I Came Upon a Troll
By Jason Pierre

Every so often, I take these hour-long walks. I drift for miles at a time. It gives me a chance to look out at Los Angeles in a way I would never have done on the bus. One thing I’ve learned about this town is that it’s very segregated. Areas are designed to be cultural pockets for different communities and pride is held in the emotional ownership of a neighborhood. And these neighborhoods aren’t small. Los Angeles is a massive place. A neighborhood is like a town. And me? I’m a man on my feet, wandering through them as a stranger; belonging to no piece of land other than the footprint of pavement my feet touch for a tenth of a second as I walk.

Recently, I walked under an overpass and saw a bed of massive rocks surrounding a gated entrance to the sewers. Construction trucks loomed over the area like gargoyles protecting a church but there were no men sitting inside of them. Wind crept out from below that sounded more like the ominous breathing of an old giant.

“Is there anyone down there?” I asked as I looked into the darkness.

“Is it time for me to rest?” asked a voice from below.

“Um… I don’t know. There isn’t anyone up here.”

“I need to rest, they promised me I could rest,” said the voice from below.

I pulled the grating open and climbed down to see a massive old troll. His feet filled with calluses and bruises from standing for so long, his hair as long as telephone lines and his massive arms, they held up the city above ground.

“Oh… my… god,” I whispered, shocked at this creature bearing the weight of the city above. “How long have you been standing here?”

“Two hundred years,” he said. “I can stay in my home as long as I hold up the city they’ve built on top of mine. Will you give me a break? My arms… they hurt.”

“I’m not that strong,” I replied, wishing I could offer him some help. Sadness covered his face as his arms quivered, causing an earthquake to echo above. The whole city felt his fatigue. I looked around this underground world and saw dozens of trolls, covered in the rubble of the city above. They were no longer able to carry the weight so the city crushed them and their homes.

“I want to give up,” he whispered. “There is no one left to talk to, I spend more time holding this city up than I do enjoying my existence.”

“But if you give up, everything will cave in.”

“Then they will build on top of that cave. Then when that is not enough, they will build on top of that and on top of that!”

“Then why stay in the first place? Why didn’t you leave one-hundred years ago?”

“Because in the middle of the night when everything is quiet, someone will listen and hear the heartbeat of the city: that heartbeat is mine. And what is a city without a heart, without an identity to call its own?”
He was right; I listened and could hear his heart beating as loud as the beat of a drummer leading a band. And his breath was the wind that flowed through LA at night.
Beep, beep, beep… the sounds of the construction trucks backing up came from above ground.

“They’ve come to let me rest,” said the troll. A smile formed on his face as he gleamed up at the entrance above. The humming engines moved closer to us until the entrance was blackened out by the ominous slow moving wet cement that poured on top of us.

“They’re filling it with cement!” I shouted as I ran. “Come on! Let’s get out of here!” But the troll stayed. They lied to him and he accepted it. He stood there like a guard protecting a castle and let the cement blanket his sad, disfigured body.

“I don’t want to run. I’ve held up this city for so long, why not do it forever? I’ll be its heartbeat if that is what it wants me to be.”

I ran for the nearest manhole and escaped.

When I got above ground I closed my eyes and listened for the city’s heartbeat… and there it was. I’d never heard it before that day, and now that I’ve heard it, I can’t escape its rhythm. Now when I go on my long walks, I’ll stop in a neighborhood and listen for its heartbeat. There’s someone down there holding it up, giving it soul, personality and a reason to belong.

 

Jason Pierre is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and writer. He was born to first-generation Jamaican immigrants and raised in the South Bronx. Jason attended the High School of Art & Design, where he became interested in filmmaking and fiction writing. He earned his BFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. Shortly after, he moved to Los Angeles, where he has worked in Creative Development at production companies such as Red Varden and film studios such as FOX 2000. His first short film, David at Daytime, premiered at the New Filmmakers New York 2014 Winter Screening Series at the Anthology Film Archives. He is currently developing his next short film, Gemini.

Dry Terrain

If I could explain your desert, I would—
the spines of your beard, your shoulder

as stone, the tuft of dried grass struggling
beneath it. I would roll the tumbleweed

across your chest, or disrupt it with my
fingers. Your abdomen is the silent side

of a long expanse of dune, and I would
cross it. I would leave my footprint

or sweep my hand to brush it out.
​Something has skimmed across your sand:

pinnate leaf of foot, stem of tail.
I don’t have the languages for desert.

