short collection: misheard David Bowie lyrics, Jessica Rabbit, Zeus eating pita chips, and Buffalo Bill protesting no shirt no shoes no service.

sissyfist and two-piece suitor are hilarious and crude and their personalities leap of the page. A distinct undercurrent of sexual tension and homoeroticism courses through the poems: “a long soft kiss in the business district, two-piece suitor profiteroles back down the curve of sissyfist’s spine oh scoliosis groans two-piece suitor make me in your image” (Fantin 11). It’s unclear what sissyfist and two-piece suitor’s relationship is exactly, but it’s definitely queer-coded. sissyfist and two-piece suitor both use he/him pronouns yet neither seems to fit distinctly in the male category, which is exemplified when “two-piece suitor strokes the cervix in the hole in his thigh postpartum depression sissyfist nestles within that musculature,” (Fantin 8). That slightly unsettling image presents two-piece suitor as being both male and female or neither. sissyfist’s name alone is very queer, and his actions match as he “hissyfits” and “sissyshrieks.” Playdough Symposium also troubles and blurs the lines of gender. Above all, this work is deeply original. I can confidently say I have never read anything like it. Playdough Symposium is a delicacy of language, pop culture, philosophy, queerness, and mythology.  Each poem is layered with jewels of sound, word play, and genius turns of phrase. Each sentence is surprising—you’ll never guess one that begins with “ostrich egged,” will lead to two-piece suitor plaiting “pinkies into radishes,” (9). This collection may be playful, sexy, and funny, but there is also a poignant emotional depth. Fantin proves that Jackass can be philosophical and that the Ancient Greeks have a certain jackass-ness beneath the historical veneer of intelligence and sophistication. This is the micro-chapbook you never knew you wanted but definitely need to read. Right now!

A Playdough Symposium is available from Ghost City Press

Max Stone is a queer poet from Reno, Nevada. He holds an MFA in poetry and a BA in English
with a minor in Book Arts and Publication from the University of Nevada, Reno. He played
soccer at Queens College. Max is the author of two chapbooks: The Bisexual Lighting Makes
Everyone Beautiful (Ghost City Press) and Temporary Preparations (Bottlecap Press).

Sundress Reads: Review of The Bisexual Lighting Makes Everyone Beautiful and A Playdough Symposium

Sundress Reads: Review of Bird Body

Content warning: Sexual assault mentioned

A sketched bird lies in the center of the book cover amid drawn ferns. Bird Body is written above in lowercase italics. Below the image is written "poems by Zoë Fay-Stindt"

What does it mean to inhabit a woman’s body in a world that tries to break it? This is what Zoë Fay-Stindt explores in their poetry chapbook, Bird Body. Fay-Stindt weaves intricately between birds and the stories of women to shine a light on women’s and femme’s experience in our misogynistic world. Fay-Stindt writes of the speaker’s emotional pain and exhaustion following their sexual assault. Here, healing can take the form of being picked apart by birds even as our speaker is devastated by their own inability to help others with their pain.   

Birds, Fay-Stindt appears to say, have levels of meaning and such a depth of representation that even we are birds. Sometimes we are brutal, then too-easily crushed by the world, yet containing within the cages of our ribs wrathful howls and cries of mourning and the ability to, despite it all, keep “opening [our] eyes every morning.” In such exploration, Fay-Stindt offers us the great gift of understanding what it is to survive in our problematic world.

Much of the chapbook is around the assault of the speaker and the emotional aftermath, although the assault is itself never described in much detail. Instead, much of the focus is on the effects and the ways that society compounds them by teaching the speaker to invalidate her own experience, even telling her (when she does begin to write about it in poetry) that she speaks of it too much. Bird Body dives deep into the emotional effects of something that is so innate to many women’s experiences, as 1 out of 6 women in the U.S. face sexual assault in their lifetime and 90% of sexual assault victims are women (“Scope of the Problem: Statistics.” RAINN).    

In “that’s it, now” Fay-Stindt compares the speaker to the mourning dove in her grief and exhaustion, imploring the reader to not pity the dove (or, perhaps, the woman) as she weaves laments yet still opens her eyes each morning, holding her “tremor and her great loud voice / in the same body.” This emotional depth and exploration makes clear the impact of an event that many still invalidate, bringing forth shockwaves from the event in all directions so that it can be fully felt—and understood—by the reader.

Bird Body also looks at the way terrible events echo backward, affecting the speaker long before it even happened through the fear women must live with. Through such writings, Fay-Stindt connects us in community, building bridges between us in order to share often overlooked and unspoken experiences. Fay-Stindt writes of the prelude to the rape, “I’ve been training for a lifetime—my body / knows the drill: I won’t yell. Instead, / offer a bargain: not tonight, or I promise / I’ll make it better next time, or I owe you one.” As a woman, this line had a profound effect on me because it touched on something not often discussed; the way that we spend our lives preparing for the possibility of an assault, finding responses to catcalls and men who approach us, finding the ways to battle our own instincts of rage in an attempt at survival. And this prevalence makes it all the more necessary to discuss.

Fay-Stindt expands the examination to include our human fallibility, broadening the chapbook’s relevance for all potential readers. They write in “a robin at the bus station” of the devastating inability in the face of others’ pain to do more than “build beds, soft spaces to land,” and show how our best attempts at help can make matters worse when the speaker accidentally kills a robin in “swallow.”

Yet, as the chapbook explores, there is so much more to a woman’s experience. From their relationship with their mother, to breast cancer, to pap smears, to finding a connection with and healing in nature, to having one’s body picked apart and prodded like it’s nothing more than a vessel, Fay-Stindt touches on much important and often-overlooked aspects of what it means to be a woman or femme in their poems.

But let us not evade how the speaker’s body is treated as a visceral vessel throughout. Their body is picked apart by a heron, washed clean, then squeezed and entered by a doctor during a pap smear. In this way, although both situations are geared toward healing, a comment is made on the objectification of women and femmes as nothing more than a body, how they are treated as such by society.

Bird Body is a vital read since it shows these experiences without flinching away, and makes obvious that you cannot completely tell a woman’s story—or understand it—without showing the grief, the connection to nature, our helplessness to aid each other, our objectification by society, and so much more. Fay-Stindt creates a vibrant, moving ode to women, femme people, and our bodily experiences by shining the spotlight on aspects of our lives that are often overlooked, and in so doing allows us to understand ourselves, and even humanity in all of its cruelty and struggle.   

Bird Body is available at Cordella Magazine

Solstice Black (she/they) is a queer poet and novelist living in the Pacific Northwest. They are currently undertaking a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chautauqua, The Fantastic Other, and A Forest of Words, among others. They hope to pursue an MFA in creative writing and a BFA in visual art in the next few years. Her cat is both her greatest joy and torment.