Grist

The Journal for Writers

How to Survive the Rest of Your Life: Vanessa Blakeslee’s Perfect Conditions | Review by Samantha Edmonds

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Several weeks after finishing Vanessa Blakeslee’s Perfect Conditions (Curbside Splendor, 2018), I still feel these stories overflowing in my head, the way salt lingers on skin after an ocean swim. An apt comparison—of the ten stories in Blakeslee’s collection, six are water-based, set in coastal regions (particularly, but not exclusively, Latin American countries) and depicting ocean towns where people try living Jimmy-Buffett-style to surf their blues away. Do you think it’s always warm there and people are happier? Do you think the water washes away your troubles and you rise from the waves of your salty baptism into a new life?

If you do, you’d have that in common with many of Blakeslee’s characters. And like them, you’d be wrong.

This collection takes readers to paradise—perhaps in search of these so-called “perfect conditions”—and very quickly reveals the truth about perfection and paradise: People ruin everything for themselves everywhere. In the title story—which first appeared in Grist—Jack, living out his retirement in Costa Rica, is visited by his adult son Sebastian for the first time in several years, only to find this is not the son he remembers. In the horror-filled “Stand by to Disembark,” a young man on a sailing rig experiences claustrophobia and paranoia as he learns the captain has no plans to let him off. Two young surfers in “Splitting the Peak” fall in love on the beaches of Australia during a competition, only to be torn apart by reality when the trip ends. A forty-six-year-old gets testicular cancer in “Arthur and George: The Voyage Begins,” but is unable to go to the doctor until he finds health insurance for fear of getting a “pre-existing condition.” Paradise is not to be found in these places. But I promise, you still want to come along for the trip: Oscillating as it does between hilarity, heart-warmth, and terror—and sometimes all three at once—Blakeslee’s collection is not one to miss.

It’s not all beaches and ocean waves, either. Several stories cross genres, featuring aliens and doomsday preppers and post-apocalyptic police states where art is illegal and people don’t even own their own bodies. But “the invisible snap of magic” connecting all these stories, regardless of genre, are the people and relationships (162).

Perhaps the most important story in the collection to me is “Sustainable Practices.” Nina and Clint are on their honeymoon in Tahiti, chosen because Nina wants to visit the Tahitian aquifer portrayed on the label of her favorite bottled water. Upon arrival at the resort, Nina finds the island as idyllic as her dreams, but it’s not long before the people around her force her to reevaluate her understanding, such as when she snaps a picture after a bus ride of “her pedicure still intact from the wedding (#perfectpedi #honeymoon #daytrip #lovinglife)” and then notices “the long hard toenails in cracked, nameless plastic thongs” of the local woman next to her who makes this journey every day, and silently, ashamed, Nina “puts away her phone” (42). Nina discovers a more sinister truth than the “artesian aquifer” from the water bottle: a familiar story of economic disparity and capitalism and colonialization in these so-called “paradise places.” That it is told through the perspective of a #ArmchairActivist, who forgets the trouble immediately the moment she is on a plane ride home, would make it funny (and it is, actually) if it weren’t also so true. In a collection that uses these real places as settings for fictional stories, “Sustainable Practices” is a vital addition, one that manages to critique the very real, very damaging effect of the colonialization of these places in service of the white outsider even as the book tells stories about those very kinds of visitors.

And at its heart, this is a collection full of outsiders, characters that are both apart of and a part from their worlds, hoping desperately to find a place that feels like theirs. In “Jesus Surfs,” Eduardo refers to “a deep loneliness that had forever driven him to pick up and go,” then, upon arriving in each new place, finds himself asking, “Why come here at all? Was here actually better than anywhere else?” (37; 31). The narrator in “Clìnica Tikal,” a Guatemalan American from New York City visiting her “parents’ homeland,” feels a similar sense of outsider-dom, explaining that, “the way I walked, my salon-treated hair and nails, my Ralph Lauren jeans—it all told this world I was an outsider” despite that she was surrounded by family (122). These are characters that are “both inside the world and shut out of it” (33).

