The earliest stories I absorbed were variations of Korean folktales and myths from my parents. We don’t have heirlooms or gold, but we do have stories. There’s a story about a prankish frog who always does the opposite of what his mother tells him to do. When the mother frog falls ill, she asks her son to bury her body by the gloomy riverbank, hoping he will do the opposite by burying her by the sunny mountainside instead. But the son listens to her dying wish and buries her by the riverbank. This always made me teary-eyed, and I vowed not to disobey my parents, though I frequently did. There’s another story I remember about someone airing out all their dirty secrets into an empty forest where they think no one will hear, but really the trees are listening and catching the secrets like chlorophyll. I always laugh at the thought of that. But I suppose I’d be fine if all the trees in the world knew my secrets. I trust trees.

I don’t remember the first book I read, or the first story I wrote as a kid. I wish I could attest to some transformative narrative about my journey as a writer, something that sparked in me one day, but the truth is I was always writing. What I do remember is being weirdly competitive during elementary school book log competitions, and going through so much loose-leaf paper that my parents eventually bought me a mini laptop so I could type my stories. I’m drawn to various forms of storytelling, but especially writing that doesn’t take itself too seriously—the kind that’s playful, theatrical, campy, satirical, absurd, nonsensical. I’m propelled by inventive writing that experiments and isn’t afraid to break rules. I love this quote by Ray Bradbury that alludes to imagination and play as generative tools: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

In high school, I came across Jenny Zhang’s “How It Feels,” which felt transformative and eye-opening for a teenage girl and a young poet who was a lot more dramatic and angsty than she would have liked in hindsight. There’s a line by Zhang that has since stuck with me: “Why are some people’s feelings so repellent and others so madly alluring?” It begs the question of why people care to write. Or why people care to express themselves. I think about this across other forms of art too—some songs and films about suicides or breakups or family divorces or growing up are considered earnest and romantic, while others are cringe, tacky, off-putting. I remember being so embarrassed to express myself or attempt anything, but then again, isn’t that how everyone feels about living? To me, language is living. Language is transformative.

One book I’m currently reading is White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link, a collection of short stories that retell classic fairy tales in contemporary and futuristic settings, with lots of spins on pop culture. I remember finding this book in my friend’s dorm about a year ago and flipping through the first story, which features an ostentatious billionaire who sends his sons on a series of goose chases and cats in lab coats who operate a cannabis farm. I thought it was so brilliant; Kelly Link is a writer who performs play well, and her writing is gritty and otherworldly. Other writers who perform play on the page and inspire me are Carmen Maria Machado, K-Ming Chang, Toni Morrison, and Franny Choi. I’m drawn to the funky stuff that reimagines and reinvents worlds. I love stories about mythical creatures, queer desire, ghosts, lineage, strange neighbors, annoying teenagers, bad breakups, altered states of consciousness, transformation, collective memory, and messy embodiments of women and girlhood. 

I’m grateful for the opportunity to work alongside bright, compassionate, and inspiring people at Sundress Publications, a nonprofit press that platforms diverse, imaginative, and cutting-edge voices. Send me a DM on Instagram @corinayii if you’d like to talk about writing, swap book recommendations, or just chat!

Corina Yi (she/her) is a student at Pomona College studying English and Creative Writing. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Agave Review, the literary magazine at the Claremont Colleges consortium. She likes collecting postcards, painting, drinking tea, cafe hopping, and going on spontaneous adventures.

This month we had the honor of speaking with Mckendy Fils-Aime about their powerful debut collection sipèstisyon. The collection is an exploration of memory, both personal and cultural. Mckendy’s poems are visceral and immersive, each one plunging you into the deep end whether you’re ready for it or not, but always giving you a moment to return to the surface and breathe; to reflect alongside the poet about the good, the bad, and the unbelievable. These are poems that deserve to be read again and again, and they will reward you each time you do. The collection is available at Yes Yes Books right now; our interview is below.

Ada Wofford: Many of the poems share the same title as the collection and have a superstition serving as the epigram. Can you speak about the superstitions you chose for your epigrams and what they mean to you? Or if that’s too broad, why did you want to share these specific superstitions with readers? I was particularly interested in the first one, “If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory.”

