Tag: sonnets

Interview with Donna Vorreyer, Author of Unrivered

The cover art for "Unrivered," featuring a drawn image of a faceless woman with white hair wearing a bodice of several colors and textures, including midnight blue, white, teal, and red. She appears to have feather-like objects coming from both hands.

Ahead of the 2025 release of her fourth poetry collection, Unrivered, Donna Vorreyer spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Lizzy DiGrande. Here, they discussed the beauty that grows from grief and resilience, the complexities of fertility in humans and nature, and how we learn to live inside bodies and lives that are always shifting.

Lizzy DiGrande: The title “Unrivered ” appears in various forms throughout the collection, such as in “Blood Line,” where you write, “I wanted there to be a rivering, a signal.” Can you talk about what “rivering” means and how you feel it encapsulates this poetry collection?

Donna Vorreyer: There is a reason civilizations were built around rivers. Fresh water for drinking, for cooking, for planting, for animals. Food sources. Transportation. So when a landscape is “unrivered,” through drought or sprawl or natural disaster, everything around it also becomes lost. I started to think about the idea of droughts in a lifetime, how we are drained of certain things that have defined us.

For me, it started with early menopause. My body literally stopped flowing, and the thing that I had been taught made me a woman was gone. And of course, I’m aging and all the fun physical things that come with it, so vitality and youth are ebbing. Then in 2018, I lost both of my parents, to whom I was very close. That loss led to a lot of questioning of the faith I had been raised in. Then lockdown came. Then I retired from teaching, the only job I had ever known as an adult for 36 years. With that retirement also came the loss of relationships I had thought were friendships, but were merely relationships of proximity and convenience.  So when I was reaching for a concept, a word that would encompass the feeling of losing the most grounding elements of identity, “unrivered” seemed correct.  In the poem you mentioned, “rivering” is a direct reference to menstruation/menopause, but the idea of being unrivered hopefully resonates in multiple ways as a reference to loss in general, to what is drained from you as you age. And so, how does one reroute the waters? Come up with new ways to see the self and the world? You “salvage a self, unrivered.” 

LD: Religious imagery is a strong, recurring theme in this collection, as evident in the mentions of transubstantiation, stigmata, apostasy, and even snakes. How has your own relationship with Christianity or Catholicism shaped the way these themes appear in your work?

DV: My relationship with faith changed while caring for and then losing my parents during lockdown, which happened shortly after. I struggled (and still do) with how to reconcile the faith I was raised in with the harsh realities of grief and isolation and global loss. I still find solace in and seek out places where I feel the pull of the spiritual—sometimes in expected places, like churches, and sometimes in unexpected ones, like viewing a bank of clouds or watching the movement of light on water. When the concept of self is wavering or uncertain, the desire to connect or reconnect with something larger than the self becomes very strong. A desire for connection with the divine, however one defines it, can be a grounding force.

LD: In “Coppering,” you highlight Dorothy Hood’s 1977 painting Copper Signal as the inspiration behind this ekphrastic poem. How did you build on this piece of visual art to bring a deeper meaning to it? How is the poem interacting with Copper Signal, and what are you hoping your poem adds to the conversation?

DV: I first saw this painting in San Antonio while attending AWP. The painting is mostly rust/red with a split or chasm of those colors that leads to a jagged brilliant blue that then fades into a deep midnight in the bottom left corner. One of the phrases I wrote in my notebook in the museum that day was “blood-rock/blue-vein,” and the poem builds from a description of the abstract landscape in the painting to a reference to the menopausal body, still “thick with life and howling.” Copper is often associated with blood—the color, smell, and taste—and it seemed like a natural progression as I drafted the poem. There is also a deep rift in the painting, something divisive that separates one side of the canvas from the other. To me, that seemed like a clear image of a breakage, a major change. I don’t know if it adds anything to the conversation about Hood’s painting. I only know how it felt to me in that moment.

LD: In your acknowledgements, you mention how Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve in DuPage County, Illinois, almost plays a character in many of these pieces. How has this place worked to ground your poems and shape the collection?

DV: I love being outdoors (though not sleeping there—I’ll hike all day, but I want a bed and walls at night). We are lucky to have a 2500-acre forest preserve about a mile from our home, and it is the place where we most frequently walk (and, during the pandemic, the only place we went outside the house). After spending hours and hours there, I continue to make discoveries (like a small waterfall whose force varies with the weather or a gully that looks like the perfect place for someone to die in a Decemberists song). I also continue to be delighted by its small pleasures—a family of deer running across the trail, the mosses that grow on the rocks, the thunderous frogsong in the spring. A forest is also the perfect place to observe a constant state of change and cycles, a type of reinvention that mirrors the changes and cycles of aging in the book.

LD: In “I Contest My Body’s First Eviction Notice,” you break words across lines, even starting a new line with a singular letter from the previous word. How does intentional fragmentation work to reflect this poem’s subject matter?

