Tag: sundress reads

Sundress Reads: Review of sipèstisyon

The book cover for Mckendy Fils-Aimé's debut poetry collection, sipèstisyon. It features an upper body image of a Black man whose face and shirt are adorned with a variety of flowers. Above the image is the title in red, sipèstisyon.

In sipèstisyon (YesYes Books, 2026), Mckendy Fils-Aimé’s debut poetry collection, language is lacerated by the breath of memory. Titled sipèstisyon, the Kreyol word for superstition, the collection speaks through and against the smothering regime of English by assembling a sonic Kreyol terrain. The oral form of superstitions is invoked to elevate the acoustics of resistance and revival. Truth-telling, herein, does not merely vibrate the ache of trauma and violence but appears as an affective experience suspending us within the temporal orientation Fils-Aimé’s speaker migrates us toward. Vanishing lines are brought closer and vocabularies overflow. 

Though memory is often attributed to interiority and the past, Fils-Aimé writes it as a lived condition, as history. It is the marrow from which all contemplations, anguish, and wounds surface and coincide. The first poem, “sipèstisyon” comes to warn us of the fragility of memory: “If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory” (6) all the while it is made into an entity, an object of interest that can be plundered, with the speaker asking, “if memory is a museum // what happens if it’s ransacked?” (6). It is here where Fils-Aimé’s collection dilates: in the collapse of memory’s infrastructure. We are thrust into the nonlinearity of remembering—its illegibility, obscurity, and entropic tendencies. How, then, must we speak of ruin after it has happened? How do we absorb the shame, not so much as an exercise of erasure, but of personal absolvement? The speaker answers within a position he has occupied, in the register of the interstitial aftermath. 

“mwen pa pale kreyòl” (which translates to “I don’t speak Creole”) agitates his own shame of linguistic in-betweenness when, in telling a story in Kreyòl to someone, the speaker is criticized for the nasally sound he’s making, “laughing at the kreyòl i create / from the cinder blocks & cement // of english” (9). Here, his usage of Kreyòl appears to be awkward, clumsy, with the person listening condemning him that he has made a mockery of their architecture by building it with American machinery (9). The speaker laments this remark and at the same time accentuates the linguistic hybridity he settles between: “owning two skyscrapers // of dialect pressed against the skyline of speech. // i dream of two thin tongues, one in each of my nostrils / & how to sever the one closest to you / at the root” (9). The lexicons of Kreyòl are diluted through the sedimented structure of English, the body of words stiffening in its utterance; and seemingly, at once, the speaker has in front of him a hallway of locked doors with not enough keys to open them (9).

Fils-Aimé vertebrates the somewhat gelatinous nature of memory through language. In the following poem “my father apologizes for giving me a western name,” we are placed at the mouth of the speaker. He wonders if “naming is a culture’s way of colonizing a body, / if my tongue is just another island impaled / by French & American flags” (10). “soup joumou” finds itself in the speaker’s mother’s tongue as well, “shriveling like a snail / in the salt / of my English / i wanted to swim / against the current / of whitewash” (11). What I found striking is how the locus of the mouth is seemingly where Haitian heritage is reinforced as a migrant, reconstituting what it means to institutionalize the very voice they use as something that can both be disciplinal and transgressive. There is this, likewise, an excess and abscess of two languages; and oscillating between them is an embodied but disorienting experience. When the cadence of Kreyòl bleeds into English’s rhythm, the dissonance experienced from being an immigrant becomes less conceptual and more operational. Suddenly, visibility is determined on which is more audible. 

Though Fils-Aimé lingers in the tension of what I observe as “unbelonging,” we see in the poem “bilingual” that reconciliation of being fragmented. He writes:

too bad we can’t push the rewind button
on a lost language, can’t rewrite an alphabet
on the chalk-brushed blackboard of erasure.
best we can do is fill in the fissures
of our vernacular & smooth out the chipping.

listen, pay your teachers no mind
when they say we speak broken French.
they’ve never had to reassemble the remnants
of their mother tongues after mourning (48). 

Here, the speaker reconfigures fracture into fascination—“we open the china drawer / of our mouths, there’s copper / more than anything else” (48). These lines ultimately resonated with me because I understand this continuous, cascading residue that colonialism leaves within a language, this enduring afterlife of language compounded into a container that co-opts it. But Kreyòl is not complicit in becoming a spectacle of the English language. As it fills its own fissures and remedies its own precarities, the isolated fragments, at once, choreograph its autonomy. What Fils-Aimé does here is essentially translating that echo of a lost language into resonance, apprehending the vanishing voice not by strangling it (like what America does to non-English vernaculars), but by suturing it within the already existing polyphony coalescing in the myths, folklores, and superstitions he already understands. 

Language gives memory texture, friction, fibrous moments. In “Invocation for the God of Laughter,” language is exhalation, “a boisterous song // from the quiet orchestra of our lungs…. / O language excavated / from the moments when language is lost” (57). This is perhaps one of my favorite poems out of the collection as it nears its closing. I am fond of this idea—of this interstice—where language cannot be flattened into a smooth surface; that there is this disruption in voice: song, laughter, the very act of breathing. Actions that operate on the very basis of sound and community and are therefore non-isolatable. It is from here I find the power in sipèstisyon. Superstition becomes saturated with chortles, guffaws, rapturous ruckus, bellows, wheezes, giggles (57-58), aural elements which cannot be colonized into syllables. Though what they do is splinter and multiply across the sky. 

We return to the mouth by the last “sipèstisyon.” At this point, superstition has become almost like an inquiry into the possibility of fruition, of the future, of foundation. It reminded me of Natalie Diaz’s “Postcolonial Love Poem” where her speaker has “learned Drink in a country of drought” because Fils-Aimé’s speaker is a “seedless orchard—a drought in a grove / called potential. but I’m as resilient as a fig, / as defiant as a field of echinacea” (66). Both speaking about the aftermath of colonial violence, there is this fluidity that is bred from trembling at the perimeter of loss and reclamation. Fils-Aimé ends his collection with arms unfurling, “to stuff / fistfuls of sunlight into my mouth. / watch me nourish & be nourishment. / watch me become my own harvest.” (66). It ends in a truth we all know too well: there is resonance that remains after undoing power. Language noises out its own emancipation and immersion. And it breaches syntactic containment, seeping, leaking, and unraveling memory with it. 

Purchase your copy of sipèstisyon today!

A brown Filipino woman with her hands behind her back, smiling in front of a brick-walled building. She has black hair and is wearing a gold necklace, and an ivory-colored dress with a green and maroon Sablay (or hand-woven sash) that has Indigenous geometric patterns and Baybayin characters, the official academic costume of the University of the Philippines.

