In her poem “Splendor,” Angela Voras-Hills writes, “I am disgusted and enthralled and / in love.” The poem has just described the untangling of a mangled worm, half-eaten by millipedes—the millipedes deprived of their lunch, the worm (semi-rescued) but not long for it. After this hinge line, the next is, “The baby grows too big for my womb.” As the poem continues, the reader meets more bodies: flies, a spider, a fourteen-year-old son, an infant daughter. The poem closes, “The difference / between the moment of being and a moment of being. // When there’s a body and when there is none.” Here, each of these bodies is a notion of home—fragile. Hopeful, requiring tending. Throughout Louder Birds (Pleiades Press), Voras-Hills constructs notions of homes and tears holes in them—thin skins and ribs, wombs, papered layers of rooms & structures, old barns, traceries of farms & crisscrossed land.
The world made in these poems is stitched together by fragile associations—half made, tenuous. The language is incantatory, impressionistic. In “Preserving,” the form of the poem moves stanza by stanza with a word or image occasioning the next. The first, “I can spend a whole winter / in the summer of these lemons / if they’ve covered in enough salt,” leads to the next, where “Trucks are salting the roads / so I can drive . . .” An image of walking leads to an image of falling. Although this form is not as pronounced in other poems, overall the poems are made of these associations. Half-starts & skips. They are juxtapositions—a setting side by side of notions of the poet’s imagination (for better or worse). Sometimes, they offer a snapshot of worst-case scenarios or the kinds of ingrained knowledge that accumulate in small towns or rural areas of what could happen—because it’s happened before.
The opening poem of the collection, “Retrospective,” describes a girl holding a sign that reads “Zucchini / and God.” She’s barefoot and bare shouldered. There’s a gray sky, and a cat, and a corn field, and “the boundaries between home and the road // are insecure.” There are signs, and there are signs—sirens, it seems (and if you don’t know what that means—it’s a warning for a likely tornado or terrible storm). “We’ve all been in the presence of something dark // and have chosen not to seek shelter.” This poem, coming before all the others, is a warning of sorts—and it’s borne out in the following pages: in these poems, things will turn quickly. What seems to be only a roadside scene can quickly become something else, something dangerous. There will be loss, the evidence of something awful come before.
“Chateaubriand” is one of those poems that turns quickly. It begins:
Love me here, a tangle in the wire, complicate my limbs with your mouth. Like the trail, we’re a handful of breadcrumbs . . .
In the second stanza, “A girl / from another town was pinned against a fence / with the grill of a pickup while jogging.” I thought I was reading a love poem—but here’s brutality, and it’s not random. It’s personal, a neighbor “the guy behind the wheel, a stranger, lived / on her street.” And the poem addresses the reader then, with a “you,” reminding me of the intimacy of the page, the small space I’m caught in: “one day, you’re eating Chateaubriand, / the next, you can barely pronounce tender.” Those notions of home return, complicated by the imagining (?), remembering (?), of that complicating act—the one that twines with the imperative to love. The body that “keep[s] / our organs safe” like the skin of a grape, “making a home of your darkest, inside spaces.”
The cover of the book, featuring a bird carcass arranged over dried flowers, as well as a number of the poems, invoke dead animals, and the bodies of “the beasts / we’d run over along the way.” In “The Rabbit in the Road,” a blood tide rises over the curb, coating feet and leaving tracks all the way home. In “Home (IV),” a coyote eats her young. In “Unfurling” (a poem that ends with the beginning of labor), there is a poisoned opossum, a blanket of glistening cricket bodies. The displacement of human pain onto the witnessing of other pain—often the close examination of animal pain—a kind of alchemic dissection, as if to engage with these safe bodies, at a distance, with some sort of critical analytical eye—is a recognizable strategy. This displacement makes for powerful poetry: close looking, and capturing that on the page in indelible detail, and then snapping the reader back to the real true thing.