Perfect Conditions is, above all, about not belonging—not just in the place you’re in, but even and especially in your own skin. Many protagonists are preoccupied with getting older and worried about their aging bodies, whether that means a woman wondering what good her life is after a divorce (“Perfect Pantry”), the pain and nostalgia of meeting a school-days love as an adult (“Splitting the Peak”), or finding a mysterious lump on your body (“Arthur and George: The Voyage Begins”). For these characters, growing old came as a surprise—“This was how aging happened,” Jack thinks, “in little blips of decline, like a motor sputtering out” (99)—and they are unsure what to do with themselves and their lives now that it’s happened.

If Blakeslee offers an antidote to these fears of aging and not belonging, it is this: people. In the opener to the collection, a post-apocalyptic story called “Traps,” the narrator spends days listening to her doomsday uncle explaining that people are their biggest threat. But when the narrator’s sister arrives she tells a different story: she and the other homeless travelers “helped each other out: shared food, carried each other’s belongs when someone got too tired, built fires, sang songs… She couldn’t have made the journey alone” (8). This theme is repeated throughout the collection: People in isolation—sometimes literally, as with the characters in “Traps,” and sometimes metaphorically—constantly discover that what they really need to survive are other people.

Though it is only Martha in “Perfect Pantry” who asks directly, “Who am I, without this person?”, everyone in Perfect Conditions is searching for the answer (60). Sometimes that means going on a literal quest—“a real one,” as George calls it in “Arthur and George: The Voyage Begins”—and sometimes the journey is more spiritual, but either way, the characters always arrive at the same destination/realization: “Surviving for yourself—wasn’t that rather pointless?” (78).

Eclectic in genre but consistent in theme, these are stories out to prove that life is not at all where you make it, but with whom. Whether they’re post-apocalyptic or simply disillusioned, these stories—international, sinister, idyllic—are the perfect guide for How to Survive the Rest of Your Life when the world as you know it—literally and figuratively—comes to an end.

 

Perfect Conditions

by Vanessa Blakeslee

Curbside Splendor, 2018

 

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Samantha Edmonds’ fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Day One, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Indiana Review, Monkeybicycle, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her nonfiction has been published in Bustle, Elite Daily, Ravishly, and more. She currently lives in Knoxville, where she’s an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee. Visit her online at www.samanthaedmonds.com

Girl, Deconstructed: Erin Hoover’s Barnburner | Review by Stephanie Walls

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Erin Hoover fearlessly explores and reports on the experiences of a young Millennial woman entering adulthood in her debut full-length collection of poems. The overall structure of the book is a three-part narrative that steadily grows in intensity from smolder to burn and finally culminates in a bonfire resulting from the succession of poems that function as self-igniting matches.

Barnburner:

Etymology

barn +‎ burner, from the idea of burning down a barn to get rid of a rat infestation.

Noun

barnburner

slang, chiefly Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, Maryland: a strike-anywhere match.

In a style that is both journalistic and confessional, Hoover addresses subjects such as female commodification, intimacy, and the politics of motherhood to name a few. The speaker’s voice recounts the liminal experiences of a Millennial woman standing at the threshold of adulthood with one foot situated in patriarchal materiality, another wading in third wave feminism as she navigates a burgeoning digital simulacrum on the horizon, questioning the very nature of humanity.

In Part 1, “The Lovely Voice of Samantha West” portrays the speaker working at a call center that eventually outsources jobs overseas with the help of an automated Americanized program referred to as Samantha West, a voice modeled after Doris Day. Here, the speaker first encounters the female body as a product to be utilized as an instrument of capitalism, “…The call center made me an/ expert in my voice’s currency, what I could/ do with its pitches and pauses…” all the while navigating the threat of losing her job to technology “Are you a robot? Samantha West was not/technically a robot…/…her voice vibrated in the

terrifying space between barely and fully/ human.”

The poem “Girls,” much like the actual T.V. series, begins with an unapologetic tone, “The point isn’t that so-called ugly girls/ get laid on HBO, but their mishaps, that if/ the single one is funny, a slew of them looks downright ambitious.”

Later, in “Livestock,” the speaker flashes back to a scene, quotes Neil Diamond fat-shaming her mother after bumping into him at a 1966 Farm Show “…Get this/ fat girl offa me.”