Mckendy Fils-Aime: I started writing superstition poems during a 30/30 in 2017 as an additional challenge to myself. Many of my favorite collections featured a group of poems with a shared naming convention. In the past, I had tried my hand at writing such a series, but failed. The self-imposed challenge in 2017 was another attempt. I picked Haitian superstitions because they felt familiar to me and were a fresh way to explore the topic. I treated the superstitions like open-ended prompts and wrote to the ones I thought were the most interesting to me. When I was putting together sipèstisyon, I picked the superstition poems that were the strongest and complemented the project’s narrative. Like all books, some poems didn’t make the cut. There are a handful of superstition poems that I adore, but left out because they weren’t serving the book.

AW: Building off of that, memory plays a large role in the book. From personal memories, to passed-down memories, to cultural history. The poem “what we sacrificed” plays with the imagery of you and your family around a fire pit, throwing in “the furniture pieces turned javelins / meant for my mother’s skull. / my mother throws in a photo album/of other men…I throw in a wedding ring…I throw in letters / to a future self.” The poem ends, “it’s hard to tell when a
flame is working / what is memory & what is kindling.” Can you speak about this idea of memory being both a solace and a burden, something that can soothe but also burn?

MF: Memories can be places of refuge or great sites of pain depending on your point of view, who you’re asking, or even when you’re asking. There are moments in sipèstisyon where the speaker and addressees have different perspectives on traumatic experiences, and that results in conflict. Our brains can be untrustworthy record-keepers, but they’re also our first confidants. Sometimes they’re all we’ve got. In sipèstisyon, there’s an impulse to forget, and with good reason, but that’s not conducive to healing. That also risks throwing away the small joys that can exist alongside terrible periods. Thankfully, the speaker understands this by the end of the book.

AW: In the poem “on superstitions,” you write about a pastor calling “superstitions the devil’s / proverbs.” I take from this the concept of fear. That superstitions are meant to invoke a sense of fear, but culturally they can be fragments of wisdom as well; small phrases or stories to remind us to keep our wits about us (e.g., don’t walk under a ladder). You touch on this in your interview with Shō Poetry Journal, saying, “I didn’t write the superstition poems out of fear or the
need for control, but an interest in exploring these sayings that I grew up hearing.” May I ask you to build on that a bit and speak about the role you see superstitions playing in our daily lives, either positive or negative, either as a source of fear or of wisdom? Do they play a role in your life today?

MF: Regardless of their nature, I think all superstitions are a type of cultural artifact. Even the silliest ones have a history attached to them. Superstitions are just another attempt at preserving the beliefs and stories of the past. Are they a form of magical thinking? Sure. Are they an attempt at control? Sure. They’re also proof of what we can carry through time with just our voices and language. The superstitions in sipèstisyon are cultural signifiers and points of nostalgia. They remind me of my youth and act as markers of identity. I love when other Haitians and Caribbeans come up to me after I read a superstition poem and say “Oh yeah, I remember hearing that as a kid” or “Have you heard this one?” Those moments mean a lot to me.

AW: The imagery of a car crash is repeated throughout the collection; you write about nearly getting hit by a car as a kid, and in “the first accident” you write about a car accident from the point of view of a passenger. Can you speak about the significance of this imagery and the theme of experiencing a “near miss” in this collection? And do these near misses relate to the concept of superstitions in any way?

MF: sipèstisyon is about the aftermath of surviving harm. Sometimes harm comes from a visible source like a vehicle or physical violence, and sometimes it’s systemic, which can be invisible. One of the final poems in sipèstisyon is called “ode to the gris-gris bag,” and it explores the moments in my life where I’ve narrowly escaped death. The poem references an ancestral force that is looking out for me. I think often about survival and the unseen, about the unobserved forces, whether spiritual or manmade, that help us stay on earth a little while longer. Maybe superstitions are an attempt at rescue before we even encounter the “near miss.”

AW: In the opening poem you compare memory to a museum, later you ask if “naming is a culture’s way of colonizing a body,” and in another you write, “solitude is a kind of death when a home / is remade into a mausoleum.” All of these images relate to the concepts of intention and context. This is something the art world has been dealing with since Duchamp placed a urinal in a gallery (and probably long before that, but he’s the most famous example); the idea that how one frames something (or someone, for that matter) dictates how the rest of us are supposed to see it/understand it (i.e., it’s art if it’s in a gallery, or in terms of museums: “it’s not grave robbing if you’re an archeologist”). In your poem, what was once a home is now remade into a mausoleum through its context, through how it relates to how that space is being inhabited. How do these concepts (intention and recontextualization) play into your collection’s other themes of identity and selfhood?

