Celebrating Queer Poetry: A Few Of My Favorite Recent Reads

Hello friends and fiends--

Today in the Madhouse, I want to talk about some of my favorite contemporary queer poets. I also want to invite you to check out my Madhouse Pride Showcase from last year where writers such as Eric Crumrine, Cynthia Pelayo, Cassie Daley, and Hailey Piper stopped by to chat about their work, their favorite books, and some must-read authors. You can check out their visits here:

• Urban Legends and Cannibal Kings: A Guest Interview with Hailey Piper
• Finding Your Door: The Importance of Queer Representation in the Wayward Children Series
• Carmen Maria Machado, The Wonder of Her Tragedies: A Guest Post by Cynthia Pelayo
• Why Do We Write Speculative Fiction with Homophobia: A Guest Post by Eric Crumrine

While the poets I’m going to talk about today aren’t inherently horror poets, their work is raw, vulnerable, and filled with both a ferocity and gentleness that I’ve come to love and admire. In fact, in a recent essay I wrote for LitReactor, I talked about this imaginary gap between genre and literary work and how as writers of speculative fiction, we can learn a lot from reading outside of our respective genres in order to find horror in unsuspecting places. If you’re interested in reading that article, you can do so here.    

First up is Andrea Gibson. I think the first time I picked up their work was at AWP. I was hanging out at the Write Bloody table when I noticed a book titled The Madness Vase. The cover was so delightfully weird and vibrant, and you know I’m a sucker for anything with “mad” in the title, so this was an easy buy for me. After I read it, I knew that I needed more from Gibson, so I went and picked up Lord of the Butterflies (one of my favorite collections). Their work is so honest, and it always hits me in a way that feels like a homecoming, or like I’m visiting a friend I haven’t seen in years. I’ve watched some of their performances on Button Poetry, too, and I’m always left breathless.  Some of my favorite lines are:

• “Though I don’t remember, I remember my birth/ was my first yes. Thought I was pushed, yes. / Though there was screaming, yes. Though the light hurt, yes.”
• “to put on/ your best outfit/ and feel/ like you’re dressing/ a wound.”
• “Truth doesn’t fly that kind of kite. / Trust knows everybody’s dark side/ is daytime somewhere.”
• “Love, I smashed my glass slipper/ to build a stained-glass window/ for every wall inside my chest.”
• “We wear our traumas/ the way the guillotine/ wears gravity. / Our lovers’ necks/are so soft.”

Next on our list is Danez Smith. I’m a new reader of Smith’s poems, and I actually picked them up based on a student recommendation not too long ago. My students were shocked I hadn’t read them yet, and now that I’ve finally gone through some of their work, I wish I had found them earlier, too. The first book I picked up was Homie, which is this stunning collection about friendship, bonds, relationships, and the ways we connect with others to make it through life. I then read Don’t Call Us Dead and honestly, I had to pick my jaw up off the ground more times than one. The writing in this collection was much more intense than in Homie (in my opinion, at least) and I appreciated the gut punches throughout the book. These poems were violent, haunted little beasts and cries and protests, and yet they were also vulnerable, sad, and heartbreaking. Some of my favorite lines from Smith are:

• “i’ll plant a garden on top/ where your hurt stopped.”
• “dead is the safest i’ve ever been. / i’ve never been so alive.”
• “…i can’t stand your ground. / i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law. each night, i count my brothers. & in the/ morning, when some do not survive to be counted, i count the holes they leave.”

Rachel Wiley immediately grabbed my attention after seeing her do a performance on Instagram. This one, in fact. It wasn’t long after seeing it that I read her collection Nothing is Okay and starting teaching some of her poems in my undergraduate classes. There are so many reasons why I love her work, but her confidence is certainly high up on that list. She is a force of nature and I love how her words command my undivided attention. I also feel amped up after listening to her, like I could go out and conquer the world (including the blank page). Her poetry explores queerness, space, feminism, and the joys of dating (sarcasm, because dating is awful) all while tearing down the patriarchy. She has another collection out, too,—one that I still need to read---titled Fat Girl Finishing School. Some of my favorite lines from her work include:

• “…I don’t know, maybe this is why I love/the way I do/ with teeth and swallow and song and snarl/ and water and sparkle and consequence”
• “Trust the bone next cradling/ your pink precious lungs to mother the breath/ back home to you”
• “I have clawed my way to okay and it will/just have to do for now.”
• “What you actually mean when you say that I Glorify Obesity/ is Hallelujah.”
• “Perhaps I should submit a butcher’s diagram of all the things/they/might find in my fat.”

