Tag: Sundress Publications

Sundress Reads: Review of String

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.
The word "string" is in the center of the image. Thin strands of red string are tangled and spread out in the image. The background is a light tan color. The author's name "Matthew Thorburn" is in smaller font near the bottom.

In String (LSU Press, 2023), Matthew Thorburn chronicles a teenage boy’s journey through an unnamed war. Thorburn brings a breathless quality to the entire volume, with almost no punctuation in any poem. Lines break randomly in the middle of sentences and phrases. Concrete poems seemingly resemble nothing while still floating strangely on the page. Disorientation and urgency ring all throughout Thorburn’s poetry collection,.

String is divided into four parts, each one roughly corresponding to the narrator’s experience of this war. Part 1 depicts the happy life before the war alongside the anxiety as war looms and Part 2 describes the devastation of living in a war zone. After beginning with rich, nostalgic narratives, Thorburn plunges unexpectedly into violence in, mirroring the way that conflict envelops civilian homes. In “They,” Thorburn creates the idea of a generic, violent “them” consisting of soldiers who “liked to throw things” such as “a woman down a well” (11). After establishing a serene, happy setting, Thorburn destroys any sense of security the characters possess and depicts the awful descent into chaos that occurs for the victims of conflict.

Thorburn’s outright refusal to name who or what is happening forces us into the lived experiences of conflict. We never learn what war or what part of the war String occurs in. We have no semblance of timeline or how long these characters suffer, nor how long the conflict itself endures. We aren’t allowed to think about politics or death tolls; the ideologies of any single side blends into a single wave of violence that falls upon the narrators’ home. Thorburn focuses us entirely on a single life and the devastation that war inflicts on that life. String is a deeply emotional, personal book in a place that seeks to rob its inhabitants of any sentimentality.

Part 3 guides the reader through the narrator’s choice to leave his home. Consisting of a single extended poem, this section investigates the string which ties the narrator not only to the people who love him, but to the past and present. Over the course of the poem, his string takes the form of a fuse, soldiers’ razor wire, a cursive line, and even an umbilical cord (Thorburn 43-54). This string represents the hold that the narrator holds on his world over the course of this conflict, as well as the sense of self that he maintains during his displacement. As he notes, “this string / I follow / and follow and / know I can / never stop” (Thorburn 52). This moors him to the present and past, but also tugs him relentlessly into an uncertain future; to end the collection, Part 4 investigates what it means to come back to one’s home after war.

String is not only about the disorientation that inhabitants of a warzone (and refugees) feel, but also about the way that comfort morphs in a war-stricken environment. Pianos, for example, are a symbol of comfort early in the book through depictions of the narrator’s family and friends playing together, and he revisits pianos in later poems as a way to show how comfort can rupture in times of war. After a bomb strikes, the narrator recalls how:

“bits of paper swirled behind my eyes

some with treble clefs with quarter

or half notes Uncle Albert penciled

years ago.” (Thorburn 34)

When the narrator’s physical home is obliterated, his mental comfort is as well. Perhaps no poem encapsulates this as well as “Shatterings,” which in part catalogs Uncle Albert (who was previously skilled on the piano)’s stroke. After the stroke, a gorgeous flow of notes becomes “a stutter of / knots nots notes nights / and days” (Thorburn 33). Much like war, the stroke turns order into disorder, blowing to pieces what made so much sense before.

Thorburn’s narrator can never really escape in spite of scattered efforts to either lighten the mood or escape reality entirely. Even as the narrator’s family friend tells him that “those wishing to sing / will always find a song,” the narrator recognizes that “only he spoke” (Thorburn 13). The narrator’s mother remains terrified in that scene as onlookers are completely unmoved by this man’s display of security. In another scene, the diversion of a magic show is repeatedly interrupted by war-related details like “the splintered tree out back,” bringing readers back to the painful reality of conflict (Thorburn 17). Reflecting on an old photograph of the narrator’s father, Thorburn remarks:

“Time stops the camera

says let me show you

how time hurtles on leaves

only this creased piece

of cardboard little square.” (6)

String as a whole is the narrator’s “cardboard little square,” the fleck of memory and hope he intends to pass on to the next generation.

All through his book, Thorburn is painfully aware of the frailty of nostalgia, the weaknesses present in any recollection. In language rich with horror and hope, Thorburn truthfully renders the human costs of war through the eyes of a single teenager.

String is available from Louisiana State University Press

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.

Meet Our New Intern: SINDUS Kim

A Korean person stands, head turned to the right, so that their face is mostly covered by shoulder-length black hair. They wear a shoulder bag, white pants, and a black shirt that reads MARRIAGE FOR ALL in red punk font. There are trees, grass, and other greenery in the background.

My first work of presentable quality was written in 10th grade, fresh after a devastating breakup with my Discord girlfriend of six months, and published on a well-known fanfiction website in a fever dream of heartache. 

I had explicitly tagged my piece as “Breakup Self-Insert,” because I recognized halfway through the draft that this was a thinly veiled projection of my own angst. A personalized hell of Hurt/No Comfort. Pieces taken from the still-burning house fire that was our mutually blocked DMs, then slapped onto an innocent Google Doc—fourteen thousand words written & proofread in the span of three days. This piece was the final nail in the coffin, my own special closure, and writing it was perhaps the most painful experience in my life: second-place only to admitting on my “Meet Our New Intern” post that I actively wrote fanfiction. 