The poem “A Small Hole Filled with Mud” calls to mind the beginning of Angela Carter’s “The Snow Child,” where the wife’s desire for a child is crystallized by a perfect blood-filled hole in the snow. All desire, all wanting, a stylized image of perfection in the contrast of crimson and white. In Voras-Hills’s poem, desire is cast in the rural imagery of salt licks and bait piles—those heady tastes that lure the animal in us. The way salt almost burns the tongue with its pleasure; the way fruit rots in a late-autumn heat, a dense sweet tangibly heavy. Called, the speaker of the poem has arrived, and is “waiting / for the man to see me through / the screen door.” Instead of that image of perfect beauty, there’s the hole filled with mud, the mud “up to my ankles.” In that field, “children who won’t exist are calling / my name.”
In the notions of home Voras-Hills suggests throughout her collection, as well as the ways she troubles their existence, she names a particular kind of landscape and place, best articulated in her poem “Maps of Places Drawn to Scale.” The poem begins with a car accident, a van flipping on an exit ramp. “In a small town, a priest / knows the man’s name.” The poem muses that at the Chinese buffet (there’s often a restaurant called this in small towns), no one’s fortune cookie says “you will suffer [ . . .] / but it’s implied / in the parking lot.” Throughout the collection’s accretion of imagery, memory, and imagining, a skeletal narrative has formed—one of a relationship surviving losses of would-be children, finding comfort in the world they make together even as that world is threatened. One of looking out windows into the distance at neighbors—people and fields and animals, the barn across the way—and trying to find one’s place there. This poem ends with the comfort and suffocating qualities of living in one of those small-scale places: “But in a small town, there’s one / name for each baby born, and eventually / it’s on the lips of everyone in the street.”
C. Kubasta writes poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms. She lives, writes, & teaches in Wisconsin. Her most recent books include the poetry collection Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press) and the short story collection Abjectification (Apprentice House). Find her at ckubasta.com and follow her @CKubastathePoet.
The night Trump was elected, I lay in bed awake all night, wondering if a nuke would reach the Midwest. I was sure we would all explode before the night was over. Lots of people were afraid in different ways, but my fears always culminate in the explosion of the world. Have you seen the movie Melancholia? That is always where my mind ends up.
When I was pregnant, I was afraid of falling. I was afraid the baby wasn’t kicking. I went to the doctor a lot to be sure she was still alive. But then, she was born, and the fears were bigger. There was not a squishy waterball around her body to protect her if she fell. I was afraid if a knife was in the same room as her. I was afraid of stairs. I was afraid of sleeping and of not sleeping. Don’t get me started about crossing roads.
Two Months Before My Son Leaves for Belgium, We Visit the Zoo
And a few months before that, the airport is bombed. I get message message message: am I letting him go? And maybe I’m to blame, because I never told them I’d once caught him running on the roof of our third-floor, that he was once hit so hard by a car his shoes flew from his feet into air (a story I heard as his friends joked about the lady who’d hit him, who’d cried and hugged him in the road, making sure he was ok), or when, just three days before the bombing, a high school kid scrawled plans to shoot everyone on a bathroom stall. And so, two months before my son boards a plane to Belgium, we feed giraffes, and he poses with peacocks. He wants to see reptiles and primates, his sister wants elephants, crocodiles, never stops running until she sees a baby kangaroo—we all stop and watch him hop around his mother who lays on the concrete floor, bored. He cleans her ears, jumps on her head to engage her in play, and she swats him away. He is already half her size, but clearly still a baby. He doesn’t give up until finally she stands, and I say I think he’ll climb into her pouch! My son doesn’t believe the joey will fit, and I tell him he will fit, and then, an illusion— the pouch one minute tucked against the kangaroo’s belly, stretches, touches the ground as the joey climbs in head-first, shuffles and turns settling in. After that, there is little to see. Black paws peek from the belly. The mother nibbles her fingers, drags her baby toward a food bowl, and I follow her eyes down the dark corridor toward the metal door bursting open, the light blasting in, my daughter running out into it.
Most moms I know spend a lot of time at Target. The Dollar Spot. The end-cap clearance. The Starbucks. They go for toilet paper and spend $100. I am occasionally a mom who does this, and I don’t call this out to judge, but to say, when I am afraid, I go to Target. It feels safe there. (Though I’ve seen enough shooting footage at Walmarts to know better.) It’s easy enough to drink a latte, push my kids in the cart while they play with a random toy I won’t buy, and pick out a pretty thing or two that will make my life easier.
