1) My poems that won an Honorable Mention at The Feminist Wire are now live! Please read my sexual lego ramblings here, as well as another poem that is a bit harder to glibly summarize. Other honorable mention recipients were Coco Owen and Kimberly Reyes, for whom I couldn’t find a link. Owen’s poem “Who rled” was an especial favorite of mine. I really liked Evie Shockley’s, the judge, selections as a whole, including the winner and finalists. Very experimental choices.

2) A book review of a book I truly loved, Michalle Gould’s Resurrection Party, is up at Entropy, and I was so glad to work with them again! I would recommend them to anyone looking to get into book reviewing.

The second Feats of Poetic Strength went off without a hitch! Thank you to all the readers, audience members (including Feats of Poetic Strength Alumna, Hila Ratzabi), Gus from 1fiftyone gallery for hosting us, and Girls Rock Philly for the PA rental.

Before photos, I am going to plug Volume III of Feats of Poetic Strength, please RSVP! It features readers K.T. Landon, MaryAnn Miller, Violet LeVoit, Elizabeth Hoover, Elizabeth Langemak, and Sheila McMullin, and is sure to be as powerful as the first and second. It is also a fundraiser for Permanent Wave Philly, a great feminist collective of which I am a part.

Now, photos!

Liz Solms, our first reader, took us on a volley between Jamaica and Philadelphia. Lovely words.

Elliott BatTzedek (who blogs at thisfrenzy) was a hoot, particularly her poem pertaining to peaches.

Ysabel Y. Gonzalez was a great performer who had the audience clapping between every poem.

Jennifer Hook read poems from her book “This is How He Left Me,” and took us on an emotional journey recounting her life after her husband’s passing.

Catherine Bancroft finished up the night with her hilarious and moving poems, full of imaginative leaps.

The crowd after the reading discussing the work. This gives you an idea of how cool the space was!

The readers line up for the mug shot.

And that’s me on the left!

Thank you again to everyone, it was wonderful!!!

“Ode to Kingsessing,” “Engagement,” and “Thin Walls” have been accepted by Storyscape Journal. I love these poems, and am so eager to see them in this wonderful journal. They are my most recent works to be accepted, and it is great to have some confirmation that I am heading on a good path with my writing.

The journal has an interesting premise, where instead of categorizing into prose/poetry, etc., they categorize by “Truth,” “Untruth,” and “We Don’t Know and They Won’t Tell Us.” So after my poems were accepted, I had to label them one of the three. It was a really challenging decision!

My poems are heavily influenced by confessionalist or post-confessionalist themes, and at their core they are all true. But then the muddiness of the details! I take liberties here and there in the writing process (the hissing cockroaches in “Thin Walls” are typically found in Madagascar, not in Philadelphia kitchens, for example), and it was a fascinating moment for me to decide if such a detail made these poems “Untruths.” Thinking of James Frey, I can imagine an argument for making them “Untruths.”

But I felt that negated so much of the poem’s meaning. And poetry is not likely to be held to the same standards of truth as memoir, for reasons I am both unsure of and grateful for. I think it has to do with, in part, the expanse of your audience. I believe I would prefer the right to change a detail here and there if it better suits the meaning of the poem, then to be bound to an exact (while malleable, fluid) truth.

So I decided on labeling my poems “Truths,” and don’t have a fear that I’m about to be kicked out Oprah’s book club as a result. It was a great process, deciding what drew the line where, and it’s one I’d suggest for all writers.

Oh, and of course, a great way to do so is to submit and have your work accepted by Storyscape! Link to submissions page here.

Elated to announce that Crab Orchard Review has accepted my poem “Lucky Ones” for their special issue, “20 Years: Writing About 1995-2015.” Crab Orchard Review was the first journal I ever submitted to when I was 19, so it is a really big deal for me, 11 years later, to know I will soon appear in their pages.

The poem is about the 276 girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the title is a sort of irony referring to those who were able to escape, but will still spend the rest of their lives scarred. For those of you wondering, I wrote this poem well before meeting Vashti at the Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway, but did show it to her. She said it was like I was there, which meant a great deal to me, as I did a lot of research and invested much of my heart and time into writing the poem.

When I wrote it originally, it was in many couplets, and had a very neat and tidy order on the page. I meant this to provide a contrast to the chaos it was describing, but when poet Leonard Gontarek was reviewing it, he suggested trying these longer, more unwieldy lines, and that is its present incarnation, one I am much more pleased with. I am learning to be less clever and analytical in the construction of my writing through working with him.

I am very glad that it was picked up, as it is one of my favorite poems I have ever written, and I couldn’t think of a better place for it to find a home.

You can find the link here. I am grateful the journal accepted my poem, as well as the time they took with getting the spacing as it appeared in my original submission. They are currently seeking poems and prose written by women to do with American music. I really encourage you to submit, as they have been great to work with!

You can hear a recording of the poem that my old friend Brandon produced here.

A note on some of the other submissions in the journal: I was, of course, elated to see friend Denton Loving, author of Crimes Against Birds, published here with his piece “Hatred with Wings.” It’s wonderfully written, with amazing moments of dialogue. Denton is also the editor of drafthorse, another journal to which I recommend you submit.

Two women’s poems in particular also jumped out at me, among many excellent pieces of writing. The first was “An American Meditation” by Shandiel Beers,  an enviable poem that does so much in a surprisingly small amount of lines. The second was “Mechanicsville, Iowa” by Amanda Moore. Favorite poems of mine (think Bidart’s Ellen West) create characters devotedly, and this is one of those poems. The subject matter is loved and well cared for.

As a whole I think it is a wonderful issue, and I am glad to be a part of it!