Be it dissociation or healing, soon after I published the fic, I got over the girl. But I’ll never forget: I woke up the morning after that first chapter and saw that my notifications had exploded overnight. Comments sung praise after praise about a “fresh take on the character” and “a beautiful interpretation.” Every few hours, I’d receive some variation of “I don’t know how you wrote him so correctly!,” and think to myself: thanks, I just pretended he was my ex-girlfriend. I remember being confused, that nobody recognized the deception. Then, one day, the obvious hit me. 

If you squint hard enough, real characters look just like real people. 

Like characters, a real person exists within an ambiguous mishmash of ideals, morality, and history, to fluctuating yet paradoxically static degrees of importance, that influence their decision in any number of ways. These facets layer and collide to form the loose concept we call “self,” whether anthropocentric or otherwise. Similarly, like people, a real character is malleable—so we like to observe this self as it experiences a “thing.” Authors put an extraordinary amount of care into ensuring this happens. Consider everything the self is at this present moment, and why it is that way. Now, here’s a thing. Will the self change? Will it stay the same? Should it? Why, or why not? Or, my favorite—doggone with the character. Will you, the self reading this thing, change as a result of having read it? At the center of literature, there is a push-pull of human reaction; the process of evoking these reactions is what I call art. 

Between real things, the line dividing them is only a matter of semantics. The pravus opus of my career blended a teen lesbian situationship, an adult gay situationship, & every real thing’s real history together until I had something fresh. In the wake of a four-way projection, all of us imposed onto each other, I was left with a sadomasochistic mess of a story—in which every breathtaking reaction was brand spankin’ new. My readers were so compelled by my characters working out their abandonment issues over Spotify playlist descriptions that they could, graciously, overlook the fact that I clearly didn’t know what a semicolon was. 

All this to say: since then, I’ve loved real characters & people everywhere, and I’m elated to continue doing so as an editorial intern for Sundress Publications. I hope this was obvious from the piece, but I got back together with the girl. Please don’t go looking for my fic—I might have to quit my internship if you find it.

SINDUS Kim (any/all) is a writer & fan of the odd, off-putting, and preternatural. Though they have a penchant for fiction and CNF/essays, their Word document dedicated to bad poems about their ex-girlfriend well-exceeds fifty pages. You can find him at his completely empty Instagram and Twitter @sinducated, or her website, where she’s open to all kinds of small talk and inquiries.

Interview with Frances Boyle, Author of Light-carved Passages

Frances Boyle’s Light-carved Passages was released by Doubleback Books earlier this month. Frances spoke with Doubleback Books editorial intern Katy Nguyen about family, reflection, art, and home. Light-carved Passages is available for free download at the Doubleback Books website. 

Katy Nguyen: What was your thought process in putting together Light-carved Passages? Was there an overarching narrative or theme that you hoped to achieve?

Frances Boyle: Like many debut collections, Light-carved Passages began with me assembling many disparate poems I had written over a number of years, ranging from my first-ever published poem (not counting the high school and university newspaper publications which are rightly confined to history) to more recent ones. The work in putting the collection together, what poet Sue Goyette once called “writing the big poem”, was to find the themes, preoccupations and tics that resonated with each other, and to shape them into sections. In the end, the poems coalesced around a number of themes: family of origin, interiority and reflection, often in nature, created family, and responses to artwork in various media. These themes turned into five sections (which became six in the current version), though they aren’t hermetically sealed off from one another. The themes overlap and show through in shadows and echoes, in conversation with each other. When I realized that the image of car headlights carving a passage through the dark appeared in several poems, I knew I had my title.

KN: By the end of your poems, there is a tension that rests just underneath the surface of them. How do you navigate tension and decide when to end a poem?

FB: I’m never entirely sure when a poem ends. There have been times when I’ve pushed on past when it really ought to have ended, writing lines that felt like an overly-neat wrap-up or an explanation of what the poem already said. In that case, the work was to trim back the poem as I revised. Other times, I felt a poem had come to an end, but in revision pushed myself to go deeper into the emotion or the language to what felt like a more satisfying and richer result. Finding the balance, maintaining that tension you asked about, is for me a question of feel, of nuance and some delicacy.

KN: Where did you draw inspiration from for this collection? Who or what did you look to as you put Light-carved Passages together? 

FB: As is evident from the acknowledgements, I turned to many sources of inspiration for the individual poems, including international writers like Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath and iconic Canadian poets such as Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Don McKay and Judith Fitzgerald. But in addition to writing directly sparked by other published work, I always draw inspiration from fellow writers in my community, many of whom I thank (and continue to thank) in the book. One of my writing groups, the Ruby Tuesday group, has been together for 18 years, and I credit them with major influence on the poems, both in initiation and in revision. I’ve also been lucky to work with several great mentors; Barry Dempster in particular worked with me extensively as I put this collection together and was endlessly kind and supportive, while frequently asking me to “put some pressure” on a phrase or a line.

KN: In the poem “And the room breathed”, you wrote, “I refuse to mourn days past.” Can you speak about this great sense of lost connections, memory, and longing? 

FB: Well, the poem may say it better than I’m able to in prose! What I think I was attempting to convey is the wish and hope that connections—with people, with places—are never really lost, that they can be accessed, either with the effort of refusal to believe in permanent loss, or perhaps with the effortlessness of letting go. Longing is an essential component in my visceral sense of how memory recreates connections and braids them into strands that sustain emotion in the present day. Another poem speaks of how “the moment never lasts”, but the crystallized feel of it lives on in the heart and, hopefully, in the poems.

