Su Zi's Review of DOMESTIC BODIES by Jennifer Ruth Jackson

    The lineage of modern American poetry is now a century of voices, some of which have been levitated into the canon—the voices we find most anthologized, most taught to students. As scholars find perhaps marginalized voices from history and that work is seen anew, out of its time of creation, certain aspects of the canon gain in wider recognition. Our cultural sense of discovering marginalized voices and amplifying that work is familiar enough when the artist is dead; however, the living artist is a conundrum in the tempestuous weather of social expectation. Taboo topics, although the pillars of the American canon at a historically safe remove, challenge the humanity of us all. 

    What is taboo is a culture can vary, but globalization has homogenized differences into what is sometimes cute exploration—a new type of food, public pajamas; yet certain taboos seem entrenched in westernization and often invert previously revered social positions into ones of stigma; from wise elder to covid disposable. We do not discuss the covid disposable, and what history makes of this will not glow up the humanity of our current culture. We do not discuss the covid disposable even at cultural events, which exclude even as they publish photos of the very throngs that are the core of jeopardy. The covid disposable are the disabled and the not-yet-disabled, the most vulnerable among us, and their American voices ought not to be shunned now, as they too sing our canon.

    Among those whom we now teach as our literary giants was Wallace Stevens, who has not been as readily cited as being as influential as other modernist poets; yet this influence is readily perceivable in the recent publication of Jennifer Ruth Jackson’s Domestic Bodies (Querencia 2023).  Stevens himself did not bother with literary throngs and was recognized after years of work. Jackson’s acknowledgments page too shows years of work, with individual poems finding publication some ten years before collected publication. Such career trajectories are common enough in poetry, as in the arts overall; however, Jackson’s work resonates with aspects of Stevens’ work that are distinct. This resonance can be seen in the poems “Absentee Father” and “Those Who Inherit”, which begin, respectively, with  “Pause, cut the applause off mid-cheer/And screams mod-screech like a bird of prey” (46) and “Come, hungry hippos, another of your ranks has died”(52) that has a metrical echo of Steven’s widely anthologized poem “Emperor of Ice Cream”.  Jackson’s meter throughout this work has a musicality, a tendency towards line emphasis of the quadratic familiar in our culture.

    Jackson employs the Objects of Americana, a path now traditional in modern poetry, and recognizable as American highways, family dinners, bathtubs. In this use of the prosaic, Jackson often allows the metaphor to become symbolic, the poetic delight of a tightly constructed collage, a moment of being privy to the internal experience of living the poem. Jackson is also overtly disabled in this text, and the juxtaposition of that taboo within the framework of an American life will certainly challenge any conditioned thinking. In the arc of the work, Jackson introduces us to disability both in sensual hints—as in “You On The Palate” begins with “Let me taste you again and discover/ (with this chemo mouth) what flavor” (36)—and the medical nightmare of disability “I’d Rather Be Dead Than In Your Shoes” (26). Furthermore, Jackson’s text centers an identity poem “The Word Is ‘Disabled’”, that begins with “Yes, I am that cripple with calloused/knees and suede-soft soles” (56).  The fifth stanza refines this phrase to ‘I am that wheelchair, no name or gender/when you talk about the space I take.”  While the identity becomes one of other to object, Jackson’s point is made through the subtleties of alliteration, rhyme, and other auditory repetitions.

    This is a densely poetic work, well-constructed and well-worthy of inclusion in any scholarly consideration of Steven’s influence—intentional or not. In our era of challenges both to our curriculum and our personal health, Jackson’s work offers a well-crafted consideration from a point of view that has been held taboo for far too long.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

Su Zi's Review of Valois J. Vera's I, THE REVOLUTION

     The personal library is a testament to an individual’s intellectual life, and the volumes curated sometimes have individuality as entities in that collection. Sometimes the rarity of the edition is more than a volume’s history, sometimes the edition is signed or acquired from the author. Upon the release of his book (2023), Valois Vera had a swag bag that was of higher quality than something snagged from a big five house; happy recipients were sent the book, a book bag, a flag, a jute-fringed bookmark, a pin and stickers. The book itself is perfect bound and standard sized, with three blurbs on the back and a graphic of black background, of white letters and the raised fist logo that is found on the sticker and the bookmark. Also striking about this work’s appearance is the title itself:  I, The Revolution. The appositive comma in the title of the work, also gives title to the pronoun; readers are thus confronted immediately with the social activism nature of this volume of poems.