The speaker adds, “That’s one version/ of intimacy, a body invading/ another’s space, both recoiling/ from trespass as if scalded.”

While in the company of S. and her young son the book’s protagonist encounters the fossilized question “Why Don’t You Have Kids?” after the friend confesses that her husband “hurled a mug/ of coffee at her—” among other offenses. The speaker silently ruminates, “I know how I’m supposed to respond,/ like I know how to slice water/ cleanly with my arms and legs.”

Part 2 finds our protagonist working as a “Temp” where her “…only job [was] to smile at people who leaned/ on reception and talked about their kids.” Years later, she trudges along in another corporate office, watching her “…days fall away like molted feathers.”

In the poem “Gifts,” the speaker describes her mundane office work as, “each year peeling away a layer of girlish skin” and also maintains a long-distance relationship in “D=R x T,” a poem set in a series of major airports during long weekends in which she confesses, “…Neither of us [are] willing/ to dampen the thrill of a friend you never grow/ used to, the romantic weekends away that refuse/ to sink into a home’s worn upholstery. You and I/ will end.” Not surprisingly, this section culminates in a fertility clinic where the speaker brazenly refutes the traditional dyadic path to motherhood, “…Because the binary/ of women’s choices is false.”

By Part 3, the speaker has shifted from disillusionment to assertiveness as she calls out the gender inequity that she swims through daily in the poem “What Kind of Deal are We Going to Make?” She remarks, “It’s what a girl’s days/ are made of: What body part, this time?/ And what will I get for it?” She then confronts cyberbullying and sex-shaming in “Takedown” with her declaration “…As it ever was, the best methodology for devaluing a woman is to strap her body/ to the cum-stained mattress of your mind.” But the protagonist doesn’t just point fingers, in “What the Sisterhood Means to Me,” she acknowledges her own complicity in a flawed social system that had compelled her to protect the character of a former boyfriend in a “Stand By Your Man” situation, only to later realize that he “…knew/ what so many men know: if you don’t/ admit it then it’s not true.”

Throughout the book, the speaker’s voice evolves from a standpoint of introspection to empowerment as she pushes against the metanarratives of modern society.

As a Gen X female, I was delighted to journey with this young woman protagonist from a state of ambivalence to self-assured agency as she confronts not only the blatant hegemonic mechanisms of misogyny but navigates the nuances of compulsory heteronormativity, traditional gender ascription, meritocracy and more. Barnburner implores the reader not only to question, but to deconstruct a flawed cultural system, as the speaker remarks:

“Every day, now, more people are dying/ from cheeseburgers and chokeholds,/ and I have lived through/ so many wars about/ what people won’t say.”

Erin Hoover says it.

 

Barnbuner

by Erin Hoover

Elixir Press, 2018

$17.00

 

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Stephanie Stanley Walls is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. Her poems have appeared in Strongverse, Rat’s Ass Review: Love and Ensuing Madness, Cliterature Journal and elsewhere. You can find her at the dog park with Teddy, her Wheaten Terrier.

The Death of Empathy: Anna Moschovakis’ Eleanor or the Rejection of the Progress of Love | Review by Amy Lee Lillard

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Something has happened to Eleanor, the thirty-nine-year-old teacher and writer at the center of Anna Moschovakis’ debut novel. This thing permeates Eleanor’s daily routine of teaching, reading, and wandering her Brooklyn neighborhood. This thing also haunts Eleanor when she breaks her routine to track down her computer thief, take drugs with a commune in upstate New York, and finally move to Ethiopia to work in a Rimbaud museum.

But this thing, the “thing that happened—that she had caused to happen, or that she had not caused but merely not prevented from happening” is never named.

A few pages in to the novel, I assumed that “it” would eventually be named rape. When one is female and reading of female trauma, especially one tinged with guilt and self-blame, that’s perhaps our go-to response.

But Moschovakis resists and questions this reaction, and she does it with a bit of structural play that’s exciting and shocking. Interspersed with the third-person narration of Eleanor, Moschovakis adds an unexpected first-person voice: the writer behind Eleanor.