That plucky writer above with the grin-so-hard-it eats-your-upper-lip-smile is me, at the 22nd Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway, sponsored by Murphy Writing at Stockton College. As I described in this post, I won a scholarship to the conference through the Jan-ai Scholarship Foundation. Without this scholarship, I would never have been able to attend, as I am deeply in student loan debt (with a dash of credit card debt thrown in for fun–side note, if you find yourself in a similar situation, please visit this site, it has been a saving grace for me).

Now that I’ve used all of my allotted hyperlinks for one post, on to the enormous amount of fun I had at the conference. I met a woman there named Vashti who came all the way for this conference from Nigeria (!!), and she was assigned to be my roommate. She gave a tear-jerker of a lecture about Boko Haram’s effect on her students (she is a university professor) and how she uses poetry to help them navigate their fear. It was so incredibly moving, and I felt a greater appreciation for American culture and the privileges it affords its citizens than I have in a long time. Plus, Vashti’s husband calling us at 2 AM from Nigeria gave me a funny story to tell each morning (albeit groggily).

(above, Vashti and I, below, Vashti giving her lecture).

I met a bunch of other cool folk, and had a really interesting conversation with a woman named Kyle about being realistic about your talent. This is something I am very much coming to grips with. I am not one of today’s hottest young poets, sky rocketing into The New Yorker straight out of the crib, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t still publish and get my book out there. It’s hard to fully encapsulate the conversation and what it meant to me, but in sum: it meant a great deal.

I worked with poets J.C. Todd, Luray Gross, and Kenneth Hart, and Kim Addonizio and Stephen Dunn were there as well. Luray has become my new mental cheerleader–meeting with her was wonderfully powerful, and really spurred on my ambition for my manuscript, to push it further and see what I am leaving unsaid. I very much hope to stay in touch with her in one capacity or another. Kim Addonizio’s closing reading was hilarious and moving at the same time.

And there was intergenerational dancing!! Which is my favorite kind of dancing. When I am dancing next to a 75 year old man along to “Shout” that is really where life feels a-okay! All weddings, all the time.

I wrote one poem that I am convinced I will include in my manuscript. I brought it to Leonard Gontarek and crew for review, and he had some great suggestions on how to improve it. I was writing a difficult poem about my mother’s mental health, and only had an hour and a half to do so (that’s part of The Getaway structure), so adopted this refrain to push through the writing process. Leonard is suggesting I remove this refrain on account of cleverness, and leave the poem more vulnerable in its approach.

It reminded me of my manuscript consultation with Luray, where she wanted me to try saying what I was leaving unsaid on account of it being too difficult. Both teachers really pushed me over the course of this one week. Handling personal subject matter can be complicated in this regard, you can have all the poetic tools in the world, but if you don’t have the emotional fortitude to write what needs to be said to bring about the poem’s truth, it’s going to flop. You (I) run the risk of just having emotional subject matter on the page for the reader to be voyeur, but without making the connection to the reader of why it should matter to them.

In last words, I’m going to make a push for a workshop that very much helped me when I first moved to Philly, which I have linked to previously: The Red Sofa Salon. If I weren’t still in the financial dire straits I find myself in, I would be your classmate in a heartbeat. Which isn’t to say it’s not affordable, at $40 a class for her (Hila Ratzabi’s) expertise, yummy vegetarian food, and cocktails, it winds up being a bargain I am very sad to miss out on.

In final final words, I am off to the dentist. Look for poems about root canals in the near future.

and I get a shout out! Read the review in its entirety here. My section is quoted below:

“While quite a few other poems succeeded on one level or another, two resonated particularly deeply. In Shevaun Brannigan’s ‘To the cabbie who waits for me as I unlock the door,’ drunkenness and loneliness ‘in the 20 hour dress and its wrinkles,/in the body and its nightly defeat,’ engender a quiet cry for help, which in turn lays bare a desperate life: ‘A little girl is going to run out/the door, chased by her father./Get her out of here.'”

I am so glad they liked this poem, as it is one I am quite fond of! I wrote it in Hila Ratzabi’s Red Sofa Salon workshops. There is an open house for these workshops January 11th, from 1-4. Click on the link to register, she is a wonderful teacher and there is no obligation to join!

Excited to share my review of Take this Spoon by poet Julia Wendell! Thank you to the good folks over at Entropy for publishing it.

As someone who is perpetually being told I am too literal, I enjoyed this article on “Why Poems Don’t Make Sense” by Matthew Buckley Smith.

I feel as though many of the poems I read today don’t make sense, which is hard for me because I am very much a beginning, middle, end type person. I recognize this as a limitation of mine, and of my poetry.

Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!

Just wanted to share my call for submissions for a reading I am curating for female poets, to be held in Philadelphia.

I read at the first one, and below is a picture from that (very chilly but fun) reading:

Call for Readers:

I am organizing a new, all female poet reading series in Philadelphia. The first reading was held at the Philadelphia Sculpture Gym and featured Hila Ratzabi, Kimberly Ann Southwick, dawn lonsinger, and Chloe Martinez. There is one slot open for the next reading, to be held on February 13th at 1fiftyone Gallery, and I am also scheduling line-ups for future readings.

To submit, please email three poems and a bio as an attachment toloveantilovereading@gmail.com by December 31st, and indicate whether you are available on February 13th, and/or if you would like to be considered for future readings as well. The theme for the February 13th reading is love/anti-love, and you are encouraged to submit poems that fit that theme if you are interested in reading that date. Other poets reading on February 13th include Elliot Battzedek, Catherine Bancroft, Jennifer Hook, and Liz Solms.

Women of color and non-cis gendered poets are strongly encouraged to apply. Please include a note specifying as such if you consider yourself to be a member of a community underrepresented in the world of literature.