KN: Even further, “Sort of an Elegy” is the shortest section in the collection. Was this an intentional decision? 

FB: This section is actually one of the very few parts of the collection that changed materially for the Doubleback republication. In the original book, the first three poems in the section appeared as a multi-part poem, even though two of them had earlier been published separately (“Passchendaele” was my first publication, and “Wake” was first place winner in the “Great Canadian Literary Hunt” magazine contest). Because all three dealt with the same subject matter, the days surrounding the sudden death of my younger brother, I decided to present them as a single poem, which felt right at the time.  When I had the opportunity to make edits for this new edition, I chose to separate them again, so as to give breathing room to each of the poems, with their individual moods and slightly different time frames. “Sepia” felt like an apt coda to those memories and my sense of how we preserve them, so I carved the four poems out as a separate short section that felt complete in itself.

KN: Several poems touch upon motherhood and daughterhood. How did the two inform this collection?

FB: Mother-daughter relationships, and their inherent challenges and sometimes joys, are key to both this collection and my two other poetry books. They are also thematically important in much of my fiction, particularly my novella, Tower, and my forthcoming novel, Skin Hunger. In Light-carved Passages, my role and emotions as a mother are central to the “Bouquet” section (and to a couple of poems in the final section), maybe because my own daughters were still in the more challenging than joyful stages during the time when many of these poems were written. Several poems in the “Blueprint” section situate the speaker as a daughter within a family, and that optic is relevant to the reflections in other poems. Much but not all of the mothering and daughtering material is based on real life; there are also imagined mothers and daughters here, including Persephone and Demeter in the poem “Winter”.

KN: In another poem, “The Land is Laid Out Forever”, there appears to be themes of home, affirmation, and reassurance. The line—“Don’t ever forget where you come from”—comes to mind. What was on your mind when writing this one?

FB: This poem was originally written in a long-ago workshop, so I can’t recall the assignment or prompt that spurred it. What I feel it was trying to do was evoke the various forces at work upon leaving home; specifically, the Saskatchewan prairie city where I grew up. The man in the poem, my boyfriend at the time, who I’ve long lost touch with, gave me the gift of that somewhat ceremonial farewell evening, and the imperative to “Don’t ever forget”. I attempted to do justice to that command (which I also positioned as a request on his part) by being highly attentive to the specific details of that moment, and that landscape, focusing on images as closely as I could recall or evoke them to create a sense both of place and of intense emotion.

KN: All of the imagery in Light-carved Passages is rich and specific. When writing these poems, do you have these scenes and moments crisp in your mind? Or are they something you build upon as you recall them?

FB: I think it’s a little of both. In drafting, I’ll often riff off an image that comes from another poem, or let sound and rhythm carry me through wordplay into something more specific. The poem “Silvered” is an example of that—playing with assonance and rhyme led me to the more concrete images later in the poem. Deepening the imagery and increasing the specificity most often comes out in revision, when I carve away extraneous words and ideas to focus on what feels strongest, most evocative, enhancing metaphor and figurative language, and working to crystallize the images so they carry more freight.

KN: In the “Blueprint” section of the collection, how did you go about writing these poems? It felt as though you were weaving this segment with a lot of sentiment in mind. Would you say it almost sets the tone for what the rest of the collection will be like?

FB: Exactly: the section can be viewed as the template, the blueprint, that sets the tone for the entire book, just as experiences within one’s family of origin are very often the blueprint for how a person will respond or behave later in life and in other relationships. In the section, I wanted to include both poems based on real experiences with my family of origin, as well as others that arose from imagination, all of which I hope establish a certain emotional tenor that reverberates through the whole collection.

KN: Did Light-carved Passages go through a lot of changes from other perspectives and voices? (For example, editing, sharing the poems, reading aloud, etc.) If yes, how so? 

FB: Yes, there were many many changes, both to individual poems throughout the time I was working on the collection, and on the collection and its ordering. After working on a poem through a few drafts, my next stop was almost always to share with my writing groups for feedback. I didn’t always accept their suggestions, but I found that I learned as much from comments that I disagreed with as from those that felt right and true; recognizing why I disagreed helped me clarify my intent for a poem and work to realize it. Reading aloud, either at the group or at open mics, had a way of making me hear the poem anew, recognizing awkwardnesses and places that needed to be clearer. Later, I was fortunate to work with a fabulous mentor, Barry Dempster, through the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity who challenged me to do deeper dives into the imagery and the language, and guided me as I shaped the collection to clarify the thematic flow and conversations among poems and between sections of the book. And my editors, Rita Donovan at BuschekBooks, and Bethany Mulholland and Danielle Hanson at Doubleback, all had valuable input on the ultimate shape of the book.

KN: Are there any rituals and routines that you do before writing a poem? Or does the writing come to you naturally?

FB: I wish it came naturally! I tend to be very logical and linear in normal life, so my writing routine helps me sidestep that analytical part of myself. Letting go of logic and following intuition, sound or rhythm can lead into surprising places whether in memory or in imagination. Much of my poetry comes from freewriting in response to a prompt, be it an exercise or simply reading and reflecting on another poet’s work. This most often happens in the weekly sessions with my Ruby Tuesday writing group. Our routine is to first consider a prompt that one of the members has brought, reading the poems aloud. We then allow three minutes of silent centering, to reflect on what we’ve heard or to settle into whatever else emerges. Finally, we free-write for a set time—usually 12 or 15 minutes—then each of us has the option of reading the result aloud, to minimal comments. This all happens before we turn to workshopping the poems that members have brought for our input.