Zie Madayag (she/her) is a writer and academic from Metro Manila. She is a recent graduate of a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature: European Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She has worked and volunteered at non-profit organizations and cultural institutions promoting artistic and literary production. Both critical and creative, her research interests include corporeality and materiality, spatio-temporal entanglements, ecologies, and the rhizomatic potentiality of the periphery.

Sundress Reads: Review of Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps

Sundress Reads

The reasons I read poetry are so numerous, and each of them so meaningful that explaining them all would probably take a lifetime. For the purposes of this review, I’ll mention one: to have ordinary human experience transmuted into something that feels new, revelatory, and even magical. Which brings me to the poetry collection Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps (Milk & Cake Press, 2025) by Yamini Pathak. This book contains some of the most dazzling poetry I have ever read, bar none.

Each of the book’s sections is named after an element of a raga, which is a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music. More than just a piece of music theory, the word “raga” itself in Sanskrit is related to color, to dyeing, and the soul. That is the essential mission of a raga: to evoke a particular emotional state in the listener, to color the soul and the mind, if you will. That Pathak would choose this as the framework for her book is more than fitting, not only because Pathak’s poetry is itself endlessly vivid and evocative, but because she explores a vast emotional territory.

The first section, after the prelude, is named Thaat. A subheading simply denotes it as “The Parent Scale.” The first poem of the section, “Ghazal for the Children Born Far from Home,” demonstrates with its brilliant couplets that this section is aptly named:

Rama scaled the ocean/Bheeshma died pillowed on a bed of arrows
Their ghosts in your marrow unstirring, this is my sorrow

In the bazaar you petted unblemished baby goats, you didn’t know
they were meant for slaughter, this is my sorrow

Exiled from a language where yesterday also means tomorrow
You wander thirsty with no tongues, this is my sorrow.

Dedicated to her sons, the poem is a perfect example of Yamini’s poetic ability as well as the themes of the first section of the book. She is able to conjure huge depths of emotion, acknowledging the sadness she feels at her sons growing up without their ancestral tongue but also endless possibility as she mentions the time-bending aspect of that tongue and the magical imagery of the religion she was raised with. Where there is beauty, there is violence; where there is sorrow, there is the memory of joy.

It isn’t just the poems themselves that make this book memorable, though. It’s often how they are ordered. The final three poems of the second section demonstrate this to devastating effect. All poems seem, in some way, to be looking back at some place, or some person, that cannot be returned to. They all deal with the death of the speaker’s father. In “On a Far Afternoon,” as the speaker’s father is dying in the hospital, they pass by “a hall / where marriages are sealed by flame. / Every morning a white mare / grazed outside.” It’s a line that Gabriel García Márquez would’ve written. In the next poem, “Everest,” she describes the moment when the painting of the same name by Nichola Roerich brings tears to her eyes when she sees it in a gallery. The only indication that these tears might be for her father comes in a line that is all the more searing for its candor: “Only a week since my father died.”

Then comes “Hunger,” the last poem of the section. The bulk of the poem describes how the narrator prepares a cauliflower for a meal, listening to Yo-Yo Ma talk on a podcast while she does so. The façade, like any façade, has cracks, and the grief seeps through: “I imagined a space like a cavernous chest, / the cello pulsing at its heart…My own chest vibrated, empty.” The experience of beauty is likened to receiving “a glimmer of impermanence.” And as Yo-Yo Ma’s band plays at the end, they “intone a dirge.” Here, it’s Pathak’s restraint that recreates the enormous tension of trying to hold yourself together. It’s heart-stopping. This section is named Alaap. Alaap, Pathak tells us, is a melodic improvisation in a raga that “defines the raga, its mood, emphasi[s], secondary notes.” The mood of this raga, then, seems to be the mood of departure, of memory, and grief.”

The last section is called Pakad, which is a “musical phrase that establishes the identity of a raga, encapsulating its essence.” An overarching theme here is more elusive. These poems are focused more on the day-to-day experiences of the narrator, such as perimenopause or dealing with unpleasant coworkers. (It also contains a poem called “Poem with No Apology,” which is one of the best love poems I’ve ever read. The line “I love you like I love a novel that makes me sad / it has ended” is one I will wish for the rest of my life I had written for my girlfriend.) I think, though, that this smattering of experience and emotion is the point. It comes the closest to the experience of actual selfhood, of real life, and, having read the book, it appears that this is the essence of Pathak’s raga. The reminiscences that have come beforehand have shaped the person the narrator is now. What we, the reader, are supposed to take away from that fact, I’m not sure; Pathak is a better writer than to provide an answer for us. Maybe, going back to that love poem, it is to love the places and people we encounter “like a burning building, like there’s no more time to waste.” Or maybe it comes in one of my favorite poems of the collection, “The Cosmos Asks Three Questions,” in which the universe itself speaks to the narrator:

At the airport, that woman by the sliding doors, homeless and babbling like a river with stones in its underbelly? She could be you, escaped from a parallel universe through a rent in my fabric…The galaxies are pitted with black holes, gravitational lenses that bend and distort light so that everything is chimera, illusion, Maya…If you led a blameless life, you need not fear my teeth.

Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps is available from Milk & Cake Press

Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Half and One, Gauge, won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize, and made the Shortlist for the 2025 Letter Review Poetry Prize. His debut poetry chapbook, The Remains, was published by Bottlecap Press in March of 2026. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.

Sundress Reads: Review of Differential Diagnosis

Sundress Reads

Cavar’s sophomore poetry collection, Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026) is a visceral dissection of postmodern anxieties through the lens of trans* and Mad experiences. Reminiscent of Joanna Klink and Lyn Hejinian’s surreal work and, more broadly, a long lineage of Mad literature, the collection also uses quotes and footnotes to engage in conversation with writers like Michel Foucault, Jos Charles, Kim Hyesoon, T. S. Eliot, and Evelyn Berry. The body of the work both structurally and thematically expresses the gravity of grief, lamenting lost time and the limitations of language. The speaker uses sullen puns to play with language despite resignation and fatigue after enduring years of obscurity. The voice of this collection is a prolonged exhalation of exile woven through a variety of loose forms and unconventional syntax, the solemnity inextricable from the structure. In other words, the form augments the content, a harmony that consistent and effective collections aspire to accomplish.

The primary arc of Differential Diagnosis, as alluded to by its title and eponymous series of poems, involves postmodern and metapoetic anxieties about language. In “Substitution Poem,” the speaker is distanced from the self, a dissociated caricature or “stick figure… in crisis” (Cavar 29). They tend to be assertive but not authoritative, with an unspoken hope that the reader will respect and affirm declarations of a self that has been chronically undermined and underestimated. This “stick figure” frequently slips into compulsive disclaimers and self-sabotage as self-defense, only rarely snapping under pressure with exclamations like, “I am sick / to fuck of being sensible!” (10). In “Envy Narrative,” they briefly admit, “I have myself to blame. She can’t / Be trusted” then turn to the reader for support, asking, “Do you understand?” as if anticipating revulsion or rejection (42).