This writer details her revision process with her novel about Eleanor. She grapples with the critics: her own inner voice of self-doubt, and a male critic who questions her choices. This male critic assumes that Eleanor is a stand in for the writer, and demands simplicity and clear motivations of the characters; he wants the “thing that happened” to be named.

In some ways, the critic may serve as the voice of the reader who wants things to be explained and resolved. But at the same time, the critic is a certain kind of male that women know well, especially women writers. The critic dominates all their conversations, first with overly negative feedback on the work, and then with his own neuroses. He uses Eleanor as a therapist, an object of seduction, and an empty receptacle waiting to be filled. The writer recognizes what he’s doing, knowing he’s:

“one of those men…who speak only in subordinated sentences, developed theories…whatever insight emerged was of an apparent authority and completion that I knew from experience I could muster only after substantial thought, the painful suppression of doubt, and rehearsal before a mirror.”

Perhaps by giving this man the lines and demands that readers might also have, Moschovakis encourages us to examine how we view female stories.

That’s what I did. As Eleanor thinks of the “thing that happened” again and again, and the critic demands the writer name this thing, I started to think about how we react to female trauma in particular. If the thing that happened to Eleanor was rape, for instance, readers might pity her, while quietly (and perhaps unconsciously) poking holes into her account. If the thing was a parent’s death, we might feel sad for her, but may also want her to deal with it quickly and move on. If it’s divorce, or a miscarriage, or a lost job, or a meltdown, we might have more ready-made responses prepared.

And maybe we’ve developed these gut reactions because of the sheer volume of stories in the world. We see Eleanor herself may even do this: every day she shifts from social media to news feeds to books to films, consuming hundreds of stories in giant chunks. Most of these stories, on their own, could be deeply emotional, important, life-changing. But she reads and moves on. We’ve all had to learn to do this with the daily firehose of story, to read, digest, and move on to the next. When they’re stories of trauma, as they often are, we’ve learned practiced reactions to help us do that.

This may be the ultimate power of Moschovakis’ novel. Eleanor, and the male critic, and we readers, may no longer be able to feel real empathy, the book suggests. Detachment may be the new human state.

Eleanor for one recognizes this in herself, and tries to make herself feel something, anything. She tries sex, masturbation, drugs; she tries thinking deeply on the thing that happened. But time passes, as Moschovakis repeats again and again, and Eleanor “takes note” of events, and her reactions to them, from a distance. We may assume that this is the effect of her trauma. But really, this is life. This is Eleanor’s life, and this is ours.

Moschovakis’ book is a stunner, showing how we are detached, separated from our bodies, from empathy, from the world and its horrendous events, from time. We’re acting out patterns to cope, and in that way we make no progress.

But we still try. Eleanor does, ultimately moving to another country to simplify her life. She may still find a way to live in this world. Maybe we can too.

 

Eleanor or The Rejection of the Progress of Love
By Anna Moschovakis
Coffee House Press, August 2018
Paperback, 224 pp. $16.95

 

 

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Amy Lee Lillard was named one of Epiphany’s Breakout 8 Writers in 2018. Her fiction and non-fiction also appear in Atlas and Alice, Off Assignment, Gertrude, and Entropy. She holds an MA in literature from Northwestern University, and an MFA in fiction writing from the Pan-European Program at Cedar Crest College.

The Wolf at the Door: Darren Demaree’s Two Towns Over | Review by Donna Vorreyer

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Meet the wolf.  Seductive. Dangerous. In Darren Demaree’s Two Towns Over, drugs are the wolves that infiltrate and prowl the author’s home state of Ohio, turning the kingdom of his childhood into a fairy tale in reverse, haunted by lost dreams and lost potential. This collection, honored with the 2017 Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, delves into the minds of both addict and community, giving the reader a realistic yet empathetic view of the wolf’s kingdom.