When I spend a lot of time at Target (or, more recently, internet shopping), I write nothing. I let all of my anxieties be swept away by faux eucalyptus wreaths, bamboo potato bins, vetiver candles— the promise of an organized home, manageable children, an “Instagram-worthy” life. But when I get these things home, I am unsatisfied. Most things I buy, I return within a week.
Haunted
Living alone, I’d call my mom, make her listen as I moved room-to-room looking in closets, behind doors, under the bed, anywhere
a man could fit. I plugged my curling iron in each day before showering, imagined identifying a man in a lineup by his melted cheek,
his missing eye. By then, I’d seen enough Law & Order reruns to play each scene out until sentencing. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted things
to be fair, believed hand-on-my-heart in liberty and justice for all, but I’ve also been so afraid. Mostly of a death I’d have to live through—
drowning, fire, kidnapping that ends with me tied up in a hole filling with dirt. My daughter is scared of ghosts, believes they’re in each
corner of her dark room. I tell her they’re not real, but once playing Ouija at the cabin with cousins, we contacted The Blue Ghost
and the light above us flickered blue/ burnt out, left us in dark woods alone. So who’s to say? I’ve never walked through a haunted house,
staged or otherwise, but my cousin pissed her pants inside one, left a puddle someone had to clean. One year, the gun club
sponsored a haunted hayride, and I rode through the forest, hay splintering my ass through jeans, and when a man jumped out of the dark
with a chainsaw buzzing at us, I thought, “God, who knows if this is really part of it? Who gets paid to behave this way?”
This was years before a man shot into a crowded concert from a hotel window in Vegas and before so many
defended his rights. I watch TV, try to believe “these stories are fictional and do not depict any actual person or event.” My daughter
asks about monsters, and I say they’re not real, but news breaks, and she knows I’m lying. If ghosts are real, what do they expect
from a four-year-old? By now, you’d think we’d all have heard the unsettled dead. You’d think something would’ve changed.
It took me a while to recognize this cycle of consumerism and fear, and especially how it is encouraged among women, particularly mothers, and it is fed by social media. The amount of money a mom can spend on “baby gear,” and the sheer volume of stuff one can buy for a tiny human being who can only roll over, is a testament to this.
A few years ago, I watched the video The House in the Middle, which is a PSA made by the Civil Defense Department in the Fifties and sponsored by a paint company. The video suggests that if you (the housewife) keep your house clean (and well-painted), your family could survive a nuclear attack. Can you imagine? All you need to do is keep a clean house, and ta-da! Your family survived the nuke. From there, I read bomb-shelter shopping lists. I looked at fallout shelter meal plans. I looked at photo after photo of how mannequin families “survived” nuclear tests. All of these mannequins looked just like me. They looked like every mother I knew: cooking dinner, stocking the pantry, decorating the fallout shelter with new bedding, encouraged to buy things and stay busy.
The Mannequin Refreshes the Facebook Mom Group While Sitting on the Toilet
A pregnant woman has been reading— childbirth sounds awful, bringing baby home is terrifying, she wants someone to tell her it’s not. Someone say it’s beautiful. And they do. 97 comments gushing about the beauty, assuring her yes, it’s hard, but you will only remember the joy of those first days, they go so fast. The mannequin has had enough babies to mostly remember the awful, the weight of body after body escaping her own, she can barely read the comments without feeling cheated out of forgetting, so she scrolls past them, another mom wants recommendations for a nutritionist, her husband won’t let their toddler eat sugar, natural or otherwise, and her toddler is losing so much weight so fast now that he’s weaning, and that’s as far as the mannequin gets before the door bursts open, and a photo appears in her Facebook feed, and it’s her baby a year ago, and here’s her baby today, and she sees he was beautiful—the baby on the duvet, stretching in his new skin, now wobbling in on chubby legs, such terrible, awful beauty.
Poet, community organizer, and instructor Angela Voras-Hills grew up in Wisconsin. She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of the poetry collection Louder Birds (2020), selected by Traci Brimhall for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize.