KN: And lastly, for budding poets and other creatives, what do you believe is the best way to go about starting or continuing a project?

FB: I am speaking just for myself here, since I know many writers who do begin writing with a specific project that they want to pursue (or that they feel compelled to pursue). I, however, have never consciously set out to write a collection or chapbook. I’ve always begun by writing individual poems, so that’s what I’m most comfortable suggesting. Write the poems that come to you, write lots of poems and share them with people whose opinions you value. Those opinions shouldn’t be considered the definitive word on a poem but, as you learn to trust your instincts, they will help you to find your own voice. You may get some further sense of what’s strong in as you submit to lit mags (rejections are inevitable, personalized comments are rare, so treat them like gold!). Once you have what feels like a critical mass of work, it will be time to take a close look at the stack of poems and see what themes or motifs recur, images that you revisit consciously or unconsciously. Your poetic obsessions are the best clue to how you can proceed to shape the larger work, finding and reinforcing threads through the larger work, either discarding poems that don’t fit or finding a way to bring them into the conversation, and sometimes writing new poems where you see a gap. It’s an iterative process, so requires patience and some stamina!

Read Light-carved Passages at the Doubleback Books website!

Frances Boyle is the author, most recently, of Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022). In addition to two other poetry books and several chapbooks, her publications include Tower (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2018), a novella, Seeking Shade (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020), an award-winning short story collection and Skin Hunger, a forthcoming novel. Boyle got to know Pearl when they were both members of the Ruby Tuesday writing group and has admired her and her writing ever since.

Katy Nguyen is a budding creative studying Sociology and English at the University of California, Irvine. Katy enjoys reading and writing about the little things, music, and peoplehood. In her spare time, she likes to peruse around stationery shops and add more pens to her growing collection. 

Sundress Reads: Review of Meta Work

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.
This is a collage of abstract objects such as a grid, stars, and paint throughout the image. There is also half of a face at the bottom right corner. "Meta Work" is in the middle of the image and "Autofiction by Anastasia Wasko" is at the bottom in smaller font.

Anastasia Wasko’s Meta Work (Planet Dust Enterprises, 2021) is a dissociative fever dream wearing the skin of creative nonfiction. The only question is: what type of creative nonfiction? 

A memoir, fittingly, places emphasis on memory. A personal essay explores a life lesson. More often than not, these lines become increasingly blurry as a writer searches for truth within the chaos of memory. Such was Wasko’s challenge writing Meta Work as a memoir, which couldn’t “hold [her] vision of [her] world” (5); wanting to preserve the fantastical, irrational elements of her life, Wasko turned to the genre of autofiction, in which the only promise is an authentic portrayal of herself. 

Through a blur of events and imagery, we readers are only offered one tangible detail: the chapter titles, denoting the location from which Wasko writes. The rest is up to her world of chaos, containing a mannequin with fiery, burning eyes; a river pooling at her ankles in the middle of Eighth Street; a depressed mother whose emotions swing like swords; a repressive father who refuses to consider writing as work; and, most importantly, unreliable time. Despite Meta Work being in chronological order, hours are missing from the story. Wasko’s time skips from 9AM to 5:45 (AM? PM?) to 9PM with no preamble, unobserved. She often breaks from her dazes to ask, “Where am I?” (Wasko 44). The gaping holes in her life are jarring to read, but these absences are intentional—we don’t know what happened, and neither does Wasko. This is, exactly, how she experiences day-to-day life. 

In fiction, as in trauma, there is truth in suffering. In order to simply live, Wasko must navigate an unyielding series of challenges. Existential dread and past trauma is compounded by the divorce of her parents, bipolar disorder, and a sense of insignificance—one she attempts to fight by working as a freelance marketing writer going in and out of the City. 

The City operates as a “mirror” (47) to portray Wasko’s internal chaos, but more specifically, a hatred; she despises her inability to reconcile her trauma and disorder with the rest of herself, and represses as a result. Primarily, this applies to her everyday emotions. After suffering a panic attack inside her office cubicle and being fired (banished) from the concrete jungle, Wasko finds dissociative comfort on the steps of Madison Square Garden. Later, though she swore she “would never come back to” Greenpoint as it “held too many memories” (25), she stays at an Airbnb there because it’s closer to her job. The City forces her to confront herself, and at every turn Wasko prefers to hide: sometimes even running back to her childhood home in Kingston to avoid looking into herself. 

This repression, naturally, inhibits her creativity. Writing is an expression of her chaos, and chaos is antithetical to being a functional member of society: therefore, throughout Meta Work, Wasko fails to write this very novel. We readers can see the way she’s holding back from herself. Wasko’s psyche and writing shine as a breathtaking whole during her worst moments of fear, exhaustion, and suicidal ideation, yet these are always short-cut. There is always work to do, rent to pay, and a need to keep moving; there’s no time for deep introspection nor emotion in Wasko’s life, only matter-of-fact compartmentalization, so there is none in her writing either. Wasko’s candor in refusing to fabricate what is missing, nor withhold from what is there, offers us a gut-wrenchingly authentic portrayal of what life is like as a flesh bag of trauma responses and unbalanced chemicals too busy surviving to heal. Imagery flits. Reality falls apart. Still, we know how Wasko feels about her absurd, confusing existence, and are helpless to watch her suffer.

