issue eighteen : guest-edited by Melissa Eleftherion

NOW AVAILABLE: G U E S T #18
edited by Melissa Eleftherion
see here for Melissa Eleftherion’s introduction and biography 

featuring new work by:

Caroline Goodwin
Nancy Chen Long
Elise Ficarra
Brenda Iijima
Florencia Milito
Saba Syed Razvi
Aileen Cassinetto
Zoe Tuck
Kim Shuck

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Author biographies: 

Aileen Cassinetto is the Poet Laureate of San Mateo County. Widely anthologized, she is also the author of the poetry collections, Traje de Boda (2010) and The Pink House of Purple Yam Preserves & Other Poems (2018), as well as three chapbooks through Moria Books’ acclaimed Locofo series. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Banyan Review, Fellowship Magazine, Marsh Hawk Press Review, The Nonconformist Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, and Vox Populi, among others. Aileencassinetto.com

Elise Ficarra is a poet, writer, educator, and arts administrator. Her book Swelter was winner of the Michael Rubin Book Award at SF State. Her poetry is available in various online and print publications and has appeared in collective installations Broadside Attractions Vanquished Terrains (Intersection for the Arts) and 1078 Gallery.

Caroline Goodwin's recent collections are The Paper Tree (Big Yes Press, 2017) and Custody of the Eyes (dancing girl press, 2019). A new collection, Old Snow, White Sun, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press. These three poems are from Matanuska, which is forthcoming from Aquifer Press in Wales, UK. Goodwin lives on the San Mateo Coast with her two daughters and Jimi Hendrix the Pug.

Brenda Iijima is a poet, playwright, choreographer and visual artist. She is the author of nine books of poetry. Her involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of genre, mode, receptivity, and field of study. Her current work engages submerged and occluded histories, other-than-human modes of expression and telluric awareness in all forms. Iijima is the founding editor-publisher of Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Brooklyn.

Nancy Chen Long is the author of Wider than the Sky (Diode Editions, 2020), which was selected for the Diode Editions Book Award, and Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Her work has been supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellowship and a Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award. You’ll find her recent poems in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. nancychenlong.com

Born in Argentina, Florencia Milito spent part of her childhood in Venezuela and has lived in the United States since she was nine. She’s a bilingual poet, essayist, and translator, and her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Indiana Review, Catamaran, Entremares, Digging through the Fat, Diálogo, 92nd Street Y, Quiet Lightning, Ninth Letter, and Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA, among others. She’s a Hedgebrook and Community of Writers alumna, CantoMundo fellow, and former San Francisco Grotto fellow. Her bilingual collection Ituzaingó: Exiles and Reveries / exilios y ensueños was published by Nomadic Press in 2021.

Saba Syed Razvi, PhD is the author of the Elgin Award-nominated collection In the Crocodile Gardens (Agape Editions) and the collection heliophobia (Finishing Line Press), which appeared on the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award ® for Superior Achievement in Poetry, as well as the chapbooks Limerence & Lux (Chax Press), Of the Divining and the Dead (Finishing Line Press), and Beside the Muezzin’s Call & Beyond the Harem’s Veil (Finishing Line Press). She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX, where in addition to working on scholarly research on interfaces between contemporary poetry and science and on gender & sexuality in speculative and horror literature and pop-culture, she is writing new poems and fiction.

Kim Shuck was the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Shuck has authored eight solo books, edited a handful of anthologies and chapthologies, and has work in many anthologies and journals. In the aftermath of being SF laureate Shuck spends a great deal of time walking and not organizing poetry events. Kim's latest book is Exile Heart from That Painted Horse Press.

Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts, where she is building the Threshold Academy, a future bookstore and non-traditional educational / performance space. With Britt Billmeyer-Finn, she co-curates the But Also house reading series. Zoe is the author of the chapbooks Every Poem I Wrote From 1 to 14 December 2020, Soft Investigations (Daisy Mayhem Books 2019) and Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light 2014). She is currently writing her newsletter, blogging about books, and teaching a year of classes on the literature of friendship through the Liminal Lab. Find out more at zoetuck.com.

G U E S T #18 : Melissa Eleftherion : Introduction

 

 

 

Transformation is the great life integer. As discomfiting and tenuous as it sounds, we move through phases & changes as we become & become again. During this unique life cycle where we are being invited/forced to stretch & grow more than usual, I wondered how/if poets were getting through, & what it might look like to cohere these visions.

I reached out to various poets & writers to submit work on the theme of transformation, some of whom I did not know at all, and in doing so, developed & deepened a few relationships with poets I had long admired. This too became an opportunity for stretching outside my own comfort zones.   

Each of these works takes as its fulcrum the concept of transformation. In each of these poems, there is a turning; a decisive pivot of the will to consider or become something other than human; some process by which we might transmogrify into a greater understanding; by which we might at once be immersed and immerse our cells & light into a great organism. Might this be a homecoming, might this signal at last a belonging?

So, gentle reader – transform with us, eat “serviceberries fresh from the shrub”, visit “white skulls resting on the sage-covered desert”, “learn to communicate those languages. Breathe this all in. Hrim: seed mantra.”, “the songs of abolitionists & those bold enough to dream”, “to make wings out of no thing but air and steel”, “here is a wish and the wish is love”, “…to admit that I just wanted to go somewhere and be if not normal then in context”, “We will wear the agates Their inscriptions Cracked from Wildfire”, “may we fall into mouths that devour us.”

 

 

 

Melissa Eleftherion is a cis queer human, a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & ten chapbooks, including trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020), & abalone (poems-for-all, 2021). Her poems & prose have been widely published in various journals including the Berkeley Poetry Review, Entropy, & La Vague. Born & raised in Brooklyn, Melissa created, developed, and co-curates The SF State Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange with Elise Ficarra. She now lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Library, curates the LOBA Reading Series, and serves as the Poet Laureate of Ukiah 2021-2023. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.