Voras-Hills has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and Key West Literary Seminar as well as a fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston. She cofounded The Watershed: A Place for Writers, a literary arts organization, which evolved into Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
We were so happy to receive a significant number of submissions to BMP Voices National Poetry Month 2021 — in only the first week. Editor C. Kubasta’s theme seems to have resonated with poets, and in this first week, we discovered a theme within the theme.
This set of nine poems, this week’s Editors’ Picks, speak out to specific but very different audiences and seem to reach out to connect in order to share what these audiences may need to hear after a year of global pandemic. A thirteen-year-old poet gives us insight into the experiences of young people during this time, protest poetry indicts a complicit United States, a Mainer wife squares her chin and maintains her space, two poets imagine hauntings and ghosts in very different ways. Masks and quarantine bookend change and grief.
Thank you to these poets for sharing our collective experiences and the powerful experiences unique to different communities.
Ruth & Mary Ann Brain Mill Press Publishers
Poetry Month Contest
Submit 1-3 poems of any form or style that speak to Remembering/Reckoning as a response to the traumas of 2020
I’m used to roosters
I’ve always lived in cities; when I hear an outdoor sound, I know it’s roosters
Roosters or stray dogs
Drifting off in bed I hear them
ooo-uh-oo-oo, faintly or loudly but always clear in the dark of night tending my bladder in the morning as I cling to my blankets as I eat lunch by the window
This new city though.
First, it has no roosters.
I never hear them, not ever.
Next, it has other birds; it teems with them. exuberant choirs of birds festivals of birds and determined rusty squeak of palm squirrels
Now, I fall asleep to cooing, trilling, that squirrel squeak
I wake and sleep and urinate to choruses
I know a chirp from a tweet from a squawk
The small hours are all hoots and chirrups
It’s a new thing, this abundance
My ears need time.
Alanna Shaikh is a first-generation Pakistani immigrant. Her poetry is influenced by the landscape of Northern New York state where she grew up, daily life and the literature in the seven countries she’s lived in, and her work in global health and pandemic response. Her poetry has been chosen for publication by Eclectica Magazine and the Norfolk Coast Guardian.
“The Ghost at Home”
by Jareen Imam
I found her standing in the corner, or maybe I should say, she found me. She was watching me as I worked late into the evening. My face illuminated by the pale blue light shining from my overheated laptop.
I think she mistook me for one of them, initially.
You’re up later than usual, she finally said. This is normally my time to haunt.
Just give me another hour, I responded. I’m working on a PowerPoint my boss wants.
She sighed as she threw the white bedsheet off her ghastly frame, huffing and puffing before she vanished into thin air. The next night, she found me again, but this time she was sitting on my bed.
Are you working late again? she complained. When is this going to end? I’ve got a schedule to keep up with, she moaned, as she showed me her planner
Haunt 30-something-year-old woman between the hours of midnight to 2 A.M. Make sure to instill feelings of inadequacy, the planner read. A footnote was scribbled at the bottom, reading: Extra 10 percent commission if woman dreams about never getting married.
I couldn’t help but chuckle as I read her notes. You don’t have to worry about doing these things, I said. I already feel so alone.
Jareen Imam is an award-winning American journalist who has worked for media companies such as NBC News, CBS News, and CNN. During 2020, she led a global team of journalists who investigated and reported on stories about the pandemic, the death of George Floyd, BLM protests, voting issues, the U.S. presidential election, and more. In 2020, while reporting for NBC, she endured the death of her grandmother, the separation from her family—many of whom worked as frontline healthcare workers and took care of those infected with Covid-19—and a painful breakup from her long-term partner. It was also the year she started to write poetry again after a 20-year hiatus.