Only after the death of her overworked father and the disabling of her mother due to electroconvulsive therapy does Wasko find her turmoil too heavy to ignore. Only then does she recognize, she must heal through expression. Through surrender to her inner self, engaging deeply and intimately with her desire to write, Wasko transcends her hatred of chaos—symbolized literally by the finishing of this book and the subsequent burning of a previous (failed) draft. She embraces the surreal nature of her life and revels in the blurred lines between fact and fiction, writing:

“I stood on the edge of the platform, and I vomited, and I cried, and I wretched, and I screamed, and I let go. I’m standing by myself at the track in the subway station at Grand Central, and this didn’t really happen, but it happened here on the page, and therefore it happened… It may not be factually true, but it is emotionally true. The experience of fiction and fact healed me.” (71) 

The final chapter skips several long years into the future, where Wasko has built herself a life wholly surrounded by writing.  She now “loves” (Wasko 81) the chaos, understanding that healing from it has served as a powerful driving force for her creativity. For, as Wasko writes in her introduction, “The truth is the chaos itself… This is meta-work” (5). 

Meta Work is available from Planet Dust Enterprises

SINDUS Kim (any/all) is a writer & fan of the odd, off-putting, and preternatural. Though they have a penchant for fiction and CNF/essays, their Word document dedicated to bad poems about their ex-girlfriend well-exceeds fifty pages. You can find him at his completely empty Instagram and Twitter @sinducated, or her website, where she’s open to all kinds of small talk and inquiries.

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.

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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 Silent Letter

On a clear, promising morning, the words of Gail Hanlon’s Silent Letter (Cornerstone Press, 2023) can be slipped into like donning affirmations. Hanlon’s exploration of the intricacies of life caters to every possible reader; newcomers will find themselves “fizzling”, human, “s/he”, searching, or forgotten (4, 23). She arranges figurines and postcards of life into poems that stand by themselves. She also explores key aspects of human life in an earthly and suggestive tone, leaving sparkling possibilities for divinity while admiring the wisdom of laughing birds in an underbrush. Interacting with each of Hanlon’s poems, I feel sure and comfortable in my humility. 

I love the metaphysical questioning of human place and purpose that permeates the poems in Silent Letter— there is something special about the intellectual humility and deference to so many different sources. The voice in her poems searching for answers about the human condition does not do so vainly or expectantly. Rather, her characters and scenes ask each other questions, play in nature, and leave room for interpretation. Hanlon asks, “why do we choose utterance / if the whole world is in flames … I open the window / thinking of a friend’s question / When are you going to live?” (14). In examples like this from “Not Yet Across,” Hanlon’s work drifts languidly, plainly, and obviously towards the searching and the existential. “Why do we choose utterance” is the simplest of questions, touching on a timeless human tendency to fill voids with language. What are we doing here? Why are we speaking? The musing then considers intention: how we can do these things like talk, when we choose to make talk life. I could ask myself when I am going to live a million times over for a million days. But Hanlon does not stop here, nor does she really attempt to find a solution. In “Eight Minute Essay,” the speaker is described as “looking for an answer in the intricate puzzle faces of blue and yellow pansies as I stand in line for the bus” (17). The question they are trying to answer could be what to do with a mortal life and could be any interpersonal anxiety of the day. Either way, it seems flowers can help – and the simplest answers may be found in nature. It is this careful, artful melding of the complex and the quotidian that makes Hanlon’s poems not only stand, but shine.  

The buried themes and questions of Hanlon’s pieces are exposed through precise and deliberate literary devices, rendering each piece an actor in a beautifully orchestrated conversation. In “A Step Nearer to Them,” phrases repeatedly begin with “that” as a relative pronoun, suggesting a preceding phrase that we do not see. The result is that the poem waits, dangling, perhaps ontologically relational. The speaker celebrates: “that I’m still fizzling, shaken, / sugared, and bright even as I am / failing the I-am-not-a-robot test on a regular basis” (4). The use of such adjectives to prove humanity is almost comic, as they seem to describe something like a soda— but they certainly lend to personality and vibrancy, something perhaps artificially tainted but far from robotic monotony. As well as demonstrating strong diction and phrasal choice, Hanlon employs powerful lyric moments in her poems. The final lines of “End Now or Cancel” slow down and change in rhyme scheme, shifting the focus of the piece to the details and the author’s surprise. Lyric moments come in changes of speaker tense, too. In “Running Brush,” Hanlon convinces the reader that “You want to see / your body in front of you. / You want to see it float” (24). There is power in the directness of speaking to an unnamed recipient, because each reader is pulled to adopt the words themselves. I want to see my body in front of me, and to see it float. In this way, Hanlon writes the questions of my mind and places them in front of me, urging their apprehension. 

The poems of Silent Letter are to be enjoyed by each of us. Even in her epistemic humility, Hanlon universalizes story and theme. She does not suggest sureness but allows all kinds of readers to pull their own truth from the pages and apply it to a sister, a brother, or a friend. In “Small Gold Figure,” the speaker admits that they now “cannot think / of anything significant / to say,” and then asks “How to read— / left to right or right to left? / Sunwise or moonwise?” (31). In her appraisal of humanity’s condition, Hanlon does not leave out the curse of time— perhaps the most primary thing to a human. Reconsidering basic functions like what to say and how to read, and the ways these can become more taxing and confusing with age, Hanlon breaks against the shore of a bigger question: what do we do with what we learn? Here an earlier poem echoes again, as does its eternal plea: “when are you going live?”.  

Gail Hanlon’s Silent Letter is available from Cornerstone Press

Isabelle Whittall is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in combined Philosophy and Political Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She co-hosts the radio show Hail! Discordia! on CITR 101.9fm, and is an Editorial Board Member of UBC’s Journal of Philosophical Enquiries.  