I might be the water from a cactus;
I might be unreliable and bitter. Maybe

I am a storm. I rage and roil and think
I make you different. You take in my relief,

vanish me into you. Or I am the stone
​you hold in your mouth to stave off

thirst. Most days, I know, I am nothing
but gill and fin, with no stroke for

where you move best. I lie storm-tossed
where the tide cannot hope to reach.

 

 

Disposition

This, too, goes—the last of the blue glasses
in the cupboard, the dining room rug,
the cigarette lighters, the towels.
The fishing nets and the buoys.

The mortar and the stones of the front steps.
The inkstain on the floorboards.
Even the spiders are husks. Even the broken
windows are missing the wind.

The salt remains in the air, in the always-
damp grass. The boulders in the yard
cannot be moved. The ocean stays,
in its way, although the water

is new, the wash you melted into
gone west towards the breachway with
most of the sand from the beach, until
everything here is thinned, like

you, everything knees of rounded
stones, elbows of burnished shells,
and even the shore has abandoned us
to rock and carapace, to shard and bone.

 

 
Inscription

Now the problem is I didn’t dream
the skim of furrowed lines against

the thin skin of my mouth, didn’t
know I would recognize the scent

that lifted, faint and dusted. Or
the flutter of wings. Some years,

you know, the honey just doesn’t
come through—some years, the hive

can drink itself thin by March.
The problem with being stung

isn’t the pain—it’s the surprise. It is
alive and fragrant at the lip, it is buzz

and hustle, and then something wants
you run through enough to eviscerate

itself for the satisfaction. In this story,
I am not the bee or the mouth.

I am the hopeful thrumming. I am
always the breath before the strike.

 

 

Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for Wheaton College. Her work appears in numerous web and print journals, including Antiphon, The Bellingham Review, The Louisville Review, and Nonbinary Review. Her chapbook Dear Turquoise is available from Dancing Girl Press. She serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review.

 

iii.
If man should raise hands to breach the throat of his
father, feed him garlic. Who else but an imp should
eat it? It’s reaper-cruel. Dog food. The pagan’s
stinking rose. Hemlock in the belly, vipers in the
blood. Canidia, the Grey One, had a hand in this
dish, I’m sure. That other witch Medea poured
garlic over Jason to help him bind the fire-bulls; its
stink repelled their breath. She gave garlic to his
mistress, too, then flew away on her serpent-bird.
All women are best avenged with gifts. Neither the
dry southern cities nor sweaty Hercules, he of the
burned shoulders, know anything like this starry
steam. And should you desire another springtime
jest, dear Son of Kings, remember my countercurse:

“May all women oppose you with hands and push
you out of their beds.”

iv.
My quarrel is with you, [ ]. Even the wolves
and lambs realize what’s happened. They’ve seen the
way you measure the sacred—twice with three
yards of silk cut for a gown. You’re proud to walk
with money, but luck doesn’t change the race. I hear
the voices along the road:

“First he cut the whips from the politicians’ hands,
but now he has a thousand acres for others to plow?
His ponies clog the roads, yet he sits like an
emperor enthroned? Disgusting. What’s the use of
so many ships, heavy things built on slaves’ hands
and thieves’ mouths, if he’s chosen to lead?”

ix.
When will we, dear Son of Kings, feast in your
home and drink the finest wines to Caesar’s
victories? When shall it please Jupiter to let me
bathe in flute and lyre, their Italian and Greek
melodies mixing? As of late, the enemy captain,
claiming Neptune’s blessing, flees on burning ships.
He’s threatened the city with chains torn from
faithless slaves, the only men who’d call him friend.
And some sad soldier—his descendants will strike
his name—will carry the trenches for a skinny
woman and serve wrinkled eunuchs. I’m sure
the sun itself will refuse to shine on his canopy.
And here, two thousand horses turn. And here, French
masters sing Caesar’s name. And here, hostile ships
veer left, surrounded by harbor. Triumph, are you
waiting for oxen, for an untouched golden car?
Triumph, what of our peer lost to the African king?
That ancient general whose power built his tomb?
Our enemy, defeated on land and sea, dyes his
purple curtains black. Hangs them in his porthole as
he flees wherever the winds take him—to the
Hundred Cities or to opposing shores. And here,
boy, bring cups for wine. I don’t care where it’s
from if it’s good. May my fear of Caesar’s business
be lost in wine’s sweet flow.