“Grief Is the Ghost”
by Anne Marie Wells
Anne Marie Wells (She | Her) of Jackson, Wyoming is a queer poet, playwright, and storyteller navigating the world with a chronic illness. AnneMarieWellsWriter.com
FB|IG @AnneMarieWellsWriter TW @AMWWriter
“Parable of the Drought”
by Merridawn Duckler
I was rattling the inside of an old saltine tin when you came home. We’re out of tears, I said. Again, I said. You put the bags down in a huff. They were supposed to last until the party, you said, where do they go? We both know the answer to that. You spent them. Pretending it’s for others, to be donated or sent overseas. But it’s crap. Everyone knows you cried up all those tears for yourself. My eyes have been dried for fifteen years. My mouth is like a ghost lake. Sadness scurries in rat feet at the bottom of my well. A soul could drop a rock in there and hear no echo. Whereas you are a fountain, bountiful crocodile. The world is your blue handkerchief, wrung once and snapped out fresh. I am sad, I said, I’m broken. I walked to the other room and saw you absorbed in the images, taking a screen shot and superimposing it on your face. What do you want now, you said. I tried to explain to you about my hollow. My dust. You turned your face to me. Goddamn, you are beautiful. I’m so sorry, you said. And your eyes filled up with tears
Merridawn Duckler is a writer from Oregon, author of INTERSTATE (dancing girl press) and IDIOM (Washburn Prize, Harbor Review.) New work in Seneca Review, Women’s Review of Books, Interim, Posit. Fellowships/awards include Yaddo, Southampton Poetry Conference, Poets on the Coast. She’s an editor at Narrative and at the philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics.
Twitter@MerridawnD Instagram@merridawnduckler
“[2020] The Divided States of Attica”
by henry 7. reneau, jr.
henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience, is a discharged bullet that commits a felony every day, is the spontaneous combustion that blazes from his heart, phoenix-fluxed red & gold, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. He is the author of the poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press) and the e-chapbook, physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press), now available from their respective publishers. Additionally, his collection, The Book Of Blue(s) : Tryin’ To Make A Dollar Outta’ Fifteen Cents, was a finalist for the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook Series. His work is published in Superstition Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and Rigorous. His work has also been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
“Lucency”
by A Whittenberg
Amongst a breathless, debilitating, incapacitating panic attack, I told myself not to panic and… without warning, I was suddenly all right.
A Whittenberg is a Florida native who has a global perspective. If she wasn’t an author she’d be a private detective or a jazz singer. She loves reading about history and true crime. Her other novels include Sweet Thang, Hollywood and Maine, Life is Fine, Tutored and The Sane Asylum.
“We Stand”
by Keira Schaefer
2020 broke the limits Tearing our boundaries apart Like Buffalo trampling the plains Through nothing but darkness Our world was the midnight sky 2020 overwhelmed our healthcare workers Many lost beloved friends and family Others lost their job, and the ability to pay rent We thought we lost the world But we had each other Now, in 2021, we stand together We raise higher than the ocean’s tides Although we are still apart The light, the sun, the new day is coming Through hardship we are more united than ever We stand, we raise, we unite
Keira Schaefer is a thirteen-year-old girl who has a passion for poetry. She loves to express her feelings and emotions through her literature. Other than writing poems, she enjoys gymnastics, playing harp, ice skating, and photography.
“Sea Change”
by Nancy Cook
The sun is midsky when he cuts the diesel. Now he can hear the tonguelap of water ripples against cedar plank, feel a shadow of sweat forming on his brow. A line of pelicans whips across the horizon and he sees, without looking, tricolored bullet buoys in neat order, bobbing at water’s surface in a subtle play for attention. He senses the sadness all around. In times past, on days such as this, the water would talk to him. Now it has nothing to say. The fishing is good, the weather is fine, but all the world is as quiet as winter. He unpacks the sandwich the wife has wrapped in waxed paper: ham and cheddar and mustard on rye. She’s thrown in some chips, a folded napkin, and a sliced apple sprinkled with sugar like she used to do for the kids. A cold beer would taste so good right now. He reaches deep into the cooler for a Dr Pepper.
He ends the day early with a light haul. On town streets bereft of tourists, still he savors whiffs of rendered butter, partakes with phantom taste buds the sweet succulence of boiled lobsters. It is one pleasure that doesn’t age. Before joining the wife at the church, he showers and shaves. This evening is the annual strawberry festival, which every year she organizes. She is a pillar as they say, always in public her chin lifted, daring and determined, one ear cocked as if to say I’m listening. And though tonight, socializing will be minimized, face masks mandatory, she’ll oversee the sale of two hundred fruit pies, baked in honor of the state bicentennial. Keeping busy is a way of life. They all respect that.