Lyric Essentials: Ashley Hajimirsadeghi Reads Kim Hyesoon

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Ashley Hajimirsadeghi (former Lyric Essentials editor and an all-around Sundress staff contributor!) joins us to discuss the work of Kim Hyesoon and the importance of female poetry, translation, and how everyone needs a break at submitting to marinate in ideas. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

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

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: The first time I read Kim Hyesoon I was a freshman in college. I’d just moved back from South Korea after studying Korean at Ewha Womans University, and to curb the sadness of leaving behind a country I really loved, I was finding all of these ways to stay connected to the culture. I purchased a copy of Kim’s Autobiography of Death on a whim after reading about how she was one of the leading female poets in Korea–and one of the few who gets translated and brought into broader international discussions of literature made by Korean women.

What struck me then–and still strikes me–is how experimental Kim is with her work, and how unapologetically female it is. Autobiography of Death is specifically a reaction to the Sewol tragedy in 2014, but Kim generally uses the grotesque in a way that reminds me of abject theory, of artists like Meret Oppenheim and Cindy Sherman. It’s something I began to realize as an eighteen-year-old and now study today.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi reads “H is for Hideous” by Kim Hyesoon

RW: How has her writing inspired your own?

AH: I really do believe reading the work of women writers like Kim Hyesoon really helped hone in this instinct to focus on women’s stories. It was by consuming stories like these that I realized as a writer I was more comfortable anchoring pieces in narratives versus abstract concepts–and because of that, I began to lean more into documentary and ethnographic poetics. Reading Kim’s work also reminded me of translation and the power behind who and what gets translated–I wanted more from Korean women writers, and while we’re going through quite a bit of a Korean culture renaissance recently, it made me realize I wanted to read more broadly and translate myself. So I do Bengali poetry translations in my free time with books I sourced from a Bangladeshi bookstore owner in Jackson Heights, Queens. You learn a lot about language, power, and intentionality when you do this kind of work.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi reads “Mailbox” by Kim Hyesoon

RW: Your chapbook, Cartography of Trauma, has a beautiful cover and title. What does this collection explore and what was your writing process like?

AH: Ironically, a lot of these poems are from high school and beginning of college. When it comes to exploration, I was in the beginning stages of thinking about how trauma is a ripple effect across periods, and I wanted to really hone in on women’s experiences. I have a tendency to blur fiction with reality, while delving into history, but I want to be really intentional and careful with the work I’m doing. Some of it is personal, some of it is research, but with fictional bends. I say I’m an accidental poet; I was a devoted fiction writer who kind of fell into this.

RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?

AH: Right now I’m in my third semester of graduate school and preparing for my thesis. It’s going to be on colonial Korean women’s literature, so writers like Kim Myeong-sun, and this concept of hybridity as a form of self-expression for those suffering from the double colonization involved with the patriarchy. I’m trying to turn this into a digital humanities project, so maybe I’ll open it up to broader Asian feminist writers like Qiu Jin (if I have the energy). 

Besides that, I’ve been taking a cute little break from submitting to marinate in my ideas and writing. I find it so liberating to step away from the submitting grind and just write. I’ve been doing this a lot more lately, and I think it’s helped my practice as a writer.

Read more from this interview on our Patreon

Kim Hyesoon is one of the most influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She is the first female poet to receive the prestigious Midang and Kim Su-yong awards, and her collections include I’m OK, I’m Pig! (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016), and Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018). Kim lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

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Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian American multimedia artist, writer, and journalist currently pursuing an M.A. in Global Humanities at Towson University. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Passages North, The Cortland Review, Salamander, RHINO, Salt Hill, and The Journal, among others. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief at Mud Season Review, a former Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and a contributing writer and film critic at MovieWeb. She can be found at www.ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com // Instagram: @nassarine

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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 All Hat, No Cattle

“I tell them I love them because I do. Because I can,” (18) says the narrator of Mariah Rigg’s All Hat, No Cattle (Bull City Press, 2023), about a bunch of green onions she has been keeping alive on the sill above her sink. The use of can sparks a question that runs through this collection: what can we love? In six short essays, this chapbook packs a powerful emotional punch, exploring the complexity of love–romantic, familial, one-sided, long distance. Each relationship is presented in an honest and undramatic way, as no relationship is perfect, not even the narrator’s relationship with her green onions. She must leave some behind to build a new life in a different city, yet the memories are preserved and presented with love. They are not tainted by time or emotion. 

Throughout all six essays, Rigg’s narrator navigates her relationship with C (who is addressed by his initial or in the second person). In “Suspended,” the narrator is in love with C, and C is either blissfully unaware or ignorant of this reality as he casually shares stories about an ex-girlfriend. The narrator tries not to imagine this ex being attacked by a goose as she acknowledges that she “only knew he loved her and not me” (Rigg 3). Their relationship is fraught with guessing on the part of the narrator. Though the essay starts with C’s hand on her knee, the narrator “never knew when or if I had the right to touch him” (Rigg 5). This guessing continues in later essays and the constant push-pull in this relationship makes it painfully relatable. 