T.A. Noonan is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently The Midway Iterations (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015) and The Ep[is]odes: a reformulation of Horace (Noctuary Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Menacing Hedge, LIT, West Wind Review, Ninth Letter, Phoebe, and others. A weightlifter, artist, teacher, priestess, and all-around woman of action, she is an artist-in-residence at Firefly Farms, home of the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Vice President/Associate Editor of Sundress Publications.

I used to date a woman with exceptional taste in art. She kept a steady rotation of coffee table books in her living room, my favorite of which was an enormous hardcover filled with paintings by Lucian Freud. We would be watching television, or trying to have a conversation, or making out, and I’d inevitably find my eyes and my hands returning to that gorgeous book: the incredible depths of the flesh tones—portraits that, regardless of the model, straddled the line between the beautiful and the ugly in a way I found helplessly entrancing. It became a point of contention: “Why are you still looking at that book?” “Yes I have seen that one before.” “No. He doesn’t care. He’s a dog.” Coffee table books are a delicate matter: if you want to play it safe, go with Ansel Adams or a book of funny church signs—guests will flip quickly, get bored, and you will eventually seem interesting again. However, if you are cursed, like my friend, with great taste, then you very well might lose your guests to the gravity of an artistic genius.

As we discover in The Gorgeous Nothings (New Directions, 2013), an entirely new breed of coffee table book, the artistic genius of Emily Dickinson is hardly debatable and absolutely singular. This huge, breathtaking book features high-resolution photos of various scraps of paper written on by Dickinson late in her life. This selection of what scholars have taken to calling Dickinson’s “Radical Scatters”—writings on paper without a discernible literary genre—is equal parts poetry and visual art, and, in a very important sense, neither: a hybridity that challenges the ways we have approached and thought about Dickinson’s work since it first found its way to our eyes.

It has been almost 130 years since her death, and we still don’t know how to read Emily Dickinson. It is now common knowledge that Dickinson was almost entirely unknown throughout her life: circulating poems to friends in the mail, managing to publish a small handful of poems in regional literary journals, and relegating herself to legendary (and somewhat exaggerated) solitude. It was only after her death—after her sister Lavinia discovered over 1800 documents in a locked chest—that her poetry was first published in book form. That volume was published in 1890, and Dickinson’s work hasn’t been out of print since.

There is no artist I can think of as widely admired and as thoroughly mediated as Emily Dickinson. In many regards, the history of her readership has been a history of problematic mediation, given that the 1890 edition was tampered with by well meaning (though aesthetically challenged) editors. For the next sixty-five years, Dickinson’s poems were read in heavily edited forms: words had been changed to even out rhymes and metrical patterns; punctuation and capitalization idiosyncrasies had been removed; entire stanzas were cut to make the poems’ “meaning” more straightforward and accessible. These early editors (and their successors) put great effort into smoothing Dickinson’s rough edges—to tame her verse into something comfortable—something more in line with our expectations of what poetry is and should be.

In 1955 Thomas H. Johnson published a monumental variorum that granted readers access to Dickinson’s unaltered verse for the first time. This stood as the most significant contribution to Dickinson scholarship until 1981 when Ralph W. Franklin performed unprecedented literary forensics to present Dickinson’s poems in an order that placed curatorial authority on the small manuscript “fascicles” that Dickinson wrote and bound by hand. Most importantly, Franklin’s Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson presented rough scans of the original documents for the reader to see for herself. In a fundamental sense, the history of Dickinson scholarship has been an incremental journey toward Dickinson herself: a series of attempts to return to the work in its most feral state. The most recent step in this progression came in 2005 when Virginia Jackson published Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading, in which she persuasively questions the central assumption about Dickinson’s work: that the Woman in White wrote lyric poems. In masterful excavations of archival material, Jackson manages the most fiercely unmediated reading of Dickinson’s work to date, and in so doing places urgent emphasis on the writings in their original forms (with particular attention paid to the Radical Scatters).