DV: I remember that I wanted those fragmented lines to be able to be read in two ways, for the reader to think, “Wait a minute, I thought it was this, but it’s this.” The mid-word line breaks move the meanings from broad to more specific. The stairs are a subtle swell, but then, oops, they cause swelling. The damage can refer to the body as a whole, but the addition of the d on the next line allows it to be a specific part that is damaged. There is a sort of disorientation when the body starts to refuse tasks that used to be easy or starts to exhibit new and troubling symptoms. I wanted to try and mimic that confusion with the structure of the poem. And I do love a poem that resists being read aloud, that wants to be seen on the page.

LD: There is tension between the idea that one’s imagination remains fertile, but the physical body is barren. How has this juxtaposition shaped your own sense of identity? What do you hope readers take away from this concept and its relation to womanhood and resilience?

DV: I think that tension is true for anyone, regardless of gender. Everyone has a body, and every body ages, though aging as a female brings different expectations from the world, particularly regarding appearance and worth. And the imagination can be both a refuge and a very unwelcome generator of maybes that can make reality seem even more difficult. So I think that specific word as it relates to the book, to being unrivered, is more related to losing a sense of usefulness, a sense of purpose, a sense of value as a person in the world, and imagination is key to seeing new versions of a self that has changed. I would hope that readers see themselves somewhere in these poems and know that they are not alone in their self-criticism and their raging against time, but also not alone in their turn toward what is beautiful, toward desire and joy.

LD: The concept of “dropping breadcrumbs” is scattered throughout the collection. What does that image mean to you, and why do you think it recurs?

DV: That image appears three times because it is the last/first line in the heroic sonnet crown that anchors the collection. Thus, it is an ending line in one sonnet, a beginning line in another, and then an internal line in the final sonnet that finishes the crown. The image of dropping breadcrumbs, of course, comes from Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail to follow back home. In reality, dropping breadcrumbs in a forest wouldn’t work as birds, insects, and animals would make them quickly disappear. So dropping breadcrumbs became, in the crown, once a mundane image of cooking dinner and twice a metaphor for a flawed tether to past mistakes, a false belief that one can go back and somehow change what has already happened.

LD: There are so many strikingly vivid images in this collection, such as a student carrying a lemon in his pocket, and “the intricate lace edges of kale mapping an unknown coast.” Are these images derived from observation, imagination, or a mix of both?

DV: I think it’s always a mix of both. I taught middle school for thirty years, and the lemon in the pocket was a real thing. (You don’t want to know what other things were kept in some pockets, trust me.) But the placing of it in that poem came from a flash of that memory out of nowhere, a way to connect a past experience with a certain state of mind I was trying to convey in the poem. All writers are observers, but just writing a pure description or narration of an image or event is not a poem. Observation and extrapolation combine to make the most memorable images, I find.

LD: Different sections of this collection touch on topics ranging from grieving the loss of parents, menopause, body dysmorphia, and more. Is there a significance to the order of these sections, perhaps to suggest growth in the writer?

DV: When I ordered the collection, I knew I would be splitting up the sonnets in the crown, so I first chose poems that seemed to connect to each individual sonnet in some way. (A reader may see repeated themes or diction or images, for example.) But the arc of the collection as a whole moves from grief, confusion, and fear to acceptance and rediscovery. This is not to imply that confusion and grief and fear end, but more to recognize that they have become a part of learning how to continue to grow and find joy. The heroic crown as a form is both propulsive and recursive, moving forward by throwing back to a line from the previous sonnet, and then bringing back all of the first lines at the end. Life is the same way. It is always moving forward, even while it is looking back.

Pre-order your copy of Unrivered today

Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Unrivered (2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016), and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her poems have been nominated for multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. Donna has also published seven chapbooks, including The Girl (2017, Porkbelly Press). She currently lives and creates in the western suburbs of Chicago, runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, and is the co-editor/co-founder of the online journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.

White woman smiles at camera in selfie format. She has brown hair and is wearing a blue denim dress.

Elizabeth “Lizzy” DiGrande is a graduate student in Emerson College’s Publishing and Writing program, where she also serves as a Transformational Leaders Fellow and Writing Assistant for the Emerson Grad Life Blog. She is on the board of the Women’s National Book Association, Boston chapter, and is passionate about amplifying women’s voices in publishing. Originally from New Jersey, she now resides in Boston and can often be found perusing the city’s public libraries or exploring new restaurants. She hopes to build a career as both a food writer and literary agent championing female-identifying authors.

Sundress Reads: Review of Four in Hand

Sundress Reads black-and-white logo with a sheep sitting on a stool next to the words "Sundress Reads." The sheep is wearing glasses and holding a cup filled with a hot drink in one hoof and holding an open book in the other.
A book cover that reads "Four in Hand" in white letters against a dark green background with a folded down piece of yellow in the top right-hand corner. "Poems" is written in yellow in a vertical line below the title and the author's name "Alicia Mountain" is written in black letters at the very bottom of the page against a white outline that wraps around the dark green and yellow.