Similar self-deprecation appears in “My First Crime” with the lamentation, “I am have never been cage-free. Always compensating for something” (40). Under relentless external and internal scrutiny, the speaker eventually crumples into humility—“What exactly is required of me, I can’t / do it… Am I worth all I am capable of doing. This cruel / Knowledge” (Cavar 58). This is a striking example of the quintessential metapoetic voice, both self-referential and confessional, resigning to the shortcomings of the self. This collection’s place in postmodern poetry, especially trans* and Mad lineages, is evident in the confessional nature of these self-portrait poems.

The urgent insecurities of Differential Diagnosis orbit around the act of naming. From a trans* and Mad perspective, gender and sexuality markers and medical diagnoses can be both a constructive and inadequate constraint. Even selecting a new name for oneself is a fraught journey of grappling with language and the self, its own microcosm of metapoetics. In a rare moment of conviction, the speaker expresses early on, “I believe I have / No name but rather perhaps dent or event… This thing / sends me into dark places / where the nameless live” (8). To be nameless is undesirable and disorienting, associated with trauma (“dent or event”). Who holds the power of naming—the self or the other? Is naming an internal or external process?

These questions and more guide us through the central conflict. One possible resolution is, “Name goes to its grave a secret. / Name is anecdotal / evidence” (49). A name can be a subject, a proper noun, a pronoun, a narrative. It can be fleeting. It can be dismissed. The eighth poem in the titular “Differential Diagnosis” sequence narrates, “You spot my wrong a while / away. You may / Get even to name it, for good / or ill” (31). The act of articulating and labeling is a coveted privilege. The speaker goes as far as to say, “I am helpless in the face / Of my own legitimacy,” identifying their own powerlessness to externally imposed labels. However, as many disabled and Mad folks know, a diagnosis can also provide clarity in suffering and even a redemptive relief that one’s experiences are not imagined but recognized. In other words, “my name is the sick of my illness. i am good / and named” (45).

In correspondence with the omnipresent dread and desire surrounding the act of naming, the collection delays assigning any specific terminology to its speaker. The word “autism” does not appear until halfway through the book, compared to “a backward / flower,” both natural and unnatural (37). The term “anorexia nervosa” is explicitly absent for even longer, and begrudgingly personified as something that “struggles / to name itselves” followed by a footnote innuendo calling it “That big / bad word” (50-51). Having pursued and yet postponed these diagnoses, the speaker clarifies, “I am not sure I believe in all the things wrong with me” (32). Presumably, possessing the terminology to name their experiences did not provide the desired clarity, instead lending them to experience further neglect and shame: “Being disordered is a manner / of being out of order, that is, insequential, that is, inconsequential” (59).

The idea of wrongness and disorder expands from the specificity of diagnosis until it begins to degrade the definitions by which we understand reality. In yet another installment of introspection, the speaker tells us, “I don’t know / about you, but I was born in the wrong / episteme.” (18). This collection and its narrator dwell outside the realm of accepted knowledge, condemned to feel defective and dysfunctional compared to an unknown other. Structurally, the poem uses enjambment and spacing to emphasize a crucial confession: “I don’t know.” In another piece, a doctor tells the speaker, “‘No theory will protect you here. / Redemarcate the boundaries / of your knowing’” (60). The poem frames this sage wisdom as professional advice, both relevant within the context of diagnosis and the broader, metapoetic contemplations about redefining knowledge.

Another aspect of naming to consider is gender identity and the queering of language. At one point, the speaker self-identifies as “a victim of the / pronouns” (34). The consistent voice of the collection establishes a new grammar of gender, playing with visual text through homonyms, capitalization, abbreviation, and even font size. Which elements are interchangeable and fluid? Which are rigid and therefore brittle? Readers must parse through unconventional syntax as if they are hearing English for the first time, daring them to participate in meaning-making. The audience is invited to suspend their disbelief and become a co-conspirator in the speaker’s testimony: “Can you help me pass into a new mythology?” (6). This intimate dynamic later becomes a demand: “Get my name and fuck me / with it. / I delight with delicious / Literacy” (31). In the world of Differential Diagnosis, the act of description is inherently sensual.

This sensuality is facilitated by both the anatomical and metaphorical body, with a recurring motif of “holes” representing anything from emptiness, orifices, wounds, and gaps, but also etymologically connected to themes of “holiness” and “wholeness.” Is the speaker being literal or figurative in saying, “I have… many / unofficial holes” (18)? Does this refer to trans* corporeality that defies conventional labels, or something more metaphysical? One poem is titled “You are holy, your [Name*] is holy, etc.” and another says, “i am wholly the wait of the name” (54). This play on words creates a paradox of presence and absence, “weight” and “wait,” what is included in a name and what is left out, what language can do and what it fails to do. One humorous yet rueful scene finds the speaker “trying to fill a basket. / But there’s / You guessed it / A hole” (66). The physical and metaphysical are reunited when one poem reckons with “The backbreaking / Labor of being born, nay, / Of being known,” a state of intimacy that comes at great cost to the ego (25).

The ambient caution regarding labels and “being known” is not unwarranted. One poem hypothesizes, “Let’s say I’m a monster. Say poetry made me this way. Let’s say words / are monsters trying to become sentences. Let’s say it’s pathological” (21). This passage sheds light on the pathologized pathos of trans* and disabled bodies. The motifs of monsters and marginalization appear throughout the text. “The Ways of the Monster” is declarative and abrupt: “We are in the gutter. / Someone narrows the aperture” (17). The window of inclusion is closing, and the oppressor is nameless and therefore blameless. The ambiguity and anonymity of “we” and “someone” nevertheless establish a dichotomy. Who is included and who is excluded?

Despite grappling with an ostracized existence, the speaker expresses a profound longing for life, imploring the universe to “send me to that great sad / struggling world of things” (15). The collection contemplates the cost versus capacity of language in a postmodern world, with the apostrophic prayer, “Name don’t kill me just bring me someplace / I can live” (49). The speaker comes to terms with the “many unknowns… and even more / diversions” that “made me everything but dead and in / that way twice as killable,” acknowledging that being open and available to a full life renders one vulnerable to exploitation and harm (19). The collection even goes as far as to declare, “Being born wrong is a gift” (48). This bittersweet philosophy manages to reconcile the speaker’s pain from a life in the margins of madness and queerness with everything their identity has illuminated. They resolve “to stick to horrors within my / comprehension” and accept their physical and spiritual limitations, “because to end the bad’s / to end the whole thing” (63). The ideas of “wrongness” and “wholeness” become one.