In light of this, it is entirely possible that The Gorgeous Nothings is the most intellectually significant coffee table book in the history of coffee table books. By offering your guest direct access to what the book’s editors reasonably term Dickinson’s “Envelope Poems”—access previously reserved for a complicated network of archive-spelunkers that number in the tens—you more or less ensure that you will never make out on your couch again. And with a book so attractive in your living room, why would you want to? It presents full-color, high-resolution photos of fifty-two envelopes upon which Dickinson wrote something like poetry: texts that work with the unique shape and structure of the paper on which they are written, engaging the physical medium of writing in highly experimental ways. These photos are faced with a transcription of the words on the scatters, which is necessary only because of the difficulty of interpreting her handwriting. These photos, which are curated by the visual artist Jen Bervin, are introduced by Susan Howe and then followed by a scholarly essay by an expert on the Radical Scatters, Marta Werner.

While proposing a solution to the problem of mediation by granting the reader/viewer direct access to archival material, The Gorgeous Nothings also presents a new form of an old problem: domestication. It is, after all, an attempt to reign in a wild mind in its preferred habitat that has for so long kept Dickinson’s genius on the wrong side of the editorial fence. What makes Dickinson’s work absolutely singular is its radical insistence on liberty: liberty of form and feeling, of lyric impulse and rational digression; liberty in resistance to simple reduction or paraphrase, theological orthodoxy, received metrics, clean rhymes, conventional punctuation and unmixed metaphors. Dickinson’s genius is untaught and therefore (thankfully) untamed, which is what makes the problem of mediation so significant: editors who seek to make Dickinson palatable—accessible—blunt so much of the force that makes her singular.

The coffee table book, as a form, is preternaturally domestic: it is not designed to enthrall, but to decorate (or to serve as an expensive coaster). In recent years, the two major Dickinson archives (one at Harvard and the other in Amherst) have reconciled their historic differences to make digitally available an incredible amount of their contents. Accordingly, Dickinson scholars and enthusiasts can turn to the Internet to access hundreds of documents in high-resolution scans. What is the purpose, then, of publishing a small portion of these documents as a coffee table book?
In certain regards, The Gorgeous Nothings can be understood in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s “Green Box:” the limited edition series of boxes Duchamp himself filled with paper scatters he consulted while constructing his Large Glass “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.” Duchamp of course famously challenged the definition of art with his “readymades”—objects he would discover and then present as art installations without manipulation. His “Green Box” similarly presented as art the loose, unedited, superficially insignificant litter that functioned for the two decades over which he worked on the Large Glass as the collateral of his project—by changing the context of his trash, he turned it into art in a transubstantiation made possible, it seemed, by the artist alone. Dickinson’s Radical Scatters, when presented as visual art, take on an entirely new semantic apparatus: not only do we read the words, we read the handwriting, the scribbles, the folds and stains, the envelope adhesive, the postal stamps, the shape of the paper, its pinholes, its color, and countless other variables that cannot be transcribed. To encounter the “Envelope Poems” in high resolution is to experience some of Dickinson’s strangest work in its most undisturbed form, and the interpretive possibilities of this encounter are endless.
It is fitting that, in light of recent Dickinson scholarship, the only troubling implication of The Gorgeous Nothings relates to genre. The product of contradictory forces, it is on the one hand the private, esoteric, wildly unmediated scribbles of a mad genius, and on the other a coffee table book: the literary genre most functionally associated with the footrest. The problem, as usual, is the unavoidability of mediation. Though some of the most beautiful pieces in the collection resemble birds attempting to escape their page, the “Envelope Poems” are still, for the most part, presented as lyric poems (or, worse: failed attempts at lyric poems). While Werner’s essay brilliantly demonstrates a number of highly experimental readings of some of the texts—taking into account their visual arrangements around seams and folds, feeling out the possibilities of semantic application—it still suggests that what the viewer encounters in high-resolution is a series of notes-toward-something-else. Werner writes, “For while it is unlikely that [Dickinson] set out to record a series of poems, messages, and fragments on envelopes, once we have seen these documents, it becomes difficult to dissociate the texts from their carriers. Flocked together for a few moments before dispersing again into other equally provisional constellations, they remind us that a writer’s archive is not a storehouse of easily inventoried contents—i.e., ‘poems,’ ‘letters,’ etc.—but also a reservoir of ephemeral remains, bibliographical escapes” (207). She is, of course, right about the difficulty of identifying genre, but are these merely “ephemeral remains” and “bibliographical escapes?” Interestingly, the book presents the photos as “Envelope Writings” while Werner maintains the label “Envelope Poems.” Are they writings, or are they poems, or are they something else entirely? Fortunately, the book mostly allows us to decide for ourselves.