MF: Early in my writing journey, I discovered the world of poetry slam and spoken word. I learned and still learn so many things from that space. One of my first lessons was the importance of framing. In slam, how an idea is presented to an audience can be the difference between whether or not a poem succeeds. Framing applies to so many other mediums, whether we’re talking about writing, other forms of oration, or visual art. Even in therapy, when we reframe, we’re altering our perspective of an event or experience in hopes of uncovering some insight to better heal. I couldn’t write about trauma, relationship, selfhood, and identity by looking at events from the same angle. I see each reframe as a new chapter in the narrative of sipèstisyon. To reach the collection’s conclusion and the speaker’s views of himself, I had to change my vantage point, and that required intentionality.

AW:  From dissecting the Pokémon movie to musing on WrestleMania, the book explores not just nostalgia, but specifically millennial nostalgia; can you speak about the significance of incorporating your nostalgia for pop culture and how these pop, one might even say “lowbrow” (though of course I’m not saying it!) influences like Pokémon and Wrestling can function within a form like poetry?

MF: In sipèstisyon, the poems that reference pop culture help situate the book in time. I wrote them because I wanted to reflect on past experiences as an adult. But equally as important, I wrote them because I’m a big nerd. I’m a millennial, so Pokémon and WWF are key parts of my childhood. To this day, I’m still a huge fan of anime and video games. Leaning into pop culture and nostalgia is one of the ways I have fun with my writing and share my personality and
interests with the audience. It’s an additional connection point between me and the reader. Poets can be so serious, myself included, and I think writing about nostalgia or our current nerdy/niche interests can be healthy and balancing. I also want to say that the exciting thing about writing and reading poems is that they can be inspired by so many different things. I’ve read poems in the shape of nutrition labels that are dope. As long as they’re not offensive and
executed well, I’m here for the pop culture poems.

AW: What are you looking forward to as a writer-in-residence at Sundress?

MF: I’m really looking forward to the dedicated time to write. Life is pretty busy right now, so I know I’ll appreciate the change of scenery. I have a few projects that I’m working on that I really want to focus on during that week. I’m also interested in seeing how being on a farm will influence my poems.

AW: And lastly, is there anything I didn’t touch on that you would like to talk about? Any new projects we should look out for?

MF: I’m working on a few different manuscripts right now, but nothing is close to completion. I’ve been working on my second poetry manuscript, a collection of poems about a shapeshifter in Haitian folklore called a lougawou. I’m also in the early stages of a chapbook that explores identity and labor. I’m hoping to have a working draft of the former by the spring.

Mckendy Fils-Aimé is a New England-based Haitian American poet, organizer, and teaching artist. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, CantoMundo, and Periplus. His debut poetry collection, sipèstisyon, was published by YesYes Books in 2026.

Ada Wofford (they/them) holds MAs in both English and Library Studies. In addition to working at a rare book shop, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, the editor of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in The Blue Nib, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Autostraddle, Capable Magazine, Sundress Reads, and more. Their chapbook, I Remember Learning How to Dive, was published in 2020, part of which earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination.

I began keeping a journal in the summer of 2022. Fifty three years prior to that event, Joan Didion wrote that “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” Is this true now, when all the world seems no longer a stage, but rather billions of public digital diaries, pulsing and flashing across our collective vision? Does this make all of us “anxious malcontents”? Probably. I like reading other people’s diaries. I am interested in them. I am interested in writing and privacy and publicity; I am interested in knowledge and its dissemination. 

In my work, I have argued that the fields of literature and history are inseparable – indeed, that they are one and the same. All history is a work of fiction; all nonfiction works of history. In this way, we understand ourselves.  

I read constantly about the past. I read constantly. I understand myself through that material. Mark Kurlansky and Lilian Faderman convinced me to study history when I read their books on my A Train commute to high school. Wandering through Dublin in 2023, I spent hours on park benches reading the works of David Foster Wallace. Crying inconsolably in the woods of Vermont, I finished Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Either/Or. Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends was near biblical to me during my sophomore year of college – I would carry my annotated copy in my bag at all times, turning to a page at random and consulting when needed with my liturgy. The year prior, I had done the same with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ novels on Brown’s quad my senior year was a twisted revelation. Driving across the country, my companion and I took turns reading aloud from Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, which I finished alone on the floor of a motel bathroom. This is not a reading list so much as an autobiography. 