Two dozen tables are set up in the churchyard under hulking shade trees. Broad leaves like titans’ hands block the ebbing sun. The dusk feels heavy with sadness. As if reading his mind, the wife says, Even with the church locked up, light’s passing through the stained glass. There’s secrets older than memory. Sins to be forgiven. He doesn’t know that some mornings she takes the deer path down to water’s edge. There she stands on the old dock, hands deep in the pockets of her oversized Mac, and watches for the fog to lift.
Nancy Cook is a writer, teaching artist, and completely recovered lawyer. She serves as flash fiction editor for Kallisto Gaia Press and also runs “The Witness Project,” a program of free community writing workshops in Minneapolis designed to enable creative work by underrepresented voices. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been awarded grants from, among others, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Parks Arts Foundation, the Mayo Clinic, and Integrity Arts and Culture. Her first chapbook, Written in Nature, is forthcoming in 2021.
“Safekeeping”
by Tracy Mishkin
We go to some essential job, our faces swaddled in fear. Masks leave us lightheaded, but sometimes we wear two because there are worse things. In the produce section, we struggle to open plastic bags. We must have licked our fingers back before all this. And touched our faces.
Walking the dogs feels good. We shout hello to every stranger, for nothing is stranger than this year. We used to pick up trash, but now it’s masks and tissues scattered in the grass. That neighbor we haven’t seen in months says the pandemic is a hoax. Six feet isn’t far enough.
A vet we’ll never meet says the big dog has cancer, and every three weeks she hops behind the wheel as though it’s normal for dogs to drive. “Shotgun,” we say, and she moves over. We do a piss-poor job of watching the road. When we brake hard, we throw out an arm to stop her from hitting the dash, the way our fathers tried to protect us, remembering a world before seat belts.
Tracy Mishkin is a call center veteran with a PhD and a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Butler University. She is the author of three chapbooks, I Almost Didn’t Make It to McDonald’s (Finishing Line Press, 2014), The Night I Quit Flossing (Five Oaks Press, 2016), and This Is Still Life (Brain Mill Press, 2018). She lives in Indianapolis with her family and fewer than ten cats and dogs. You can read more of her work at tracymishkin.com
Poetry Contest: Poetry as Remembering/Reckoning with 2020 & Past Traumas
Open All April – Fee Free
Amanda Gorman inspired many on January 20th, with her inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb.” With her words, her performance and presence, and her radiance, she invoked past orators and poets, referenced the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and looked toward a collective future: “Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed / a nation that isn’t broken / but simply unfinished.” In his inauguration eve COVID memorial, President Biden said, “To heal, we must remember.”
2020 was a hell of a year. People have experienced traumas collective and personal; we have deepened our intimacies with each other, felt the divides deepen between ourselves and family, and learned new concepts like skin hunger and edging sorrow. For some of us, art has seen us through – for some of us, art has not been enough. Poetry cannot pay the rent or cover the groceries. A beautifully wrought line isn’t the same as holding someone’s hand or finger combing their hair. No words can make up for the systemic and structural negation of humanity or dignity or justice. But maybe, just maybe, opening spaces for language and imagery can let us see each other again – imagine proximity, touch, a held breath, inhabiting each other’s personal space limned with possibility.
At Brain Mill Press’s pop-up magazine for National Poetry Month, we’ll be sharing posts from poets & creatives that speak to the above theme, as well as inviting entries for our fee-free contest organized around the theme of Poetry as Remembering/Reckoning.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit 1-3 poems of any form or style that speak to Remembering/Reckoning as a response to the traumas of 2020. Submissions will be reviewed for suitability by Brain Mill Press staff.
Those poets whose work is selected agree to grant Brain Mill Press the limited right to reproduce your piece on Voices. They retain all other rights to their work.
Poets’ submitted work and profile will be published on bmpvoices.com and promoted on our social media outlets. Your post will contain your headshot and bio, as well as information you may wish to include about recent work and your website and social media links.