Rigg weaves beautifully from external to internal landscapes throughout All Hat, No Cattle. The narrator wishes time would slow, and then, “The breeze stopped, the cottonwood seeds stuck in the air, suspended… The breeze resumed and the seeds fell to the water, rushing away” (5). Readers are given listed descriptions, images that stand out and define the moment for the narrator, such as, “The last petals of June’s roses drop through the window’s glass. I smell the honey of the baklava you bought from the store on the corner, the sharp Parmesan you shred over spinach-swirled eggs. Fleetwood Mac is playing” (Rigg 7). Each essay feels like a frozen moment, a snapshot of this love before it rushes away, first to different cities, then to separate lives.

In the second essay, “Gut-Punching,” the narrator’s relationship with C has become sexual. Rigg makes it clear, however, that their bond goes beyond sex, acting as a source of comfort and familiarity. Rigg writes, “You stand behind me. My head rests on your thighs, the water flowing from you to me, warmed twice over by the heater and your body. It’s dirty, but it can’t be worse than our own piss, which we lay in for months, curled inside our mothers” (6). There is deep intimacy in this moment and yet, distance still lingers. C’s feelings, and at times, the narrator’s, remain a mystery. After sex, the narrator, addressing C, explains, “your face whispering I love you even as your mouth says That was fun. I wish I could blame you, but neither of us has learned how to say what we feel” (Rigg 7). Such withholding is mirrored in Rigg’s writing, as the emotions are not laid out explicitly. The writing does not tell us how the characters feel. Instead, it lets us feel it.

Memories of the narrator’s father are braided through scenes with C in the essays “Linger” and “All Hat, No Cattle.” In the latter, Rigg writes, “Like me, here and in love with C, who’s so much like Dad. Like Dad, going to rehab for coke, then alcohol, only to get addicted to Bikram yoga” (14). There is an added layer of complexity to the familiarity that the narrator experiences with C. In “All Hat, No Cattle,” C drives around his new town, Lubbock, TX, drinking a beer and shouting out to a neighboring car. The narrator remembers drives with her father before he went to rehab. They would yell out the car window and startle pedestrians. Rigg avoids judgment on behalf of the narrator for the behaviors of these characters. They are presented, like the scenery, matter of factly.

The chapbook comes to a close as the relationship with C does. In the final essay, “Blessings,” the narrator is “rootless without C” (17) and therefore holding on to what she can: her green onions, a city that doesn’t suit her, her memories, etc. Here Rigg beautifully depicts our human need to attach to something. Though the onions have given their blessing, the narrator has not yet left Knoxville; she instead feels like she is drowning in the weight of the place. Though we readers aren’t directly told what has happened with C, the onions seem to say it all, “Be free, they tell me. Go forth, somewhere far” (Rigg 18). We can only assume C has done the same: set her free. 

So often the messaging around an ended relationship is to throw it out. Burn the photos. Move on. Paint the ex as a villain. The message of this collection is much more human, much more true. All Hat, No Cattle argues for honoring the relationship, the love, and the person. Rigg writes, “The green onions above my windowsill have become part of me through how they’ve nourished me. And though we will no longer be together, I will be grateful for that” (19). If the question of this collection is what can we love, the answer is whatever we please. Love cannot be taken from us when the relationship is. The nourishment stays. We can be grateful for that. 

All Hat, No Cattle is available at Bull City Press

Jen Gayda Gupta is a poet, educator, and wanderer. She earned her BA in English at the University of Connecticut and her MA in Teaching English from New York University. Jen lives, writes, and travels across the U.S. in a tiny camper with her husband and their dog. Her work has been published in Up the Staircase, Rattle, Jellyfish Review, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.

An Interview with Michael Meyerhofer, Author of What To Do If You’re Buried Alive

Following the republishing of his book What To Do If You’re Buried Alive this past month, Michael Meyehofer spoke with Doubleback Books editorial intern Camelia Heins about the choice behind the title along with reasons behind his references to religion, connections to the Midwest, and the use of comedy. 

Camelia Heins: Your title really hooks people in and the title itself is the name of one of your poems. What inspired you to name this collection of works What To Do If You’re Buried Alive? Why did this poem specifically stand out to be the name of the entire collection? 

Michael Meyerhofer: The original version of that poem was about three pages long and was inspired by research I did on actual people throughout the ages who’ve been inadvertently buried alive but lived to tell the tale. Gradually, though, I whittled it down until it ended up as the fairly short poem it is now. Since that one already felt like an allegory for dealing with depression—or, really, any kind of struggle that feels overwhelming and insurmountable, but probably actually isn’t—and a lot of my poems can have a bit of darkness or sardonic humor in them, it seemed like a fitting title poem for the collection.

CH: You section off the book into two sections, “Scars” and “Tattoos.” I think these words are particularly interesting, especially with how tattoos themselves can be seen as scars or as art. What is the significance behind sectioning off the book this way? Can you explain your reasoning behind choosing these two words? 

MM: To be honest, I actually have to credit my late friend and mentor, Jon Tribble, for that! Many years ago, I was at critical mass in terms of having way too many poems that I was trying to fit into manuscripts, and he kindly volunteered to take a look at what I had. It was his idea to arrange the manuscript in two sections, with “Scars” and “Tattoos” used to distinguish between formative events and later, more deliberate choices. I eventually added what became the title poem and tweaked a few small things, but overall, it’s still as he arranged it. Jon was a kind, brilliant man, and like hundreds of poets out there, I owe him a lot!

CH: Many of your poems include some sort of unexpected twist or may catch people off guard. What influences can you attribute this style to? What kind of impact do you intend to make with these twists in your poems? 