Alicia Mountain’s new poetry collection Four in Hand (BOA Editions, 2023) is comprised of four heroic crown sonnets—a sequence of fifteen interlinking sonnets wherein the last line of the first sonnet is the first line of the next, and so on, and the fifteenth sonnet consists of the first lines of the previous fourteen. Quite a complicated structure indeed, and tricky to pull off, but Mountain does so masterfully. She weaves together eloquent, and at times archaic, language with urgent issues like late-stage capitalism, the pandemic, environmental devastation, LGBTQ issues and discrimination, drone strikes, the 2016 election, etc. with contemporary references and found text. Mountain also offers contemplations of familial structures, her gay poetic lineage, love and loss, as well as investigations of the self and place.  Aside from the political undercurrents and heavier themes, Four in Hand is also tender and personal suffused with numerous kinds of love, including the lingering love that persists even after heartbreak, “I offer to trade you / a poem for the story of the place we pressed / our bodies together.” This book feels like a necessary antidote to the crushing pressures and anxieties facing us today.

A narrative thread is braided through the book, submerging then reemerging signaled by motifs like “train tracks,” “the queen,” and “violet,” “which operate as anchors that ground the poems and refocus the reader’s attention. The form lends itself to this loose, nonlinear narrative and though each heroic crown appears disparate at first you begin to notice the intricate patterns as you read further.

Each sonnet rolls effortlessly into the next, turning the meaning of its last line to mean something completely different—even opposite—when it becomes the first line of the next sonnet. For example, the last line of the ninth sonnet in the first sequence “Train Town Howl” reads “whomever you love. They belong beside you,” which seems to be a lament that their ex-lover likely has a new lover. But in the next sonnet, the same line reads as well-wishing towards the lover rather than lamentation—the speaker is now expressing to their past lover that they deserve to be with someone they love, whomever it may be, and be happy. Mountain achieves this reversal of meaning simply by changing the sentence structure. As a last line “whomever you love” is part of the sentence that begins in the previous line, but as the first line of the tenth stanza, “Whomever you love” is the beginning of the sentence, starting a thought rather than completing one. It’s a tiny change but has a significant impact, which is a testament to the virtuosity of Mountain’s. The syntax is delicately crafted and each period, comma, line break, and word, and is intentional.

On the note of intentionality, while many sonnets in the collection resemble traditional sonnets, the sonnet form never feels tired because of Mountain’s experimentation. In the second sequence “Sparingly,” she pushes the boundaries of the form: each line consists only of a single word. A traditional sonnet puts pressure on the line as a unit, by using one word per line Mountain zeroes in on the word, forcing us to linger with each word and really notice them, hold on to each syllable, savor the sounds.

Despite the dark cloud of political instability, environmental degradation, and loss that permeates, Mountain finds moments of lightness and hope, especially in the “elementary poets” the speaker is teaching poetry. They like “butts and cats and killing” and the girls are “purple princes too.” This childhood silliness and wonder contrasts the “The sinister lever-pull that will not right us / came swift in November,” meaning the election of Donald Trump and the dividedness of the nation. Mountain asks, “How long has it / been since you worked for an hourly wage?” exemplifying the disconnect between the wealthy and the politicians and the rest of us. By posing this question and then going to work with eight-year-old poets, the speaker is deciding to do not be crushed by despair and do the important work of investing hope in the future, represented by the children, and in small but not inconsequential actions. Such a kernel of optimism is found when “Eight-year-old writes, We befriend enemy / countries like we were never enemies.” A vision of a more peaceful world without senseless violence—a better world.

Four in Hand is an epic, ambitious work, the opulent landscapes, gentle intimacy, and acute awareness of corruption and destruction that we are complicit in, “Often, I forget I am a benefactor / of war by birthright,” will percolate in your brain long after you’ve put the book down. It is a perfect alchemy of the personal and the political, of abundance and sparsity, of the quotidian and the extraordinary. Mountain demonstrates dexterity in both form, lyric, and blank verse while retaining a pleasurable cohesiveness. This book is achingly beautiful and exemplifies the magic of poetry—how at its best, poetry can touch you deeply; make you feel, and think, and cry, and hope, and yearn, and be glad to be alive.

Four in Hand is available from BOA Editions

Max Stone is in his final semester as an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his BA in English with a minor in Book Arts and Publication from UNR in 2019. He is originally from Reno, but has lived in many other places since including, most recently, New York City. His poetry has been published in Black Moon Magazine, & Change, Fifth Wheel Press, Sandpiper Review, Night Coffee Lit, Caustic Frolic, and elsewhere. Max is also book artist and retired college soccer player.