Reading this collection as a trans* and Mad poet with many of the same thematic obsessions, I found Differential Diagnosis to be a highly cohesive and effective deconstruction of how we attempt and sometimes fail to relate to one another as humans of intersectional experiences. These poems simultaneously wrestle with, transcend, and concede to the boundaries of the written word. They “invent a value / -system as consistent / as nonsensical” (25). Just like its author, this work is a paradox incarnate that resists labeling, a bittersweet celebration of complexity and the human condition (25).

Differential Diagnosis is available for purchase from Northwestern University Press

Zoe Korte is a queer and mad poet whose work has appeared in Roi Fainéant, Maudlin House, new words {press}, Foglifter, Room Magazine, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. They have earned degrees in English, Spanish, and Ancient Greek from the University of Missouri. They live with their partner in St. Louis, where they work for Sundress Publications and the Missouri History Museum. You can find them on Instagram @zoekpoetry or Bluesky @mostlymosspoetry.

Sundress Reads: Review of Sailing Paper Boats & Other Stories

Sundress Reads header in black and white. A sheep wearing glasses is sitting on a stool on the left-hand side. It holds a hot cup of a drink in the left hand and a book in the right.
A cover of a book, showing a photo of a bright red paper boat sailing in blackish floodwaters in the center, with pelting rain and blue lightning strikes coming from the gray sky above. In the background are blurry outlines of green trees. overlaid yellow circles near the top. The title, "Sailing Paper Boats & Other Stories," is written in white on the lower half of the cover. The author's name, Swetha Amit, is written beneath.

Swetha Amit’s short story collection, Sailing Paper Boats & Other Stories (Alien Buddha Press, 2025), is an earnest, poignant collage of stories that explore both the fragility and resilience of human relationships and the natural world in the wake of disaster. Over the course of nine short stories, Amit beautifully captures the fear, loss, longing, and cautious hope one navigates as their notions of home, family, and belonging begin to transform.

Amit grounds readers in the environment of each story through her unvarnished, simple prose and deeply honest tone. Like reading through an old personal diary that you stumbled upon at the thrift store, or a sociologist’s field notes chronicling the lives of the humans they observe, Amit presents the characters as everyday people with their own memories, perspectives, and responses to the changes unfolding around them.

Using a first-person stream-of-consciousness narration, she lays bare the unpleasant and, sometimes, precarious realities of life that happen without warning. She explores issues such as climate-induced displacement, the material and emotional toll of natural disasters on local communities, and the illness and loss of loved ones.

This is brilliantly portrayed in the one-paragraph story, “The Nest”, where the speaker contends with the trauma of losing their house in a forest fire. When the speaker comes across a quail’s nest teeming with new life, they recall: “As the sky turns orange, I feel a pulsating rush of fear in my veins. I look at the tiny home of twigs in front of me. It reminds me of my old home wiped out by the fumes of orange and hues of smoke” (35). For the speaker, even the orange setting sun triggers their memories of the fire and of a home that no longer exists. The shocking abruptness of the flashback, heightened by the contrast between a fragile bird’s nest and a home burned to ashes, illustrates how severely the speaker has been affected by the catastrophe. Amit’s intimate portrayal invites readers to engage with these experiences.

Weather and natural disasters are a constant motif throughout the collection. As I read, I was fascinated by how the climate-related imagery in the stories seemed to reflect the internal landscapes of the characters as they face upheavals in their lives and relationships. See how, in “The Floor Beneath My Feet”, the speaker and her husband grapple with marital tension and infidelity between them when an earthquake hits their home: “The wooden floor beneath us is threatening to crumble at any moment… Our wedding photo, taken four years ago, lies on the floor, surrounded by shards of glass” (16).

Similarly, in “The Wrecked Wharf”, the storm surge crashing through the Capitola Beach wharf mirrors the speaker’s mental state after the sudden passing of his fiancée: “A few days later, a wall of water split the wharf in two….Around that time, you received news about your stage four lung cancer diagnosis. The devastating news shattered my heart and mind” (40). By drawing parallels between the destructive force of natural disasters and the characters’ mental states, Amit emphasizes the emotional weight of coping with relationships that have been permanently altered, allowing the reader to better understand the uncertainty, inner displacement, and other complex feelings that arise during the mourning process. This helps immerse the reader in the narrative, making its most heart-wrenching moments linger beyond the page.

At its core, however, Sailing Paper Boats is a short story collection centered around the theme of resilience. This is most clearly seen in “Sailing Paper Boats”, where the child protagonist, Krishna, and his family are suddenly uprooted from their seaside village due to flooding. As the rising waters submerge his home, instead of falling into despair, he turns to his faith, reminding himself that “Ma always emphasized how true faith in the almighty keeps us afloat” (13). In several stories across the collection, Amit explores how faith and spirituality are powerful resources for overcoming obstacles. Prayer becomes a way for Krishna to maintain his agency and hope, even when confronted with situations beyond his control. Later on, when Krishna’s village is forced to evacuate, he notices that the flimsy paper boat he made is still holding its ground against the flood:

“I took a deep breath. Maybe we’d soon see Pa…. He might find a better job…. The government may give us better homes. Ma and Pa may stop their quarrels. Like the boat, we could also sail smoothly on these rough waters. The storm will eventually subside with time, and sunny days will smile upon us again…” (15)

To Krishna, the miraculously intact paper boat is a symbol of survival. Through these comforting lines and visual imagery of the warm, gentle sun returning in the end, Amit reminds us how we, too, have the strength to recover from catastrophes and drastic life changes.

In Sailing Paper Boats & Other Stories, Amit skillfully turns personal memories of natural disasters into narratives that connect with all readers. I could understand the characters’ unspoken fears and frustrations and see myself in the struggles they encountered, from avoidant arguments with parents, like in “Sands of Time”, to the longing for a time before, when a loved one was still alive, or when life felt more stable, when you were stronger. But much like how nature is resilient, humans are incredibly resilient as well. Reading this collection taught me a valuable lesson: “Paper boats may be fragile, but they sail on”.

A South Asian woman smiling and sitting on a green couch. She has black hair, half lying over her right shoulder and half down her back, and is wearing a wine-red turtleneck. Behind her are two closed window curtains, one light blue and floral print, and the other solid teal.

Tara Rahman (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA in English Language and Literature from Smith College and an MSc in Global Development from SOAS, University of London. She is also a recent graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course in Oxford, UK. With a strong interest in culture, identity, and global history, her personal writing often focuses on intersectionality and the untold stories and experiences of marginalized communities.

Sundress Reads: Review of ‘Flood’ by Rachel Bulman

In Flood (Sunlight Press 2025), Christine Kalafus writes with power. The myriad themes and stories she interweaves are beautiful, but more importantly, they serve a greater purpose: a woman writing with intention.

Dealing with her lived experience as source material, Kalafus layers snippets of her life in a vast collage of motherhood, chemotherapy, mental health, and what it means to be a woman.