Most of the poems in Two Towns Over are one page, and this short form suits both the documentary style and the keen, focused language of Demaree’s observations. The collection, although not technically separated into sections, does have three distinct parts. The first contains a series of numbered poems all called “Sweet Wolf.” The first poem in this series, “Sweet Wolf #1”,  allows the wolf into the veins and makes it the alpha inside our own bodies. In subsequent poems, the wolf shows itself in different ways. In #4, it becomes undressed inside of us because that’s how real monsters operate. Questions are asked in the wolf’s presence: How much self is left by the time we’ve mastered the science?  Regret is expressed: The children are ruined because they wanted to choose their own ruining. In this section, the speaker also articulates the poignant and realistic desire of anyone who longs for an easy escape: Demaree introduces us to the wolf’s charm and power without any condescension to or blame for its victims. As the book moves away from the “Sweet Wolf” poems, the inhabitants of the wolf’s domain take a stand by lying down. Where they choose to lie down builds the second section of the book.

Here, the poems are mostly titled with specific cities or townships. We learn how it is to live with the fangs of the wolf embedded in one’s neck, where to harbor its sweet danger. Here in “Hunt, Ohio” are those who need to be filled up/by anything that could be glory.//Fuck glory, fill me up. In “Pleasant Township, Ohio,” the fatal flaw of not feeding the dogs is committed by those who take more drugs than they sell. In “Monroe Hills, Ohio,” the reader receives a hard lesson in mercy and practical survivalism as Nobody tosses out the drugs of the dead. That’s not how it works.  The reader meets an artist in “Morgan Township, Ohio” who peels wallpaper to roll into papers looking for the good glue on the paper to help him reach a new plane. Everything in these places feeds the wolf. In “Monroe Township, Ohio,” we discover that you can’t smoke a bible-that thin paper tears and won’t catch. And everywhere, there is loss. I find no fault in those that take drugs to escape but/miss so many people/that never came back to me, explains “Utica, Ohio” though the reader knows that this could easily be the case in any town.

The ubiquitous places that one could find in any state across the nation are also offered here as places of safety and sanctuary, perhaps a bit like the brick houses that hold off the wolf in the story of “The Three Little Pigs.” In “Chain-Store Identity,” the speaker shows great reverence  for the off-brand, off-color revelries found within, for the bathroom to smoke in, for a place to belong, for A mountain of sugar/for a quarter/& a safe place to get//high, I name/you my naming,/a church of sorts.  “You Can Do Anything in the Walmart as Long as You Don’t Touch the Bicycles” gives us another house of my belonging, the speaker wearing empty twelve-pack boxes as shoes, eating marshmallows, changing all the television stations, feeling safe and being left alone until committing the crime of taking down and riding a bicycle. This particularly poignant poem reveals both the desperation and the child-like wonder of someone with nowhere to go, one who can find joy in a place that just allows him/her to exist in the world of those who the wolf has not grasped.

The third section of the book focuses on why those moments of normalcy in the Walmart or the discount store matter so much.  It takes us into the isolation of the drug house with a similar construction as section one. All of the poems at the end of the book are titled “Ode to the Corner of the Drug House Down the Gravel Road Off the Two-Lane Highway” and are numbered to distinguish them. This is a place where the real world does not intrude, where the wolf reigns supreme. Here the knots in the paneling are eyes, life is contained in four corners, and a fence made of dirty carpeting is enough to prevent escape. Even those who know this place well are bound more to the drugs than to one another as, in #18, we learn that alliances are worthless–I don’t even get a discount on the wolf. Those that live here are vessels: I am nothing being filled up with something from just south of your heavens.  And #60 gives us this heart-breaking question: I feel loss will find me once this shit wears off then what will I get to look out of?

There are poems in the book that react with frustration or anger rather than give us the addict’s voice. In “Middlebury Township, Ohio,” the population longs for the days when drunks were sent over to pad the votes because We know what to do with drunks. These people are eating each other’s faces off.  A parent raves about the midday robbery of his children’s  bikes in the one sentence gut-punch of “I Believe in the End of Forgiveness.” But mostly, these poems give the reader a realistic yet sensitive look at the tragic ravaging of communities and individuals caused by drugs, the losses that cannot be forgotten. The seduction of the wolf is simply and elegantly shown in the lines of “I Got Lost Every Time”:

We all missed
nowhere
& so I was trained

to forget everywhere
& I was trained
to fill light times

with darkness.
It changes,
but most drugs,

they work
almost every time.
It’s beautiful.