     The work’s opening poem “That Poet, in Front of the Stage” is directly addressing the audience, from the page, but as if from the stage. The strong sense of direct address is a characteristic of this work throughout, and Vera introduces the reader to the narrative individual with a bluntness that emphasizes immediacy. Vera also uses graphic elements in the text itself—some traditional and some more contemporary. In this first poem, Vera uses double spacing and hanging indentation to emphasize six stanzas of repetition “my soul”, “my nose,” “my skin” before repeating “That poet”, using the italics in the poem a dozen times, title included. In the first stanza using this repetition, Vera self identifies as “diagnosed with a disease and a short life [...} I was crowned a casualty, an anomaly, an unpublished/obituary” (12).  A strong confession that continues with observations such as “because a ramp was an afterthought” (14) and continues with further biographical enumeration. Vera is overt in establishing this point of view, of our times as experienced by the disabled individual.

     Many of the pieces in this volume are intended for performance, but Vera is also cognizant of the poems as existing on the page. There’s an experimental aspect to some of the graphic elements, especially the use of the forward slash:

          We fill our souls with fresh fruits/ from the plantations

          of poetry

          We fill our body-minds with intoxicating wines/ from

          the vineyards of our verses   (29)

                                                              

The reader will notice Vera’s multiple forms of internal repetition, his use of end rhyme, internal rhyme and alliteration are frequent techniques. There’s a strong, vocal element to this work, but an awareness of traditional poetic elements that gives the poems a sense of physicality, of the narrator’s strong presence.

      The works are contemporary, the Covid poem is titled “Graves of the Unwell and Other Beautiful Things” (23) and a telephone recitation from this reader of a section of “The Revolution Will Not Be Accessible” (17-22) to a friend facing a bad flare day evoked that sensation in the listener akin to a hosannah. Vega uses observations from the repeated and overt realities of disability “You can tell by the tracks of my tires” (51) , which would be a gestural reference to his wheelchair on stage, but which reminds the text reader of the root of this work.

Vera himself makes multiple references to the root as a symbol—the rising fist graphic seems to be rising from roots plant-like, the personal history he speaks of in the poems is often on his family.

     Vera’s poems are an enumeration of his disability experience and might be seen as an answer to Whitman’s Sing of America; however, Vera’s point is a call for justice, a call for inclusion as both a poet and as a physical member of society. If our libraries are, as Franklin said, a wealth between the ears, then the physical realities of disability do not bar accessibility of this book of poems onto the library shelf. If the curator of a personal library keeps books of personal significance, that “opened up a truth” (Dianne, personal conversation, 2024), then poetry from the perspective of disability ought not to continue to be marginalized.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

   

Su Zi's Review of BEAST BODY EPIC by Amanda Earl

 

   The narrative arc occurs often enough in individual poems, and is not utterly rare in an entire volume of poetry, but what stories are being told? The reader will be familiar with a narrative poem that offers a protagonist, and the position of the protagonist as a hero is an established one. The hero takes a journey and the literary work that reports this journey is generally called an epic. Of course, there are dialectical uses of that word, but all inferences consider the journey to be iconic, to carry cultural weight sometimes for centuries. If that journey is a visitation of hell, of horror, of torture, then those who lived to tell are heroic by the fact of their survival. Amanda Earl’s Beast Body Epic (AngelHouse Press 2023) is such a journey.

    Elegance is the aim of many an art form, and poetry is not a general exception; however, a binary of the macabre and the eloquent can have an elevated impact, and such is the case with this work. The book itself is trade-sized, perfect bound with a matt-finished, heavy and textured paper—it has a sense of physicality, its near one hundred pages have a slight weight. The cover image of a vispo graphic folding circle is repeated on page 39 as a section graphic; however, each of the eight sections in this volume begin with a vispo graphic. With endpapers of red heavy bond that echo the red and creme cover design, the book itself has a subtle luxuriousness.