Wielding fluid, gentle prose and a calm, matter-of-fact tone that occasionally dips into self-deprecating, Kalafus draws the reader into a conversation which, to me, felt like reconnecting with an older sister years after losing touch. She recollects her past with authority and insight, but lays bare the doubt, the pain and the ultimate growth that brought her through the ‘flood’, a metaphor used throughout the book to illustrate drowning, both in a literal and emotional sense. It is a highly reflective, carefully arranged memoir, unfolding the cost of pushing your body and mind to their limits.

I am reluctant to reveal too much of the content, but Kalafus’ situation is a tragedy that hardly bears imagining––lurking cancer, three children: one only four years old, two yet unborn.

As Kalafus so plainly puts it: “You can’t outrun a flood” (110).

Indeed, water pervades every aspect of the book. Humidity in the house, ruining the piano; the fresh spring at neighbours’; the leaking cracks in the basement; every literal breakage offers a mirror to Kalafus’ internal landscape.

Prevalent throughout the story as a stronghold against storms, the house earns its place at the centre of LJ Mucci’s cover design. When introduced, it feels alive, offering sanctuary, becoming a manifestation of feeling outcast or odd. It brings joy to Kalafus, “as if the house’s blueprint had been daylight” (21).

But this creation solidified my fears as Kalafus steadily accelerates the looming threat of a flood. Not just of emotion, but a physical, biblical flood that may leave behind nothing but wreckage. And all emphasised by the unearthing feeling of being told something you thought was certain is not: my husband loves me, my house cannot flood, I do not have cancer. Flood is what happens when solid ground becomes malleable, and stability falls away.

Over the course of the memoir, Kalafus delves into her life before diagnosis. She recalls growing up in Connecticut and northern Virginia, discusses the internalized threats women face and observes society persistently teaching women how to dress to avoid danger, and so the real threats go unnoticed––invasion “from the inside” (3). Amid powerful childhood memories, Kalafus recalls being objectified, sexualised, and fearful, shared with the casual understanding that this is what ‘normal’ looks like for most women. As I read, I found myself struck by an outsider’s perspective: the tragedy of growing up as a woman and never learning how proud you should be.

Kalafus’ musings on womanhood permeate the whole text: “In my family, a woman’s denial of herself equalled survival” (23), “I apologise for the mother they won in the lottery” (114), “I ignore him because that’s how I’ve been socially trained to manage a raging asshole” (121). To my surprise, I felt known by this book, and I felt rage on behalf of Kalafus, and every woman whose opinion was superseded by a man who thought he knew best.

With razor-sharp precision, Flood elaborates on female guilt, the pernicious companion to feminine rage: harder to eradicate and all too easy to indulge. Even after all she has survived, Kalafus struggles not to blame herself (163).

This was a topic made all the more raw by the realities of medical treatment. A combination of the occasional colossal ineptitude of medical professionals and the consistent devaluation of women’s opinions, Flood suggests that negligence can become a form of cruelty without intent. Kalafus makes a devastating case against the apathy of doctors and the American healthcare system at large.

I took away from this book a lesson in setting limits––a hard-won battle for Kalafus––an example of expressed agency, a deeper understanding of its worth, and a steadfast belief that your opinions about your body have value.

Kalafus delicately puts something that should be taught to every woman from childhood: you do not have to keep the whole world in balance, as much as you are told to. It is an impossible task; Atlas holding up the sky; Sisyphus’s boulder: “As a modern woman, I’m supposed to do everything at one time. Glass ceiling smacker, mother martyr, sex goddess, selfless sisterdaughterfriend” (156). All roles that led to such acute stress that they were considered the only suggested cause of her diagnosis.

Merging the poetic intent of Mary Oliver with the clarity of Margaret Atwood, Kalafus’s writing is ruthless with details and surgically precise. From the smooth and elegant inclusion of a second-person perspective to the balanced and intriguing variations in page layout, including lists and quotes, Kalafus offers an arrangement finely tuned for brutal contextual impact.

Flood layers its tragic elements so delicately that I felt the water rising around me––despite the stress of two newborns, rising water tables, and chemotherapy, I had been mercifully spared worrying about the details of medical bills and insurance repayments until Kalafus chose to open that floodgate as well.

Just as Kalafus quotes her mother’s wisdom, I will repeat it here: “It is possible to be completely terrified of something and do it anyway” (198) to show that you can survive the flood and smile again on the other side.

Order your copy of Flood today!

The side profile of a pale-skinned woman wearing glasses and a grey baseball cap as she looks off to her right side. In the background is a scenic body of water, greenery on the horizon line, and a clear blue sky.

Rachel Bulman (she/her) holds a BA in English and Creative Writing as well as an MA in Publishing from the University of Exeter, specialising in interactive and children’s fiction. Her written work has appeared in The Book of Choices, Velvet Fields, and Exeposé, among others. Find her on Instagram @worm.can.read, through her online portfolio, or ask the bridge troll who taught him his riddles three.

Sundress Reads: Review of Souvenirs from Another Life

Sundress Reads

Leah Browning’s Souvenirs from Another Life (Quiet Ocean Studio & Press, 2026) is the first full-length short fiction collection from the author, but the latest in a long line of chapter books, non-fiction, and poetry. With over thirty publications having originally featured many of the stories, this collection is an amalgamation of multiple years of work and dedication to the craft. At its core, the collection is a series of vignettes featuring life at its truest: in relation to others. From first loves to last days, the shutter closes on glimpses of parents, children, friends, lovers, and strangers as they navigate what it means to live a life.

In form, Souvenirs from Another Life is diverse. Its diversity is most evident in its inclusion of everything from full-length literary fiction to microfiction. The variation in the length, content, and perspective of each story maintains an engaging pace. With every page turned, completely new expectations are set. In theme, it feels almost voyeuristic, looking on at these faceless characters as they navigate the most arduous or joyous days of their lives. They have plain names and minimal physical descriptions, lending to that anonymity. We absorb these moments in singularity, often completely unaware of their backstory. 

This book is the embodiment of the feeling when you are sitting at a cafe, sipping on your americano, when two best friends sit down at the table beside you. Just over the noise of the busy street, you overhear fragments of their conversation. One of them is breaking up with their boyfriend or dealing with a terrible landlord. You know you are eavesdropping, and you know you should not, but curiosity gets the better of you. That quiet thrill is what keeps you reading Souvenirs from Another Life.

In particular, the collection truly shines in its briefest stories. While the few plots that were linked were always fascinating, I found myself most struck by the ones that lasted a few mere paragraphs.

As I read on, I was particularly intrigued by the idea of absence. Without being able to sit with a character for very long, there is an intentional lack of intimacy between the reader and the narrator. You are being held at arm’s length by the form while Browning’s high stakes and distinct characterization pull you closer. But the less there is to know, the more room it gives for the reader to insert their own thoughts, beliefs, and interpretations. It invites an open dialogue, encouraging you to contend with the story and reflect on your own memories.