The Gorgeous Nothings achieves something similar to Duchamp’s “Green Box,” although the means by which it is realized is reversed: while it was Duchamp, as artist, who imbued his box with artistic merit, the Radical Scatters’ artistic merit is determined not by their author/artist but by their reader/viewer. In this regard—and its importance cannot be overstated—The Gorgeous Nothings acts as a kind of hermeneutic mirror, revealing to us the assumptions we make when approaching a genius as staggering and inexplicable as Emily Dickinson’s. We read the Scatters—the Scatters read us. The decision to print these “Envelope Poems” in a book that might appear next to reproductions of paintings by Lucian Freud makes this context both possible and necessary, as it emphasizes the materiality of and the process behind literary creation.

The “Envelope Writings” prominently display the genre-bending realities of Dickinson’s late work, and in so doing demonstrate an evolution of the forms, methods and vision of one of our most celebrated and least understood artists. In addition to presenting itself as a kind of visual art, The Gorgeous Nothings manages to capture the intellectual zeitgeist in a form that serves scholars and non-specialists alike. It displays what is most radical about the Radical Scatters: we see, at its roots, the working of a genius still beyond our comprehension.

 

 

Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD student at the University of Missouri. His work can be found in New American Writing, Fugue, New Orleans Review, Forklift Ohio, Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).

The poems in Untying the Knot (Kelsay Books, 2014), by Karen Paul Holmes, detail her two-year journey through a gamut of trials that rival Job’s. As the title suggests, divorce is the over-arching disaster. With what Thomas Lux described as grace, humor and self-awareness, Holmes relates the year in which she learned that her husband of 30 years was sleeping with one of her close friends, her mother had terminal Lymphoma, and her brother had a life-threatening cancer requiring dangerous surgery. None of these griefs had been foreshadowed; in confessional, free-verse poems, Holmes reaches out to her reader, perhaps the only friend she trusts with the foreign thoughts cycling through her mind during the sanity shaking upheaval in her formerly charmed life.

Unsurprisingly, the themes of this book include heartbreak, denial and anger, but the transcendent theme is the author’s flight from bitterness, which she feels might swamp her life. We follow Holmes’s quixotic quest to heal herself with the assistance of therapists, Buddhist counselors, Zumba lessons and her pen. The great revelation, at least for this reader, was the success Holmes achieved in overcoming her grief by clinging to her values, which include belief in active measures to cleanse herself of negative emotions.

Holmes employs an assortment of styles. There are terse vignettes, such as “How to Undo a Kiss,” printed here in its entirety:

withdraw tongue
slowly draw lips together, then
release his
remove fingers from his hair
un-caress neck
pull your body away
from
all
the places
it
touches his

and the brief snapshot “Rumination,” which plumbs her obsessive thoughts. Here she scatters short lines down the page to depict her wish to crack her head open and let out:

He said…/ I said…/ If only he…/ If only I…/ Why?/ Why?/ Why?

These little nuggets are interspersed with longer narratives of up to three pages. For example, “Mantra Trouble at the Meditation Retreat” is a much funnier sketch on the topic of obsessive thought, neatly making its point by repetition of a mangled mantra, and “Telling My Mother” recounts the long-dreaded rite of informing her ailing parent that the son-in-law she has learned to love is withdrawing from the family, essentially abandoning both of them. The way her mother accepts this news is a revelation of the source of Holmes’ inner strength.