   The first of the eight sections is the most narrative in structure, with the protagonist being introduced as Rot. Harking back, perhaps, to Medieval theater, the second character met is Death, “the moocher”, with the third character being introduced by possessive case in the third stanza (and the work often maintains this possessive reference) of that of “husband”. The narrative moves quickly into a hospital, but the voice of the poem as a poem ought not to be swept past. The poems here keep careful tension from the get-go: “Death’s pub stank of onion breath and armpits” (6). The immediacy of the perceptions in combination with the contemporary setting gives the morality play of the narrative a steady energy.

   Perhaps it is still taboo to talk of illness, of infirmity; certainly, vulnerability is not always a welcome guest in cultural discourse. When visions of the grotesque are the prosaic offerings of media, the viewer has to decide what aspect of this vicarious experience to take, and often the default appeal is to other the sufferer. These poems, however, are reports of the suffering, as experienced from the body in torment: “the nurse pulled the stained gauze/ out of me and kept pulling. I was a /hat with a trail of colorful scarves/but only one was red. It stung, its/string of scarlet bells ringing “(34). While the noun phrase of stained gauze is relatable enough, the stanza elevates empathy with the comedic metaphor, before the sensory and alliterative metaphor reminds the reader of pain.

  While pleasure is often both easily called to memory and to the pen, pain exists as amnesia, as metaphor. The narrative’s perceptions are often ones of pain, “[...] I am/ destroyed/ I am vacant/ a light” (58) and this aspect of the work is notable in its dedication to that which we rarely speak. It might be said that work that centers disability is, in its very nature, tackling the taboo topic; Even more taboo is the acknowledgment of sexuality in disabled people. Yet, section five of this narrative has the plot of a sexual encounter. The protagonist has become “a warrior who refuses to die” (63) yet there’s no soft-focus mythology here when “he puts his hand on/ my stomach and winces at the ridges the staples/have made in my once smooth white skin or his// fingers meet the crater of the site where my/ colon once was” (63). This is not a distanced view, it is intimate, physical and specific.

 

   In previous times, work about illness, work from the disability community tended to be marginalized overall. Realities of vulnerability were shadow banned in favor of the myths of conquering, super-strengthened anti-heroes. The realities of years of sickness and turmoil in our contemporary culture evaporate these weak myths, but their absence ought to encourage us to learn from those who faced a horror we cannot fully speak about, a horror from which we are eager to move away...move forward to the just society we dream about Yet, we cannot think ourselves just readers if we leave such work behind.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

Su Zi's Review of Charlotte and the Chickenman: The Inevitable Nigressence of Charlotte-Noa Tibbit

   

  It is not often that an experienced reader will encounter a contemporary novel that has the intricacy, the layering and the joy of a literary text, but Aina Hunter’s Charlotte and the Chickenman: The Inevitable Nigressence of Charlotte-Noa Tibbit  ( Whiskey Tit 2022) is such a work. While the publisher, and a review by Jesi Buell (exactingclam) emphasize the postmodern narrative structure of the work, using phrases such as “Afrofuturistic” (WhiskeyTit) or “grotesque that unfolds in a surreality that hovers between dream and nightmare”(Buell), these aspects serve as evidence to posit the work as postmodernism. Indeed, an exhibition of the most famous—and exploited—of Black American postmodernist painters, Jean-Michele Basquiat, serves well as an iconic graphic of Black postmodernism for anyone but the most culturally obtuse. As a linguistic work, Buell’s review concludes with the provocative phrase,” visual success made textual” and describes the work as “experimental”, to perhaps warn a more casual reader.