“If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” Often wrongly attributed, the quote can be traced to a philosopher, Blaise Pascal. During my undergraduate studies in Creative Writing, my professors often cited a similar idea. Series are easier to master than a standalone novel. A short story is painstaking. A poem is completely, utterly excruciating. A single sentence can torment you.

See, an excerpt from “WORLDS,” a story that, in length, was under a page:

“But in the middle of the night, she’d lent me a toothbrush, and I’d watched her floss her teeth” (Browning 95).

In under twenty words, Browning masterfully presents setting, character, and action. Newness, uncertainty, and awe permeate the world of the narrator. There is an air of domesticity working in contrast to unfamiliarity. It is almost tangible. The cool night air, the white tiles, the silence. But all of that is there without actually being said. It is that absence that allows you to make a world feel whole without a whole novel to bring it to life. The story is colored by your own memory of longing. It is an invitation to reflect.

The intent of the collection is epitomized in the title story of the collection, from the point of view of an unnamed character:

“The photographs I found all over the apartment were proof that these things had happened: my courtship, my wedding, the birth of my child” (Browning 142).

At its most literal level, the narrator examines souvenirs of a life that was once hers but no longer is. We feel her grief, her regret, and her remorse. Many of these emotions permeate these stories, prompting the audience to use an insular moment to imagine a life that they are not privy to. Perhaps it even evokes nostalgia for former versions of ourselves. Times when we were still in love with that girl, living with our college roommate, or simply a time in which we did not understand heartbreak in the way we do now. The stories in this collection are steeped in sentimentality for life, in all its beauty and all its discomfort. It is an act of remembrance about what it means to be human. 

The last line of the collection reads, “As she crossed the yard, Stacy had watched her, feeling the metal of the house key, warm against her skin” (Browning 220).

As we cross into the next chapter of our lives, may we always use Browning’s examination of memory as a reminder to look at our own souvenirs with grace and reverence for our past selves.

Souvenirs from Another Life is available from Quiet Ocean Studio & Press.

Reina Maiden-Navarro is an editor, writer, and photographer. She recently graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in Film & Media Studies and a minor in Creative Writing, cum laude. She also works as an Editor at Prompt and an Outreach Coordinator at Bookstr. If she is not reading or writing, she can be found traveling, painting, or baking cookies.

Sundress Reads: Review of Under The Rain

Ayo Deforge’s second adult novel, Under the Rain (Witsprouts Books 2025), is a second-chance romance novel set in stormy Lagos, Nigeria. Spanning from childhood to adulthood, the story follows two lovers, Bolaji and Shola, who have been torn apart by diverging aspirations, but time ultimately brings them back together. With two weeks before Shola returns to the United States of America for good, the story invites readers to question whether the possibility of a life together is worth giving up all that they have built while apart. Taking place in both the past and present, the novel also functions as an examination of the lived experiences and sociopolitical realities of those affected by sickle cell anemia. 

Part One of Under the Rain is set in the present. Told from the perspective of middle-aged Bolaji, the reader follows him as he returns to his childhood hometown with his wife, Yetunde, and their children. A prolific medical professional, he is outspoken and knowledgeable, seemingly having it all. Yet, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in his life, most evident in the discomfort within his romantic relationship, which the opening pages present through the aftermath of a sexual encounter. While the scene is intended to showcase Bolaji’s apathy towards his wife, it made me want to know more about her character and the cultural expectations surrounding her. After all, so much of this book goes beyond a simple romance and treads into social commentary on the human experience.  

However, much of this apparent dissatisfaction is almost immediately swept away by an idyllic “what if” scenario. 

What if the love of your life showed up in your hometown? What if you still were in love with them? What if the feeling was mutual? What if what once existed could be recreated?  

Chapter 2 opens with immediate narrative momentum. From the moment Shola returns to Lagos, the couple falls back into stride, learning more about each other’s current lives and confessing their lingering feelings. The reader, thus, is swept into a whirlwind second-chance romance that paves the way for the rest of the story. 

The novel’s heightened drama creates immediate interest for Part Two, when the book returns to the past to trace how the pair found each other, fell in love, and eventually fell apart. Although this glorious romance lies at the heart of the book, their story is often colored by tragedy—in particular, Bolaji’s brother Bamidele’s diagnosis with sickle cell anemia. What Deforge ultimately constructs is a tension-filled, introspective drama centred on grief, growth, and the decisions that alter a life. 

The novel’s treatment of sickle cell anemia is what truly captivated me. It is introspective, empathetic, and grounded. During the early years of Bolaji’s life, I found myself compelled by his experience as a caretaker for his brother, a relationship that mirrors my childhood experience taking care of ill and disabled family members.  

The reader can sense the weight borne by both him and his younger brother, particularly in passages such as: 
 
“Since that day, Bamidele had never broached the subject of death again, and Bolaji had never tried to speak to him about it. After all, what did he himself truly understand about death?” (Deforge, 20) 

The depth provided by this secondary narrative affords the novel an urgent sense of topical vitality. The health-related storyline was handled in broad strokes, but the risk of including more intricate, layered themes eventually paid off. In terms of narrative development, Bamidele’s story provides a direct, yet meaningful framework for understanding Bolaji’s career trajectory while also laying the groundwork for later tensions. It was the first spark of genuine empathy I felt for his character. 

As the novel progresses into its later chapters, the reader is presented with more emotionally charged moments, heartfelt declarations, and romantic development. Alongside this, the narrative reveals a wider breadth of trauma and conflict shaping the characters’ lives, including familial violence and death. Gradually, as the plot transitions between the past and the present, a more nuanced understanding emerges of why Bolaji and Shola had previously broken up. Most notably, both characters discover that they are carriers of the sickle cell anemia trait.  

When reflecting on their past relationship, Bolaji thinks, “Allowing their passion to reignite would only inflict harm upon others. Like a volcanic eruption, nothing in its vicinity would remain unscathed.” (Deforge, 88) 

Bolaji’s internal conflict regarding their diagnosis adds nuance to the story, proving Deforge’s commitment to highlighting complicated and difficult stories. The protagonist’s fears operate on two levels: concern for their health, particularly in relation to starting a family, and the potential disruption of their existing lives with their respective families.  

While I felt that, by the end of this book, more empathy could have been extended to Bolaji’s wife, I cannot deny the importance of the conversation around sickle cell anemia. For this reason, this book can be considered innovative, including its open engagement with reproductive rights. Deforge is to be applauded for constructing a work with significant social stakes while operating within the conventions of a genre that rarely foregrounds such themes. 