We are all confused. Somewhere, some sort of wolf is inviting us into his lair. In this collection, Demaree has given us a talisman to ward off the invitation. He has inhabited his speakers with both light and darkness. He has given the wolf a name, and by naming it, raises the consciousness that is needed to tame it. The fragility of all lives is brought to bear in these deeply human poems– to read them is to recognize this connection.

 

Two Towns Over

by Darrren Demarre

Trio House Press, 2018

Paperback, 84 pp, $16

 

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress, 2013) as well as eight chapbooks, most recently The Girl (Porkbelly Press). Her reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, Quarterly West, Sugar House Review, Cider Press Review, Tinderbox Poetry, and other journals.

 

A Conversation of Selves: Canese Jarboe’s dark acre | Review by Emily Corwin

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dark acre

by Canese Jarboe 

Willow Springs Books 

ACME Poetry Series, 2018 

 

Neosporin Pussy Queen, Rodeo Queen, Rapunzel, figurine, showgirl, apex predator, a midnight bride with a 40-foot train: Canese Jarboe’s speaker is all of these and more, riveting us in their debut chapbook, dark acre (Willow Springs, 2018). I have been entranced, awe-struck with Canese ever since I met them (digitally) in 2016, and was floored to hear their chapbook had been selected for publication in the ACME Poetry Series from Willow Springs Books. I was honored to read and accept poems by them the following year for Indiana Review (which you can read here in IR 39.2), including one of the opening pieces, “Landscape with My Father & a Dead Man’s Harmonica.”  

After the sharp entrance to the book, “Using a Stolen Guide on Morse Code, I Send a Signal Out My Bedroom Window into the Cornfield” (a code which translates to: “I am still here”), the ghostliness of “Landscape…” follows with its hauntings and huntings, black ants, nail gun, a spirit in the rafters. Jarboe immediately provides us with the ethereal, the rural, the sensual corners of a self. Self as bride and bridle, self as bodied and already gone. 

Although dark acre is chapbook-length, it manages to engage wholly, to sew us into the side of this world, one of graves and blowjobs, wolf peaches, saddles, bull thistle and moths, taxidermy, magnolia, food coloring and gravel, a “nylon thong…bedazzled with river rocks” (25). The acreage of dark acre is concrete and touchable, constructed of tactile particulars we can almost ingest, almost absorb sponge-like. “I remember a horse in a parade with glittery, pink hooves. I remember when I had glittery, pink hooves” (15). Like the speaker, we enter into each image bodily, feeling it entire. 

For months now, I have been collecting poems which strike me, printing them out, and then taping them to my bedroom wall, like a vision board. Canese’s poem from this collection, “Rapunzel w/ Head Half-Shaved,” has been above my bed for half a year now. I am drawn to it for its startling moves, how it shifts from “There wasn’t any juice in the fridge” to “so, I drank the cow vaccine” without hesitation, from peonies to herons to calamine lotion to tetanus. 

Like in “Rapunzel…”, many of the pieces in dark acre play with white space, silences, the sense of images speaking back and forth across a distance. In the titular poem, for instance, the poem sprawls and echoes over several pages, often with text at the top and the bottom with a blank expanse at the center: 

 

Do you think I am under a curse?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A banshee is just a rumor that a barn owl started (36). 

A conversation of selves, the speaker interrogating themselves in a vacant field, in a mini-fridge, in a nightgown. dark acre devours, it rushes forth with intimacy and pain, violence and survival, truly alive. Jarboe asks us to: “openthedooropenthedooropenthedoor” (33) and how could we resist? Bold and corporeal, dark acre is not to be missed, is meant to race upon us ferocious. 

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Emily Corwin is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University-Bloomington and the former Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, New South, Yemassee, THRUSH, and elsewhere. She has two chapbooks, My Tall Handsome (Brain Mill Press) and darkling (Platypus Press) which were published in 2016. Her first full-length collection, tenderling was just released from Stalking Horse Press. You can follow her online at @exitlessblue.