A recent read of mine was Bestiary by Donika Kelly. Her collection was a beautiful meditation on the human and the inhuman, the monster and the beast. There are these love poems scattered throughout where Kelly writes to chimera, centaurs, satyr, mermaids, and werewolves, and they read as these subtle flirtations, these quiet yet wild adorations. She explores love and abandonment, the disillusionment with reality, how we are born screaming yet beg to be returned to nature, to push our hands into the dirt. I loved the connection to mythology and body in her work, how everything became cyclic, enchanted. Like a glorious fairy tale, it was hard to discern where the magic ended and the nightmare began, and I loved her work all the more for it. Some of my favorite lines from her work include:

• “When he opens her chest, separates the flat skin/ of one breast from the other, breaks the hinge of ribs, / and begins, slowly, to evacuate her organs, she is silent.”
• “What clamor/ we made in the birthing. What hiss and rumble/ at the splitting, at the horns and beard, / at the glottal bleat. What bridges our back.”
• “What the tongue wants. / Supplication and the burn/ of crystals expanding. / To be, always, a waxing, / a waning, and, in waxing/ again, not ever the same.”
• “Folaed, fully grown, from my mother’s neck, / her severed head, the silenced snakes. Call this/ freedom.”
• “I am a forest, / a field. I crumble and shift. I wake, / my breath deep inside the earth.”

Lastly, I want to talk about Mary Lambert’s collection Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across. This book came to me by way of a Goodreads recommendation, and I actually just finished this book earlier in the month. This was an intense read for me as she writes from a place of trauma regarding incest, rape, body shaming, queerness, and mental health. Some of these poems hit quite hard for me, and there was a particular meditation of hers about a bathtub that I think will remain a part of me forever. Truthfully though, I say that as the highest form of praise because I want to read poetry that rips me apart, allows me to heal, and assures me that I’m not alone, and her work here specifically really helped me do that on more than one occasion. Some of my favorite lines from her work include:

• “We loved each other like an ongoing apology.”
• My body is a crater/ in the living room, and you are a perfect/ moon, and I am going to ruin you.”
• “When I was young and sad and/ hungry I learned how to guillotine a/ tulip like you with my eyes closed.”
• “You will not remember these/moments, these death maneuvers, /these horror orchids.”
• “I don’t know how much of me/is just space for you.”
• “your lips are a city and I am a choir of yes.”
• “we are all flowers with our heads off/ No one gave us a burial.”

The Smallest of Bones: A Guest Interview with Holly Lyn Walrath

Hello friends and fiends--

How are we hanging in there during this heat? I know my goth self can't be out in the sun, so I've mostly been camped out in my office with the AC on full blast thinking cool, wintery thoughts and drinking water like I'm a beached siren. Heat exhaustion aside though, something else that I've been doing lately is happily drowning in dark, beautiful poetry. In fact, last month, I exclusively read poetry and I'm here today to share with you one of my favorite reads of the year so far: The Smallest of Bones by Holly Lyn Walrath.

This gorgeous collection is currently available for preorder via Clash Books, and I was lucky enough to read an earlier copy of the book. Here's what I had to say about it: “A striking meditation on the body and its ghosts, this collection is a blossoming of bones and the trauma we hold inside, a gorgeous homage to the fever dreams and nightmares we collect, break, and survive with each and every day.”

To chat more about her collection, I have Holly here with me in The Madhouse today. I hope you'll enjoy the following interview and consider picking up a copy of her collection and adding her words to your TBR pile. 

Yours, 

Stephanie M. Wytovich

SMW: Tell us about your book. What gave you the idea to create this collection and when did the idea of bones start to speak to you?

HLW: My poetry has always been a place where I work out issues in my head. Essentially, I’ve often felt trapped in my own body and trapped by society’s expectations for that body. Even when you eschew gender, society still places you in a label based on how you look, and that perception goes bone-deep. While I identify as a woman, my awareness of what that means has changed over the years. Most of the poems in the book are short, concentrated meditations on relationships, the body, and self-image. Something about the conciseness of the poems made it easier for me to talk about difficult topics.

SMW: Can you give us an insight into your writing process and how you structured this collection?

HLW: In 2018 a series of science articles got attention in the news around the topics of neurosexism and biological determination—fancy words that explain the belief that women and men are inherently different, down to even differences in their brains and as deep as their bones. I started reading old anatomy books and studying the so-called biological differences in the bones of men and women, which lead to the “spine” of The Smallest of Bones—poems titled after different bones in the body and how those bones differ between the sexes, according to science and pseudoscience. It’s not to say that those biological differences don’t exist, but to ask whether how we interpret them needs re-examining.

SMW: One of my favorite things about horror (especially horror poetry) is that is allows us to champion and explore our shadow selves. One image that really stood out to me in the book contained the following lines: “I sink myself in the river at dawn/ your words are the stones/ in my pockets.” Can you talk a little bit about how you explore the darker parts of yourself or human nature in your poetry? And do you find this approach to writing to be cathartic?