Under the Rain is available from Witsprouts Books

Reina Maiden-Navarro is an editor, writer, and photographer. She recently graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in Film & Media Studies and a minor in Creative Writing, cum laude. She also works as an Editor at Prompt and an Outreach Coordinator at Bookstr. If she is not reading or writing, she can be found traveling, painting, or baking cookies.

Sundress Reads: Review of Not Now Now

Sundress Reads

Sandra Doller’s Not Now Now (Rescue Press, 2025) is a powerful interrogation of motherhood, autonomy, and growing older in a country rooted in patriarchy and violence. By playing with the nonsensical, the incongruous, and the strange, Doller’s work interrogates the self and attempts an honest answer about our sobering reality. Although all the poems are untitled, the collection is divided into three sections: “Not,” “Now,” and “Now,” tracing a compelling arc on coming to terms with adulthood.

In the first section “Not,” often unpunctuated poems bleed into one another as Doller explores the frenzied contradictions of daily life. Her work is intentionally, unreservedly indulgent, focusing on the complications of authority and (in)dependence. In particular, the rhetorical weight of the “I” looms in each poem. In one instance, Doller’s speaker reflects, “he doesn’t use the word I / at all, just We and They / occasionally You but never / Himself never inserted as if / that’s a kind of absence / when in fact it’s the worst / kind of present tense / takeover as if he is not even / in his own likeness” (41). At the same time, Doller’s speaker turns to another unknown figure, “You and your dirty / I” (27). Through wielding both accusation and praise, Doller challenges the idea of a “tainted” or shameful self. No one is wholly innocent, or naive, or even honest with themselves, but perhaps the so-called dirtiness as we grow older—the accumulated disappointments, sorrows, regrets—does not need to be harbored in secret shame.

It is also in “Not” that Doller lays the groundwork for a vision of a distorted quotidian, interrupting what the reader may assume to be “normal.” Suspending disbelief, Doller’s speaker describes instead: “When women speak with / their mouths full of soap…Their mouths wide / whale for the credit / card insert a flag here” (38). The credit card, blurred into a flag, with a presumed place inside a woman’s body, is a true mark of the American violence that Doller attempts to grapple with. More subtly, the poem’s speaker also points out, “Erasure of girl / is a tricky little / business I’ve been / at for a few / centuries now…Puffed / sleeves and push / ups everything is / elevated. Make it / higher and high / like bangs” (42). Through the poem’s progression, Doller creates a heightening anxiety and tension that reflects the truly century-long project of controlling bodies—gender, sexuality, sex. How is girlhood defined? And then policed? What kind of adulthood can emerge from and in conjunction with this?

In “Now,” the collection’s second section, Doller’s dense series of prose poems pulls the reader into its very center of tension. The images are equally distorted as before, but the distortion settles into clarity now, where a landscape of often white, middle-class, suburban American domesticity emerges. It is in this space that Doller shoots questions with more striking precision than ever. “Does your belief depend on me to open it,” the poem’s speaker asks, to “crack that nut like a slow-moving rat on the line, does it” (72). In cutting bluntness, Doller dares the reader to face most what they want to the least. What loss had to occur and continues to occur in order for your current life to take place? In another poem: “How many years did a woman live here before me,” and “once you move in there is no moving anymore” (53). Doller makes it clear that in her poems, we are not walking around in wonder or confusion anymore. We are asking questions; we are conversing; we are creating our own answers. Despite the sinister threat of inaction and stagnancy, a form of agency and pushing forward is still possible. “I am a moving crisis in Washington and the kids know it,” Doller’s speaker declares, “watch me watch you corrupt the process” (76).

Finally, in the last section, also titled “Now,” Doller closes the collection on a note that is neither melancholic nor optimistic, but uncompromising and sincere. In one of the poems, the speaker confesses, “I have / been afraid so / afraid before. / I am sore / for the men / inside their empty / puffy suits. I have / never coughed like / that or moved my neck / so little” (109). Through this tender and vulnerable admission, the speaker acknowledges their world for what it is and has been, but now the space opens up to change. Language must be intentional, broken apart, changed—which is why Doller writes, “We foil / ourselves like cartoon / bandits. America are you / listening, lingering, are you / so old you can’t just can’t anymore” (102). Instead of saying “are you so old you just can’t anymore,” the poem refuses the oft-used excuse of fatigue and tradition.

Not Now Now is a stunning collection that grapples with how precarious our existences are. Even in our conversations with each other, just one letter can determine the sentence’s meaning, “the way one letter from word ‘now’ to ‘not’ changes everything: your breakfast is now ready, your breakfast is not ready” (Doller 55). There is fragility and ambiguity to most problems, but the reader learns through these poems that they must confront these experiences head-on. As Doller writes, “Let the times you flinch be / the times you’re really in it” (39).

Order your copy of Not Now Now here.

Ruoyu Wang is a writer from Seattle. Their poems appear in Sine Theta Magazine, COUNTERCLOCK, and The Shore, and have been recognized by YoungArts, The Adroit Journal, and Narrative Magazine, among others. Currently, they serve as the Founding Director of the SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship and study Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. They love linguistics, postcards, live music, and jasmine milk tea.

Sundress Reads: Review of The Dog Who Wanted to be a Butterfly

Heather Sanderson’s The Dog Who Wanted to be a Butterfly is a wonderful, creative, and uplifting children’s story that ultimately reminds us to dream big, and that love can be found for who we once were as well as who we become. A dip into the whimsy often absent from adult life, the charming story of Franklin, the dog, creates an imaginative space to welcome the magic of childlike ambitions. The underlying theme of embracing who you are is something children and adults alike can appreciate. Playful illustrations by Gérome Barry stick with you even after the story ends, building the colorful world of Franklin and complementing the enchantment this story invites you into.

Sanderson is very open about her spiritual journey and the importance of healing. These foundational ideas are woven into her prose, even in a light-hearted children’s book, where the compelling pull of finding oneself is explored through the lens of a dog, Franklin. Franklin, based on the real dog with whom the author is well acquainted, goes on a journey to become a butterfly. He starts by asking his human sister, Amelia, who instructs him, “Da ca bo bo.” These deep words of wisdom were, of course, interpreted by Franklin as “you need to eat chicken bones”—which he immediately set out to do. However, when this did not successfully turn him into a butterfly, he had to seek another source. He asked his dog friend, Daphne, if she knew how he could become a butterfly, and she told him to run up three stairs and jump down one hundred times. This exhausted him, and he began to lose hope, until he actually encountered a real butterfly.

The butterfly told him that in order to turn into one, he needed to lick a pink pineapple three times. However, finding one proved more difficult than Franklin expected; he almost gave up when, while at a restaurant with his family, he found a pink pineapple sitting right on their table. Each lick became a realization for Franklin. He was struck by how much he actually loved his family and his life as a dog. Although this did not stop him from desiring to fly through the clouds and float over flowers, it shifted his perspective of who he already is. It was at this moment that his wish changed: he no longer wanted to be just a butterfly. He wanted to be both a dog and a butterfly. So, on the third lick, that is exactly what he became. Thus, the last page of the story concludes with, “He always flew back home to his people who loved him whether he was a dog, or a butterfly, or a dog-erfly. And he loved them.”