Brain Mill Press strongly encourages submissions from people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers. Please direct inquiries not answered in this call to inquiries@brainmillpress.com.
Prizes
Four times in April, the Brain Mill Press editors will select one or more submitted poems as the editors’ choice pick(s) for the week. Editors’ choice selections may choose any poetry title from the Brain Mill Press catalog for their prize. In early May, the editors will select a winning poem, and the poet will receive the full collection of Brain Mill Press poetry titles for themselves, as well as a second collection to gift to an organization of their choice.
A new year means reading new books. While I don’t have a reading goal per se, I do have a long To Be Read list to get through. For every book that I already own, there are also yet-to-be-released books I want to read — not to mention books I won’t know I want to read until I hear about them! As you might imagine, there are a lot of books that I hope to read and review this year. Here are my most anticipated 2021 reads.
This book came out on January 5. It combines poetry and visual art to spotlight and pay homage to the lesser known Black women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Using the poetic method known as “The Golden Shovel,” Nikki Grimes takes one line from poems by Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and others and then uses them to create original poems of her own. These poems are complemented with artwork by Black women such as Vashti Harrison, Ebony Glenn, and Nina Crews.
Although the Harlem Renaissance was my favorite time period to study in school, I only ever learned about Black male Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. As I am a poetry fan, this book will surely rectify the gaps in my knowledge by bridging the past and present and showing the worth of these words through pictures as well as poems.
This 2020 short fiction anthology was on my wish list for months before I nabbed the ebook at a discount. Taking inspiration from Octavia Butler, this anthology features sixteen sci-fi and fantasy stories starring Black girls, women, and gender nonconforming people. The authors featured include some familiar and others new to me, including Elizabeth Acevedo, L. L. Mckinney, and Somaiya Daud.
I don’t see many Black SFF anthologies by and for Black women and girls, let alone one that looks so inviting to teen readers who are new to the genres. Did I mention that the cover looks spectacular?
Combining magical realism and autobiographical elements, this 2020 novel features Black girl magic occurring amid poverty, sexism, racism, and more. Echo Brown is a teen wizard born and raised on the East Side who uses magic portals to travel to an all-white school on the West Side. However, going back and forth between two worlds has Echo leaving parts of herself on the East Side. Soon, Echo must use her magic to overcome a dark depression that threatens to overwhelm her.
Through family and personal experience, I know that not all magic comes with a letter to a boarding school. There is also magic in making ends meet, magic in personal recovery, and magic in survival. I look forward to seeing how Black Girl Unlimited will embody this.
The third book in the Nightmare-Verse series is set to be published Fall 2021. After the events of the previous book, Alice Kingston is attempting to rest and recover. However, she and her friends start having dark visions of Wonderland’s past and future. When the evil that Alice thought she had defeated stirs once again, Alice thinks she will have to journey into Wonderland once more. However, the evil is already in the real world.
I have enjoyed the Nightmare-Verse series since I reviewed the first book, A Blade So Black, in 2018. I’m hoping this book will be just as thrilling as the others and will answer some of my lingering questions about the world building and characters.
This queer summer coming-of-age rom-com is Claire Kann’s second novel and one I missed when it initially came out in 2019. It tells the story of Winnie, a fat Black queer girl who is unexpectedly crowned Summer Queen of the small town of Misty Haven. With such a huge spotlight on her, Winnie must confront her fears and insecurities to become the best version of herself.
Although I don’t own this book (yet), I would love to read it due to my soft spot for teen summer stories. The premise sounds like a ton of fun and something I’d want adapted into a movie. Besides, I loved Claire Kann’s first book, Let’s Talk About Love.
As a Black Asian nonbinary queer femme from the United States, I find it fascinating to learn about what life is like for queer trans people of color around the world. Some countries have more queer freedom than others, but somehow international QTPOC always find a way to create a space to be themselves. This is exemplified in Dean Atta’s verse novel The Black Flamingo, which is heavily inspired by UK LGBTQ+ culture. It tells the story of Michael “Michalis” Angeli, a gay British young man with Greek Jamaican heritage. Growing up, his multifaceted identity makes him feel out of place. After deciding to attend a university in Brighton, Michael joins a drag club and slowly discovers how to combine his identities and his lived experiences to make himself feel whole.