The book is organized into five sections which move through the stages of her divorce in roughly chronological order. The first section limns the secure life Holmes inhabited before her husband’s affair, opening with “Drawn Into Circles,” a poem about the way her dogs rearrange clean towels in their beds into round nests. The poem gradually broadens its focus, comprising, by the end, a metaphysical reverie about cycles of human experience juxtaposed against unbending cultural habits. The author varies stanza shapes to reinforce her themes. Three stanzas curve, but one is blockish—the one which deals with the strict lines our culture has imposed at all stages of life, from babies’ cribs to coffins.

Life lowers the boom on Holmes in the second section, when she discovers her husband’s affair.
The emotions on display include utter despair and black humor. Holmes utilizes a number of forms and poetic devices to match the wide swings in her inner life. In “Beyond My Ken” (Ken being her ex’s name as well as a synonym for knowledge), Holmes uses a lower case “i” to refer to herself. This stylistic choice reflects the devastation of her husband’s betrayal on her sense of self:

i fail the test…i drift…the bottom tempts me.

By the end of this collection, the reader comes to understand the tremendous strength of character and spiritual reserves at Holmes’s disposal, so this poem truly marks the nadir in her emotional life.

In, “Suddenly, Old-Fashioned Words Apply to Me,” Holmes takes a trip through the dictionary to investigate the meaning of her new marital status, almost as if rubbing her nose in the truth—but not without an arch sense of humor:

Betrayed
Scorned
Divorcée

The self-help book even calls me
Cuckhold
My man found a convenient…

 

Throughout this section, tenderness toward her husband, whom she still loves, alternates with anger and confusion. For example, she speaks of a pillow Ken told her he had cried into:

Let me lay my face there
that I may absorb your sorrow.

In the third section, Ken returns. He asks her to dinner on their 32nd anniversary. When he suggests they give things another try, Holmes jumps back in, but only five poems later, after using a Persian rug and a game show as metaphors for all the emotional baggage they have between them, she ends the shortest section with this 2-line nugget:

Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda: didn’t
now get on with it.

Section four deals with the nuts and bolts of dismantling their lives and contains the title poem. They undo the kiss, untie the knot, hire lawyers, sit across conference tables, and sell their home. The poem about her diamond, “The Faceting of Forever,” is one of the strongest in the collection. It traces the eons-long formation of a diamond, its chiseled face and prisms, its acquisition and setting. Each stanza of this poem begins with a one word line, usually a verb, which sums up the rest of the complex data in the stanza, such as:

Apply
five gigapascals of pressure.
Bake at two thousand degrees
for a million years or more.

By the seventh and final stanza, one she’s filled with chasms of extra spaces, the weight of the world has been added to the simple act of taking off her ring:

A diamond can carve anything
even cleave rock hard faith
when the circle moves
from left hand to right
severing forever.

In the fifth and final section, the author moves on. She mourns her mother, communes with siblings and reconsiders her femininity. She even tries to forgive her former friend and checks out men for the first time in decades. By the end of the book this reader rejoiced as Holmes refused to wear those old labels the dictionary dished up and cheered when she let herself shimmy in “Zumba with Lady Gaga.” Spoiler alert: at the end she finds a new guy to take her dancing.

 

 

Patricia Percival Thomas lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she thinks about the big picture while micromanaging her garden. She is the author of the chapbook Bargain with the Speed of Light (Kattywompus Press, 2015). The book tells the story of a box of poems left by her brother after his death and how the mysteries there led to her practice of poetry. Five of her poems can be found in . Her poems also appear in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume 5: Georgia, Town Creek Poetry, Stonepile Writer’s Anthology: Volume II, and other venues. In what seems like a past life, she graduated from Duke University and the Emory University School of Law.

Oozing. Acrylic, ink on white paper, 18 x 24” 2014.

 

is an artist and writer who examines womanhood, motherhood, and the body in her work and others. She’s exhibited in galleries nationally and published her art and writing internationally. She is founding editor of Les Femmes Folles, and illustrated Intimates and Fools (poetry by Laura Madeline Wiseman, Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014).

is the author of the full-length poetry collections American Galactic (Martian Lit, 2014), Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), Queen of the Platform (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013), and Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012). Her dime novel is The Bottle Opener (Red Dashboard, 2014). She is also the author of two letterpress books, nine chapbooks, and the collaborative book Intimates and Fools (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014) with artist Sally Deskins. She is the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Her newest book is the collaborative collection of short stories The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2015) with artist Lauren Rinaldi.