Accompanied by the unique, cartoonish illustrations in a distinctive style, the story’s end comes to life in a vibrant way. I wanted to jump into the pages, imagining how I would fit into it, that perhaps my goals and aspirations will come true if I channel my inner butterfly, or my inner Franklin. On his journey, Franklin discovers that transformation can mean letting go of who you once were to become an even greater version of yourself, and this ends up being an emotional turn that he did not originally expect. This end to Franklin’s expedition is a pivotal moment and also my personal favorite. Sanderson illustrates such a deeply significant message in a light, accessible way so that children can easily understand it and be inspired. This is something that permeates my emotions as I read, as an adult who still needs reminders of self-love. More importantly, the final sentence, “And he loved them,” says something even more profound about this journey. It is not just who loves you, but who you love in return. Who would you always fly back home to?

The emphasis on love and on seeing your dreams not just as magic but as reality, is a necessary change in perspective and a joyful experience to be immersed in. The motif of a butterfly, in the way that a caterpillar transforms, can seem overdone. Yet, this book is a completely fresh take on what it means to transform, and the significance of finding yourself through change, both in who loves you and in whom you love. And, of course, because there was no caterpillar in this story, our caterpillar was a dog! Heather Sanderson’s The Dog Who Wanted to be a Butterfly is a story that encourages you not to stay confined within your mind  but to stretch the bounds of your imagination and bring something of it back home with you—to share that we are capable of making dreams come true and of finding our people, the way that Franklin did, who will love us regardless of what we become.

Order your copy of The Dog Who Wanted to Be a Butterfly today!

Abigail Palmer (she/her) is a current English student at the University of Tennessee. Born in the North but raised in the South, she has always had a place in the in-between of things. In between reader and writer, student and teacher, chronically ill and healthy–she is seeking to defy such labels to become whoever, wherever, however she desires to be. That currently looks like a preschool teacher, beloved (of course) daughter, adored (obviously) girlfriend, up-and-coming cat mom, and a forever nominee of the “Super Opinionated” award. If she’s not incessantly analyzing every piece of media she consumes, she’s probably intellectualizing her feelings while making ultra specific playlists that no one can relate to but her! You can find her on Instagram @zer0cooll.

Sundress Reads: Review of Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing

Sundress Reads

Charles K. Carter’s Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing: Poems and Tales (Fernwood Press, 2026) is an explorative, alluring collection of flash fiction, vignettes, free verse, and more. Divided into four sections, the book transforms a vessel of ecopoetics into an examination of human relationships, sexuality, and mental health. Carter’s sophomore release paints pictures of stunning, overgrown, and lustrous landscapes while simultaneously tearing at the most heart-wrenching and isolating aspects of the modern experience. 

In Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing: Poems and Tales, the author’s interest in what they were writing about stood out immediately. Writing about animal and plant life so cleverly requires a fundamental understanding of the named specimens. Early on, it is clear that Carter has a true affinity for nature. Their fascination is tangible on the page, from visual allusions to orchids and willow trees to vibrant references to gnats and grasshoppers. Their enthusiasm for these ecological subjects made the collection all the more compelling, as I was eager to learn more about how they could transform this knowledge into poetry. 

See, from Part I, an excerpt from the poem entitled “Blooming”: 

“Many native prairie flowers grow close together / to help each other carry the weight of the world, / to help each other stand tall” (Carter, 22). 

It is true that prairie flowers tend to congregate. It is an evolutionary response to surviving in areas with high winds. To root their imagery in truth, the author needs to have a concrete understanding of the nature that they are referencing. Carter does. That attention to detail strengthens their writing and forms trust between the reader and the book.  

Throughout this collection, Carter uses facts like those about the various flowers in “Blooming” and intermingles them with potent metaphors. They utilize natural examples of destruction and perseverance to argue for the same possibilities in human life. It was imagery that I understood and was easily able to relate to. What I did not know, I researched. Then, I was able to apply that concrete visual allusion to the picture of my own friend group and the collective support I feel through their presence. In that, Carter’s writing, despite being very emotionally-driven, is simultaneously scientific.  

Often, these grounded metaphors lead to a feeling of observation. Many of the poems read like hypotheses, long mulled over after following and evaluating a creature in its natural habitat. 

“An ant, used to relying on her colony to survive, / will purposely leave her home if she is infected with a disease” (Carter, 38). 

Then, a stanza later… 

“One of my coworkers / Couldn’t even be bothered to wear a mask for ten minutes in Walgreens” (Carter, 38). 

Often, emotions like aggression and territoriality are attributed to having an “animal instinct.” Carter subverts this notion, challenging readers to think about the sense of community and altruism that exists in the animal kingdom. At the same time, the author is also turning a spotlight on the greed and self-interest that have created division between people in the last few years. Can selfish interests be chalked up to an animalistic instinct, or is it also true that community building and preservation are innate qualities?  

The thing that most often captivates me about Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing: Poems and Tales is the contrast. Within a short excerpt, not only can you feel the author’s admiration for the ant, but you can also feel their disdain for the actions of their fellow humans. By placing these two examples in opposition, especially considering Carter’s affection for nature, it becomes clear what their standpoint truly is. 

Yet, despite this frustration, much of the collection is still about humans and human moments, whether fictional or not. In particular, the flash fiction of this collection showcases truly human relationships, dialogue, and actions. They are moments shared over dinner, in old houses, or on a day out. They are between lovers, friends, or family. Whether comforting or unsettling, the conversation still revolves around human life. It is aggravating, humiliating, and captivating all at the same time. It is one more outlet for the author to confront trauma, heartbreak, and loneliness as humanity struggles to find its humanity.  

Finally, in Part IV of the collection, the human comes face-to-face with nature, entering a conversation where they reckon with their impact on the natural world. In Earth’s last moments, a human speaks to an eagle, whale, cockroach, and dog. The penultimate piece solidifies the ecological, anthropological, and political message of the collection. It is a call to action. 

From “The Last Night on Earth”: 

“What a lonely night it would be if they still pretended not to / hear one another” (Carter, 72). 

Now, the character of the human must finally contend with what the human author has been urging them to hear all along. And, as a reader, the most important thing this collection did was encourage me to listen. I hope others will, too. 

Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing: Poems and Tales is available from Fernwood Press

Reina Maiden-Navarro is an editor, writer, and photographer. She recently graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in Film & Media Studies and a minor in Creative Writing, cum laude. She also works as an Editor at Prompt and an Outreach Coordinator at Bookstr. If she is not reading or writing, she can be found traveling, painting, or baking cookies.