  Yet postmodernism in poetry has long been known to challenge existent notions; Hoover’s extensive essay introducing the Norton does state that postmodernism, “opposes centrist values […]and any heroic portrayal of the bourgeois self and its concerns’(xxxv); that a prose work would exist as such almost classically, requires a view into the work beyond that of Hunter’s fascinating characters and overall structure. The reader, however, gets splashed into the text with the title of the first chapter, and the experienced reader might give a bit of a yelp. Chapter titles table of contents start with “White Meat” and include a line of synopsis; further chapter titles include “Blood Bed”,  “Refuge for the Wretched”, and the earworm worthy “Gracious Living”. There’s a strength of voice here that the reader might fear is a promise unkept, but Hunter’s opening line is equally delicious: “ If you ever get the chance to try a really fine thigh-steak –a citrus-marinated, pepper-roasted steak du thigh – you’ll want to give yourself time to prepare”(2). The reader, having cast eye over table of contents, chapter heading page, chapter epigram, is faced with a text involving dashes, but which draws in the reading mind by discussing food.

  Food is a primary metaphor in this novel as symbol, and didactic point. Even grocery store advertisements use new flavors in food to bridge xenophobia, and general understanding of ethnicities includes food. That the novel begins with a colloquial sermon on protein sources puts the reader at the table with the characters. It is through these characters that Hunter begins a multiple strain of language variances that are maintained throughout the text. Use of multiple languages in a text can be a slammed door to neophyte readers, but Hunter’s clever use of these variances to describe food, to be spoken by characters, and to describe the speculative culture by use of invented phrases and proper nouns serves to tour guide the reader both gently and elegantly: “Ti’Luc, accepting a fresh dish of oil from his server, changed the subject. ‘Many people are still eating farmed animal bone-meat in the States, pas non?’ (11)”. A reader familiar with the Creole of the Louisiana and Haitian cultures mentioned in the novel will be more familiar with these linguistic flavors, but Hunter is adept and keeps enough of our familiar language to keep the work flowing.

  Language is not the only variable used in the text, as chapter three is written as a script, with a change in font. These transgressions to standard notions of the novel are structurally deft, as the following chapter contains both an illustration and a first-person account of being bedborn and bleeding. The novel follows this apparent early climax with a speculative chapter taking the point of view of a factory farm pig, with jumps in time following the protagonist, and ending with the character’s infancy. 

   By challenging notions of language, of narrative structure, of imagery and point of view, this novel’s postmodern construction allows the author to challenge many other notions, most notably being our concept of food. Hunter goes to some length to discuss our institutions of eating: from table manners, “his mothers also drew their spoons north” (5), to spices “Sassafras! Genuis, Cherie!”(7) to our cultural habits of feasting “they feasted for days! They drank wine and rum and they laughed and talked story— “(33). That the narrative also employs such critical philosophical terms as Eurin-Colonial, and African-American Vernacular allows the reader to sip the parodic titling of social and governmental institutions in the novel’s futurism that forms the work’s setting.

   While some readers might find the retrocede of contemporary work to be worrisome, those who seek better intellectual nourishment will find subsistence in this novel; however, what the reader choses as a snack might be given reconsideration. For the experienced reader for whom rereading rewards with deeper vision, this work provides ample meat.

  

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

    

Su Zi's Review of "As Meaningful As Any Other " by Donna Snyder

   In our terrifying times of overt misogyny now, a view of women’s history can serve us well. There are artifacts aplenty, and each is a symbol of a way of life and a world view. Beyond batik and blarney are rituals that are tied to self-sustenance and self-agency. Every culture that has women has women’s ways, sometimes hidden in hairdo, but nonetheless a ritual of feminine celebration.

   Poetry has a well-established place in women’s history, and the ongoing efforts to suppress and marginalize women’s voices is endless evidence. Thus, offered to us as a new release is Donna Snyder’s As Meaningful As Any Other (Gutter Snob 2022), a perfect bound volume in trade size; an illustrated volume, with a number of images by Tezozomoc. The book is structured in sections, and each section has an image as a frontispiece, with one being repeated on the cover. The images themselves are digital art, saturated and warm toned, that employ a collage of a human woman and symbols such as antlers, roots, and our planet. The sections of the work are also titled symbolically, using roots, auguries, flight, awakening and crossroads. Snyder has taken fragments from other of her work and uses these as an introduction to each section, such as a fragment entitled “woman smiles” that opens the second section “auguries”:

   Woman smiles, her face starred, exotic birds tattooed around her mouth, beneath her eyes, around her nose […] (11) that squares off the reader with this vision of the Divine Feminine.