In the college library, I taped photos of my favorite historians to the wall above my desk. I dressed as historian Hayden White for a costume party. It seems, at times, I am incapable of undergoing a conversation without invoking my personal pantheon of feminist scholars: Andrea Dworkin, Amia Srinivasan, Andrea Long Chu, Silvia Federici. Their intellect sparks against me. I simmer in pretension. My friends laugh at the way I speak through a web of references, often inscrutably so. I write notes on what I read in my journal, beside pasted-in receipts and postcards. I draw pictures of Mo from Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For to keep the ephemera company, speech bubbles with snarky commentary hanging from her mouth. I draw, write, collage, and the forms and media blend and blur.

I like it, my diary. I like to read history and fiction and poetry, which is to say, other people’s diaries. I like works which are expansive, experimental, interdisciplinary, multimedia. I am excited to read your work, so you should let me read it. I am a good reader – I pride myself on it. I am in search of something, as are all of us who read (perhaps there’s a joke about Proust to be made here, but I’ll leave it to the experts). I am inexpert and excited. I am happy to be here. I am balancing a book on my head.

Lia Ortner (she/her) earned her BA in History and Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2025, with her thesis on Medieval literature being granted the John A. Thomas Memorial Award. For the past year, she has been in Athens, Greece on a fellowship with the American College of Greece. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Lia is an educator, historian, killjoy feminist, amateur semiologist, and collage enthusiast. She enjoys drinking coffee in bed.

Abi Pollokoff’s night myths • • before the body (Red Hen Press, 2025) is a tour de force of inventive language. She constructs an incredibly original poetic landscape via fragmentation, punctuation, dichotomy, and white space—one saturated with feminist critique and riveting social commentary. Pollokoff’s writing is extraordinary and surreal, carrying readers into an intimate meditation around the multiplicities of womanhood.

Like rainfall, the atmosphere of night myths • • before the body is simultaneously staccato and seamless. While reading, I was immediately struck by the innovative creation of compound words that endlessly dot these pages. Within one of the first poems, “wildflower mythology,” words like “stemwrapped,” “soilsoaked,” “goldthreaded,” and “shadowplucked” surprised and delighted me. Although none of these are in the dictionary officially, they felt so deeply accurate, visually-clear, and aesthetically coherent that I would easily vouch for their inclusion. Pollokoff here puts forward her own mythological voice with these words; she establishes her artistic voice and epistemological vision early in the collection to articulate her own becoming. Borrowing from the compound word “wildflower” itself, Pollokoff brilliantly sees patterns already existent in language and generously extends them to other natural phenomena.

Pollokoff’s structure, ordering, and paginal layout are also designed with curiosity, attentiveness, and care. With the eye of an architect and the mind of an artist in communion with her world, she places the sequence “lilies & these eroded” in the center of the book. Pollokoff writes:

weigh the phrase against
its foliage: so much
vastness in the gasping
roots so much in the
gasping tides
•
here & over that way here
& over that way & here &
here & here &.

Her gorgeous language describing lilies on a shoreline brings together earthy diction like foliage and roots and water imagery. The open vowels in “gasping tides” connect to the vastness of nature. The repeated phrases in the second stanza excerpted above mirror immemorial natural cycles. In the notes section, Pollokoff notes her intention to match “the nadir of the speaker’s emotional self-consideration” with “the vertex of the book’s ‘v.’” The foresight to be
mindful of the physical artifact of her book with the speaker’s interiority is nothing short of remarkable. Pollokoff beautifully gives her speaker a chance to refract, reflect, and grow across the second half.

I resonate strongly with “particular reminders when prayers for the body aren’t enough” for its reflection on womanhood, and more generally, living with a body that changes. Pollokoff’s poignant questioning include vivid images to capture philosophical reflection; for example, “it’s not a question of streets or piano keys / it’s not a question to fill veins with tendrils of curved bark” and “is the body swallowed in fabric to hide / or to hold it.” Anyone who has selected particular articles of clothing based on feeling insecure or ashamed of their body will recognize this speaker’s experience. The title also evokes the social norm to express ‘thoughts and prayers’ instead of offer action to help someone in need. Pollokoff’s poem is a reminder full of smaller reminders for those who wish they were a different shape or who are struggling with changes in their body; she conjures fruits, wrists, cityscapes, and muscles to help readers towards self-acceptance by sitting with their beauty.