MM: I’m sure I’m far from the first person to say this, but I feel like there’s a lot of similarity between poems and Zen koans. I’ve always loved how koans end on a twist that makes sense in a way that’s wild and transcendent but can’t really be articulated—the way they tug our brains in directions we didn’t even know were possible. For most of my writing life, poetry has been an exercise in teaching myself to stop white-knuckling whatever story or meaning I’m trying to get across and just trusting the piece to end itself.

CH: It’s clear your work contains a touch of comedy and satire, seen in poems like “My Mother Sent Me” and “Dear Submitter.” Can you talk about how you use comedy and satire and what kind of effect these elements have on your work? 

MM: There’s something transcendent and almost spiritual about humor—how it can let the air out of the worst tragedy and remind us in an instant that there’s a touch of absurdity in all our struggles and grief. Some of that might also come from growing up in Iowa, a state that’s beautiful but also rather stark and isolating, where deadpan humor is a must for getting through harsh winters surrounded by icy roads and fallow fields.

CH: You make quite a few religious references in your work, mentioning Catholic school, confessions, and more. Are you religious? How does your own religious background, whether positive or negative, influence your work? 

MM: I grew up in a pretty religious small town and attended a Catholic school—I was even an altar boy, and spent many hours in a white robe seated at the impaled feet of a graphically carved Christ! As you might imagine, I was also dreadfully emo, pondering mortality and suffering from a very young age (inspired, I’m sure, by all the time I spent in hospitals because of birth defects and health problems). So I was fascinated by religious stories because they were the first places I went looking for answers. Later, I took every religion and philosophy class I could in college (I’m the annoying guy who could sweep the Bible category in Jeopardy). Ultimately, I came to realize that my religious interpretations weren’t Catholic so much as Zen Buddhist, and to really chafe at the sense of bashful shame and unnecessary guilt that seemed to permeate a lot of those early lessons—but those feelings and religious iconography will always be with me, I’m sure.

CH: As someone with a connection to the Midwest, I found it interesting and personal that you included many connections to the Midwest region and suburban/rural life. The poem “Suburbia” particularly stood out to me. How do you think a non-urban, more suburban/rural background shapes your work? What’s the appeal of focusing on suburban or rural life? 

MM: I’ve lived in cities (of various sizes) for pretty much all my adult life, and I’ve come to see California as my home these last 9 or so years—but if you cracked my skull open, you’d probably still find a lone farmhouse surrounded by fields and tree-covered hills. The beautiful starkness of the Midwest has always seemed to me to be the perfect illustration of what it means to be human—there are people who love us, sure, but ultimately we’re on our own, so you’d better start figuring stuff out.

CH: I love your poem “Strata,” especially the imagery of lying on someone’s grave to understand the universe. I just have to ask, have you ever done that? And whether you did or didn’t, what was your reasoning behind choosing to use an image like this? 

MM: Thank you! Yes, I have done that, actually. I don’t recall where the idea came from, but I’ve more or less always had the sense that if you want to reach any kind of understanding, you have to keep your lens clear and cast off as many inhibitions and taboos as you possibly can. That might be why I’ve always had a great deal of respect for spirituality and curiosity but almost none for ritual and dogma. I think irreverence can be an amazing artistic, spiritual, and intellectual tool, so long as it’s sincere and not just performative.

CH: Outside of your poetry work, I notice you also write fantasy novels. How would you say the idea of fantasy plays a role in your poems, if any? 

MM: I’m a terrific nerd in real life! I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, so for me, there’s not that much difference between a poem, a novel, a short story, etc.—just slightly different attempts at the same thing. There are countless ways that I think fiction has helped my poetry, and vice versa—from imagery and storytelling to maybe a bit more awareness of how something actually sounds to the reader. Both sides also feed into my nerdiness too. When I’m not reading or writing, one of my favorite things is to watch documentaries about science, history, religion, etc. In fact, I love lifting weights (probably another thing tied to my childhood) and will often exercise while playing videos in the background on physics, mythology, and strategic analysis of battlefield tactics used a thousand years ago—it all gets thrown into the blender that is my brain for later use.

What To Do If You’re Buried Alive is available to download for free from Doubleback Books

Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five poetry books, six poetry chapbooks, and two fantasy trilogies. He has won the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Prize, the Whirling Prize, and other honors. He earned his B.A. from the University of Iowa and his M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He grew up in Iowa where he learned the value of reading novels, lifting weights, and not getting his hopes up. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review and lives in Fresno, California. For more information and at least one embarrassing childhood photo, visit www.troublewithhammers.com.

Camelia Heins (she/her) is an undergraduate student studying English & Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Born and raised in Orange County, California, Camelia has been active in her community through service, engagement, and both creative and journalistic writing. She enjoys reading and writing poetry, listening to several of her Spotify playlists, collecting plants, and playing with her cat, Moira.

Pre-Orders for Our 2023 Broadside Now Open

Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce that pre-orders for our 2023 broadside contest winner are now open. Kenzie Allen’s poem, “Love Song to the Man Announcing Pow Wows and Rodeos,” will be letterpress-printed at the Sundress Academy for the Arts as a limited edition 8.5” x 11” broadside.

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Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist; she is a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Kenzie is a recipient of a 92 NY Discovery Prize, the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, and the Littoral Press Prize, as well as fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words, and Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work can be found in Poetry, Boston Review, Narrative, Poets.org, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she is currently an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Literatures and Creative Writing at York University in Toronto.

The broadside edition combines Kenzie Allen’s work with an original piece by artist Lori Tennant. The poem “Love Song to the Man Announcing Pow Wows and Rodeos” first appeared in Narrative.

Order your copy today for $5 off the retail price!