   The poems here are perhaps also prayers, with both overt and subtle symbolism.  The last section of this text, “Crossroads”, includes the poem “ Her blood, a faded ribbon” that whispers of the moment when menstruation ceases, “ Her blood faded/ only a ribbon covered with dust”(46), a moment notable in women’s lives but rarely overtly celebrated. If the poems here are rituals, then the rituals themselves often involve visiting art museums and reading other poets as well. However, there’s also mention of acts of intimacy, such as “this little rhyme that filled my head upon awakening” with the lovely line “my lips awash in the taste of your unbathed back” (32). This is writing that is as much an account of a life as a collection of correspondence, there’s a tone of a woman telling her confident of the desert and the desert city’s denizens.

   Written in a hybrid of free verse and prose, these pieces seem to echo from the lineage from which they draw. The book’s last piece, “Fool’s Moon” opens with the line “The Fool’s Moon leads ineluctably to darkness” (53) which goes on the include a dancing ritual of:

   Moon paints snakes on her face. Copper bells ring. She dances, peculiarly festooned, as if time really exists […]

While the Fool’s Moon is now a minimally celebrated event, occurring every 28 years, ritualized dancing is still very much entrenched in both women’s and the wider, western culture. And while some readers may be mystified at the symbolism employed by Snyder, the symbols are common to certain types of tarot cards. There’s a sense of a tarot reading in this work, the sections and the admonitions, prayers and reminders that prompt each piece. The draw that would encompass the evidence given here speaks to the full moon and meteor shower that read this work since its arrival as a book. While this may amuse, it would be wise for booksellers of tarot too to include this volume in their inventory. And while a tarot draw, or a tarot-style poem draw might maybe remind us of our celestial seasons, there are those who are comforted by history, by this quiet and ancient wisdom.

GAS Interview with Donna Snyder

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

A Raw Ride: review of Marty Cain's The Wound Is (Not) Real—by Su Zi

 

                  

     The reader approaches a text, and there’s a relationship between them, a conversation between the voice of the text and the potential for resonance with the reader; however, not all texts are specifically representative of the author, personally. In the case of a memoir, the reader enters the text, and that relationship, with the notion that it is also the author’s life in the text, is somehow personal, if vicarious. Of late, readers have sometimes been given the sort of warning that’s seen in cinema; notifications of disturbing content. In Marty Cain’s The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir (Trembling Pillow 2022), the content warning also includes “Readers with photosensitive epilepsy should be aware that some of the linked videos (accessed through the QR codes) contain flashing lights”.  Since not many texts contain QR codes, the reader is also alerted to the potential for a non-traditional format for the work overall. While the book proclaims itself a memoir, this is not a prose-only chronology, nor is the work overtly prose, as some pieces are stream-of-consciousness, some are narrative prose, others are narrative poems, including a piece titled “Narrative Poem” (81).

      The work itself starts with a prologue that establishes the voice of the text as a Sibling Of A Disabled Person, but the structural arc of this prologue involves memory overall, makes overt allusion to Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” as an architecture for fragments that introduce character and setting. The prologue ends with a QR code. Thus, the reader is alerted to graphic elements in the text: the use of upper case, Selby-like run on sentencing, bold face, spatial elements and sometimes purely graphic use of the pound and asterisk keys. To their credit, the publisher includes these elements, but whether the use of a single old English font letter for the start of pieces is the editor’s or author’s decision as a helpful reading marker only adds to the subtle aesthetics of this work.

     Such a work as this is as much meditation as memoir, memory filtered through the experiences of life. Lest the reader too readily dismiss the text as merely some post-punk hybrid, “Wordsworth Poem” begins with three paragraphs in a type of high-wire standard critical thought that then becomes a swan dive into memory. The transition here, debating Wordsworth’s 

choice of poetic form, makes the observation “And form is a feeling/ // And form is a garment/ //

And in my mind, I return to the clothes” (23), peeks into the core structure of this work: each piece’s structure is chosen to clothe the thesis, the work is dressed in prose or QR codes, each episode has a Look.