The poem “to forest is to hide a woman” also touches on the experience of holding self-doubt and self-love. Pollokoff writes:

Such wants—to be known, to be understood—are universal. Pollokoff’s fragmented syntax makes a stop and go effect, mirroring the thought process of someone holding uncertainty and desire inside them simultaneously. The periods force me to read more slowly, and through that adjustment, I’m able to recognize more multiplicity of meaning from these words. For example, there would be less room for curiosity in the opening of the second stanza excerpted above if it simply read: “i want to know how my insides are. i want to catch the dripping light of stained glass hanging from rafters…” Because of Pollokoff’s deconstructed and then reconstructed sentence structure, phrases like “my insides are i” echo more clearly, loudly. Moments of defamiliarization with phrases like “light of stained” also piqued my curiosity, making me want to read again and again.

Pollokoff’s commitment to sustaining such an inventive, clever, and transformational poetic across the entirety of night myths • • before the body makes this thoughtfully crafted collection a standout in contemporary poetry, and one I will return to many times. Her unique diction and deep care for humanness will reach those looking for both a cerebral and emotional reading experience.

night myths • • before the body is available from Red Hen Press

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is Cofounder and Managing Editor at Two Cardinals Literary. At Sundress Publications, she serves as Assistant Chapbook Editor. Livia has been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA in poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.

Following the release of her first full-length collection, Wet Specimen, Abigail Raley spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Franchesca Nicole Lazaro. Here, they discussed the materiality and spectacle of the body in death, illness, and eroticism, the need for resistance against rigid gender, domestic, and ecological hierarchies, and the power of embracing our natural, “feral” selves.

Franchesca Nicole Lazaro: In “Ode to Fetal Deer,” the speaker observes: “your small body cold beneath the jar’s collapsed glass womb, your brine, mine too.” In “Flying Fox,” she writes: “Make my mouth the warehouse for your cherub’s thunder, I think, and semen trickles down my thin red jowl.” How does the body function as both a specimen and a beast in its own right?

Abigail Raley: I wrote Wet Specimen during my MFA at the University of Montana, and my professor Sean Hill took us to the zoological museum. I was taken with the way creatures are made into observable specimens. I’m also taken with the idea of spectacle, what it means to be observed or watched. The wet specimen doubles what the creature actually is—meaning it is itself, but it’s also a tool for observation. When I was at the zoological museum, I was looking at this fetal bighorn sheep, and I was thinking about how the hospital is like that too. I have cystic fibrosis, which means when I’m hospitalized, I have to be kept in a sterile environment, much like that of the specimen jar. The same doubling happens in the hospital. I am me, but I’m also a medical object under observation. That doubling also happens in eroticism, as in I am me, but I am also the erotic object you’re observing. I think that specimen/beast duality you’re tracking has to do with those divisions/replications.

FNL: In “M.A.S.H.,” the speaker tells herself: “Men’s fingers are just fingers, not bullets.” What does dissociation during intimacy or within desire reveal about the humans and animals in this collection?

AR: I’m interested in how you track dissociation throughout the work because, for me, it’s less about dissociation and more about hope. “M.A.S.H.” is a poem full of violence and grief, but the speaker of that poem is futilely hoping/trusting that those violences won’t happen. I think there’s a use in that hope, even if it is futile. I don’t think “M.A.S.H.” is a poem particularly tracking dissociation or intimacy at all. I think “M.A.S.H.” is my little utopia, where I get to be a girl forever. Of course, I don’t get to be a girl forever, and I have experienced violence, so the poem doesn’t get to live in that necessarily. I want it to, though.

FNL: In “Beast,” the speaker reflects: “Maybe it is the edge of your esophagus. In every iteration, I am touching your soft inside. There is blood in my mouth.” How does hunting function as consumption in this collection?