One of the most notable aspects of this book that immediately drew me in was how it flawlessly combines standard poetry with narrative storytelling. As in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, this book’s protagonist becomes a poet and gradually uses his poetry to express his blossoming sexuality as well as his gender and his racial experiences. One of my personal favorite poems in this book is titled “I Come From,” which features Michael reveling in his heritage and the experiences that have shaped him to that point: “I come from DIY that never got done. / I come from waiting by the phone for him to call. / I come from waving the white flag to loneliness. / I come from the rainbow flag and the Union Jack.”
The narrative storytelling in verse is also remarkable because it shows Michael’s life from childhood to early adulthood. I haven’t read too many coming-of-age verse novels that present the character at different stages of their life. This choice allows the reader to see how both small and large experiences shape Michael as he grows up. For example, Michael recalls wanting to have a Barbie doll as a child and how his mom initially thought he was kidding, since boys are socially conditioned to like “boys’ toys” like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In a more affecting episode, preteen Michael takes an Easter trip to Cyprus and hears about a black flamingo on the news.
In fact, seeing how different experiences shaped the development of Michael’s drag character, “The Black Flamingo,” was thought-provoking and poignant. Inspired by events such as having his dreadlocks touched by white people and reciting his poetry at an open mic, Michael’s becoming The Black Flamingo allows him to transform into a more confident and fuller self. The character also serves as the result of Michael’s growth as a person and how he has learned about, and unlearned, things like internalized racism and Black queer lives of the past and the present.
Seeing how different experiences shaped the development of Michael’s drag character, “The Black Flamingo,” was thought-provoking and poignant.
Furthermore, some of the experiences that influenced “The Black Flamingo” also give the reader an interesting glimpse into LGBTQ culture in the United Kingdom. The contrast between a gay bar and a Black queer gay bar, and the homophobia casually tossed around by schoolchildren with terms like “bwatty bwoy,” show how complex the experiences of Black queer UK youth are, especially those of the children of immigrants. Michael has to unlearn a lot, especially regarding gender norms and heteronormativity. Neither completely fertile nor arid, UK LGBTQ culture is represented as something that Black queer people must navigate well in order to grow into the people they want to be.
Michael’s story also gives the reader a solid introduction to drag culture, with clear and creative explanations of what it is and what it isn’t. Since Michael is new to drag culture, the reader is able to learn about it alongside him. I love these lines that sum up what Michael wants from drag culture: “I’m just a man and I want to wear a dress and makeup onstage…. I’m a man and I want to be a free one.”
While The Black Flamingo is enjoyable as-is, it would have been interesting to see what the Jamaican side of Michael’s family thought of his queerness. Michael doesn’t mention his queerness to them at all, since he knows it’s illegal to be gay in Jamaica and that his family might have brought some of that prejudice with them to the UK. It is entirely possible that some of Michael’s family will not accept him. Yet given how completely Michael’s Greek mom accepts his queerness, it would have been nice to see at least one member of Michael’s Jamaican family do the same.
On the whole, The Black Flamingo is an electrifying, poetic declaration of identity. Through poetry, coming-of-age perspectives, and drag, the novel offers a triumphant tale of transformation and self-expression.
The world made in these poems is stitched together by fragile associations—half made, tenuous. The language is incantatory, impressionistic. In “Preserving,” the form of the poem moves stanza by stanza with a word or image occasioning the next. The first, “I can spend a whole winter / in the summer of these lemons / if they’ve covered in enough salt,” leads to the next, where “Trucks are salting the roads / so I can drive . . .” An image of walking leads to an image of falling. Although this form is not as pronounced in other poems, overall the poems are made of these associations. Half-starts & skips. They are juxtapositions—a setting side by side of notions of the poet’s imagination (for better or worse). Sometimes, they offer a snapshot of worst-case scenarios or the kinds of ingrained knowledge that accumulate in small towns or rural areas of what could happen—because it’s happened before.
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