     These devices seem intended to a accentuate the physical deeds done in this work. In “Kids of The Black Hole, Part II”, which is presented as prose stanzas, the first stanza includes “He’s done it before. He’s hatch-marked his arms and shown me the scars” (35), one of the text’s many references to self-harm. The piece continues with “We’d kissed before. He’s asked me to blow him. I’s said no. I turned off the light. I don’t think I spoke”, but then continues as a meditation between trauma and art “It feels good and it hurts”. It is here that the repetitive use of wound in this work overall is given the thesis of “The wound is not real / // This, too, is perhaps a common sentiment for victims of abuse” (37). What the reader experiences is a clearly curated collection of violent memories at a rather gentle remove.

    As a literary work, Cain’s book is energetic. The work has a distinctive auditory quality that makes it true to its contemporary copyright. And while the book overtly self-identifies as memoir, “This is still my confessional poem” (36) also seems traditionally apt. The reader in search of inspo-porn memoir will find few soft feelings here.  The dozen or so small press zines that published these pieces prior to their collection here speaks to our current culture yen for such exposures of intimate darkness. It is then for each reader to depart the work in confrontation with their own landscape, be their experience one of horror or of catharsis. 

 

    Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

Meg Tuite’s "White Van" reviewed by Su Zi

 

Content Warning: Meg Tuite’s White Van

Monsters are an ancient memory, a symbol, a staple of genre. Works thus of horror tend to time the reveal of their monsters, be it a frightening fog or a franchise of mutated outer space lizards. Not so in White Van, where the monster are monsters, unnamed, unseen. While a typical horror offering might involve the eternally invisible, it is precisely the prosaic settings Tuite depicts that make the work so horrifying.

Reviews and blurbs of the work, however, emphasize Tuite’s craftsmanship, with quotations that tend to view the lines through a poetic lens. Certainly, Tuite overtly has skills; however, the hybrid nature of the writing as collected has blurbs which describe the work as poems, as prose, as mash-up. The text contains just shy of 50 titles in the contents. A visual inspection of the text reveals occasional use of shortened lines, the use of alternating bold and italics font, and an interesting consistency in stanza breaks: used for paragraphing, even prose-appearing sections will be broken at 20 or fewer lines with a double space break. While a typical hybrid work can sometimes be tipped in balance visually, the structure here is almost demure—it's the sequential nature of the narratives that build the arc of this work.

A sensibility is strongly present here, and a lazy interpretation might escalate the genre of the work from horror to obscenity. Here, the hybrid nature of the writing might be seen as a gesture to influence; contemporary readers might remember Acker, or ought to. White Van exists in ordinary settings, as ordinary as the vehicle named. Each episode has a victim, and violence survivors are warned that gruesome becomes ordinary here. The daily nature of each episode, “Dad roams for hitchhikers” (69), is belied by the overt and repetitive taboos “ A magazine article kidnaps me while on the toilet”(39) or “Oxycontin shaves on to tinfoil like a shot and a prayer”(47), so that each episode builds upon the flash narratives for the work’s overarching point of the infinite of intimate violence.

The volume itself is a recent release from Unlikely Books, the title nears the dozen mark for the author, and the list of where these episodes were previously published is a half a page; therefore, we can conclude that the title was released both as an individual offering and as a thread of consideration in the publisher’s catalog. Certainly, the book itself appears as ordinary trade as that of some of the monsters’ forms of employment in Tuite’s episodes. Perhaps that is the resonant horror here: how unspoken the violence is in consideration of the work, how ordinary the settings, how police blotters are full of these episodes. Our repulsion might be immediate from the text, but the serial nature, the sheer numbers represented here, are the too often unspoken horror of our times now, the keystone of all other violence being our deaf eyes to each victim. For readers untouched by the daily horror of personal violence, this text gives you enough gore and anguish to catch, at least, the scent of blood. 

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.