AR: Again, I’m so excited by your read of this section, because I haven’t had hunting on the mind, but this book is hunting quite a bit throughout. Certainly, I’m interested in consumption. Erotic experience as consumption is a pretty common trope, but I’m also interested in how it occurs naturally in non-human animals. The poems “Flying Fox” and “Anglerfish” do this most explicitly, I think, and they are some of my hungriest poems. A lot of the book is just me finding cool animal facts and writing about them. Hunting is inherently a consumptive process, so it makes sense to me that those two things would be bound together.

FNL: In “Ripe,” the speaker recalls: “a man I loved once said, I’m only waiting for you to die.” Later: “by mature, he meant your body has so much to hold, your silence.” How does physical presence in relationships aggravate domesticity for the speaker in this collection?

AR: There was a time where I was into the idea that the domestic environment was a physically entrapping space. I wrote a poem that didn’t make it into the book about the process of making a roux. I don’t know if you’ve ever made roux, but it requires a lot of standing in one place and stirring. If you stop for even a second, it could burn. The task of making it, then, is a sort of trap, if a bit low stakes. I’m curious as to how physical positions of the body govern behavior. Domesticity creates situations where bodies are coming up against each other in really animal ways. Maybe I just think that domesticity is inherently aggravated and aggravating.

FNL: In “Aubade with Cystic Fibrosis,” the speaker writes: “there was once a creature that emerged from my coffin of a throat and said, feed me” and closes with “that didn’t shake me down bright air, that didn’t consist of my body just waking up.” How does domination become intentional submission in this collection?

AR: “Aubade with Cystic Fibrosis” is about my experience with a chronically ill body. A good person to look at for this question, who has been a massive inspiration in my life, is Bob Flanagan. Flanagan had cystic fibrosis, and he did BDSM performance art and poetry. He found that submission to controlled pain was the only way to take control of the involuntary chronic pain caused by his cystic fibrosis. Submission was a necessary joy in his life. It is a gift to choose submission, because chronic illness takes that choice from you. I have no choice but to submit to illness. Maybe that poem takes on Flanagan’s choice more than I thought. To choose submission is a powerful thing.

FNL: In “But Heaven,” the speaker moves from “I was far from you and getting farther. The open air around me folded. I knew the earth would never be renewed” to closing on “I gazed, I thought of you, I smiled.” How does the collection move from feral energy to potential energy?

AR: I wonder about “feral” and “potential” as oppositional descriptors. Would feral energy be something indulgent, acted upon? And then potential energy the restrictive or repressed? Curious about your thoughts on this! I’m interested in blending death and love, but in a way that recognizes death as a banal happening. I’m obsessed with the materiality of the body, both in death and in eroticism. Maybe that’s where your feral/potential energy dichotomy is coming up.

FNL: In “Squall,” the speaker observes: “I watch the flock churn while he touches me, their nearly colliding bodies making use of all that space. His hand postures one thigh open, then the other, my stomach wide and flat as a saucer. The birds flurry, their high backs furrowing the air.” How does the speaker’s relationship with the beasts subvert the speaker’s interpersonal relationships in this collection?

AR: I love Donna Haraway’s book, Staying with the Trouble. In it, she talks about kinship in what she terms “the cthuluscene.” In the introduction to Staying with the Trouble, Haraway says, “The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.” Disability theory also contends with this interconnectedness, but Haraway focuses on interspecies kinship, which I find to be profoundly resonant, important, and true. If human-to-human relationships are subverted in the collection, it’s because they are put on the same terrain as the animal-to-human and animal-to-animal relationships. I see Wet Specimen as a book that rejects hierarchies which place human relationships and behavior at the top, which is also connected to my perspective of bodies as pure material.

FNL: In “The New Sensation,” the speaker cries: “I have been thieved out of my body, elixered into an orgy of sensation” and closes with “Give me shape again. I am a blank field. Clarify my hill.” What role does grief play in the speaker’s relationship to her body?

AR: “The New Sensation” is that feeling you have when you’re sick and all you want is the emptiness of health. Sickness illuminates how empty the body can be because it is a state of fullness. That poem to me is grieving the senseless body, or maybe it’s grieving a mind unaware of the body. One of the blessings and curses of chronic illness is an incessant awareness of the body. On the one hand, the intimate awareness of the body is quite beautiful, but on the other hand, the pain of sensation is overwhelming.

FNL: In “Trapped in the Conga Line, I Ruminate on Intimacy,” the speaker reflects: “my hands on his body say, come home, say you’re tense, say let me move you… We will unfleetingly and without hesitation touch each other through the dark.” What does physical intimacy reveal about the expression of love in this collection?

AR: I just love community. Not that everyone should be going around touching strangers, but we’re offered so few moments to honestly engage with one another. Technology has only widened the gap between community members. Even in my small hometown, our community is deeply stratified. Most of the love throughout the book is romantic or erotic love. “Conga Line” is one of the few poems about platonic love. We’re all just creatures looking for connection to each other, so we make up these little excuses to create intimacy. The conga line is one such intimacy.

FNL: In “Landscape with Magpies Nesting in the Blizzard,” the speaker confesses: “I think I was bad in my life. I think I did something wrong” and closes with “I’m sorry. Can I begin again? I mean I looked out the window and saw the birds and I only thought of being loved.” What does the direct address of the source of pain solve for the speaker in this collection?

AR: I’m not sure that I get a lot solved in the collection at all! I’m not very interested in solutions. I don’t think they often actually exist in life, at least not permanent ones. Disability resists solution all the time. My illness is not solvable. I’ll live with it until I die, and it’s not just me. We’ve all got to die. There’s no solution to that. We can diagnose the source of pain all day long, but that doesn’t mean it’s solved. We are mostly unknown to ourselves and each other. I’m not sure the speaker solves much, either. The end of that poem is so odd. There’s a gap between the externality of the birds and the seemingly unrelated internal experience of the speaker. Why would one watch birds and only think of being loved? There’s a mismatch between the external world and the internal world, even if the speaker seems to feel that she’s figured something out about herself.

Wet Specimen is available to order now!

Abigail Raley (she/they) is a queer poet and library worker from Bowling Green, Kentucky. She is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana and is a current PhD candidate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Hanging Loose Magazine, HAD, The Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere, and feature themes of animalism, release, and the body as a grotesque vessel of sensuality and tenderness. Find her on Instagram @willyoubemyvalentine. Wet Specimen is Raley’s first full-length collection.

I like to think I’m unique from the rest of my family for going into writing, but I know I was raised on it. My dad used to read my brother and me poetry before bed every night from Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems anthology. I don’t remember any of the poetry, but I do remember there was a section called “Yellow” that was entirely composed of poetry about pee. My brother and I thought that was just fantastic.

In eighth grade, I fell for a girl who was into poetry. She showed me a couple poems she wrote and I wanted to relate to her, so I wrote a few poems of my own. That girl moved onto business and is now so terrifyingly smart that she’ll have the world under her thumb in a couple years, and I’m still writing poetry. She’ll make money but I can make words sound good. So really, who’s the real winner here?

The poetry club my friend and I founded in high school solidified the love I’d caught from that middle school crush. Every poem we read at meetings would come with a “lore dump,” where we’d say what life events inspired that writing. People talked about suicide attempts and their parents’ divorces, and we also talked about our first kisses and the way our girlfriends’ dads stabbed us with pushpins while putting our boutonnieres on for prom. If you’re reading this, Mr. Wagner, I know that wasn’t accidental. Poetry made us vulnerable in a way that just wasn’t acceptable anywhere else, and that feeling of security is what I strive for in every writers’ workshop.

My freshman year of college, I wrote a poem about how lost I felt on campus. My favorite line, “I am tired of being courageous in a town I do not recognize,” might be the most honest thing I’ve ever written. I performed it at a campus open mic and I had random people coming up to me for weeks afterwards to tell me how much they related to my poem. Life is like watching a horror movie with men: everyone’s scared but nobody wants to admit it. I’ve performed at every seasonal campus open mic since then, writing about whatever has bugged me most that term. My only requirement for myself is that I tell the truth.

My favorite author (okay, actually my idol to an unhealthy extent) Kurt Vonnegut’s brother said “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” Writing is my way of doing that. I will never take my country to Mars or make gazillions on the stock market, but I know how to make things make sense for a second. I think that’s just as valuable as any other gift I could give this world.

Scott Sorensen is a junior at Dartmouth College studying English while performing standup, writing for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern satire magazine, and helping edit the Stonefence Review. Scott dreams of becoming the first Latvian man to win an MMA championship, which is pretty unlikely given the fact that he is not Latvian and has no idea how to fight.