HLW: I’m glad you noted this line because it references the death of Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide by weighing her pockets with stones and wading out into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. I’ve always been drawn to women writers who committed suicide, like Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Anne Sexton. These women were seen as great forebearers for the feminist writing movement, but they also showcase how deeply troubled confessional modes of writing can be. I think for women writers, it’s difficult to find peace in writing. We’re always wresting our creative selves away from some other responsibility. The shadow self becomes the writer self. Writing about the dark things can be cathartic, but it can also be a great weight to bear.

SMW: There are a lot of nods to body horror within the collection. Can you speak to what draws you to that subgenre, and talk a little bit about how you worked to evoke that type of imagery within your poetry?

HLW: Body horror has always been one of my favorite subgenres of horror. One of my favorite horror movies as a kid was The Fly (1986). I remember watching it and being unable to look away. For me, the genre is inextricably tied to feminism. Women’s bodies go through terrifying transformations. There’s blood and tearing, and assault, and violence. When the movie Teeth (2008) came out, I was stoked to see a movie about the weird toxicity our society projects onto normal sexuality. As a Baptist church kid, I grew up being taught that sex and reproduction are taboo. It ain’t polite, but it makes good horror.

SMW: I noticed that there was religious imagery throughout prayers, burnings, sacrifice references to various iconography and afterlives (ghosts, demons, etc). Was this something that you intentionally planned to incorporate throughout, or was this more organic to other themes in the book that dealt with topics like trauma, sickness, etc.?

HLW: I think my work is always drawing on some kind of religious imagery just because I grew up Baptist, going to church and Sunday School. I was baptized twice—that’s how Baptist I was. It’s not intentional, but it always seems to make its way in. The church has a lot of weird baggage and was a source of trauma for me growing up. I remember our church used to do stigmata reenactments for youth group—putting ink on our hands and foreheads, having us wear fake crowns of thorns—to make us “feel” what Christ went through at his crucifixion. I must have been about 12 or 13. That kind of shit stays with you. Ghosts and demons are a natural progression from discussions of the body—either in non-corporeal or in possessed form—as a focus point for emotions like grief or lust. In some ways, the spooks feel safer to me than the real world. At least I know what to expect from them.

SMW: How did you come to writing and who are some of your influences?

HLW: I started writing poems in high school at the height of my teen angst stage. Poetry was always a release and a safe place for me to work out my emotions. It wasn’t until I could become a freelancer that I actually had time to write more. I was always interested in writers who received acclaim after their deaths—like Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville (still not as well known for his poems). I have too many influences to name them all, but I love the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, Fernando Pessoa, Walt Whitman, Amelia Grey, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, Nnedi Okorafor, and Ken Liu.

SMW: What books are sitting in your TBR pile?

HLW: Exhalation by Ted Chiang, I'm Waiting for You by Bo-Young Kim, Dearly by Margaret Atwood, The Hidden Girl by Ken Liu

SMW: What is next in store for your readers?

HLW: I’m currently working on a book of queer poems set in the 90s and drawing on pop culture like The Craft, Buffy, My So-Called Life, Dirty Dancing, and Chasing Amy. I’m sure it will be just as weird, queer, and dear as people are used to reading from me. I’m also hoping to start up a new Instapoetry series on serial killers.

SMW: What’s one poetry stereotype or cliché that actually fits you perfectly?

HLW: “Poets like flowers and the moon” – Okay, but flowers and the moon are beautiful, people. More moon-flower poems, please. I’ll stop writing about peonies when I’m dead.

SMW: What advice do you have for writers working in poetry?

HLW: I think the best writing advice is to just do what you love. Love what you write, write what you love. The biggest advocate for your work is you. It’s hard when you’re writing something that’s personal, and I get that, but no one else is going to as passionate about your work as you are. If you’re doing the thing because you love it, then nothing can hold you back.

BIO:

Holly Lyn Walrath’s poetry and short fiction appears in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Liminality, and Analog. She is the author of Glimmerglass Girl (Finishing Line Press, 2018), winner of the Elgin Award for best speculative chapbook, Numinose Lapidi, a chapbook in Italian (Kipple Press, 2020), and The Smallest of Bones (CLASH Books, September 2021). She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. You can find her canoeing the bayou in Houston, Texas, on Twitter @HollyLynWalrath, or at www.hlwalrath.com.

• http://twitter.com/hollylynwalrath
• https://www.instagram.com/holly__lyn/
• https://www.facebook.com/Holly-Lyn-Walrath-Editor-Author-317260595480463/

Blurbs:

“Between stars and shards of bone, Holly Lyn Walrath invites the reader to build a skeleton with her words, to get lost between the dark spaces of curved ribs. The Smallest of Bones offers so much within each poem -- here, we wander beneath the moon and speak with ghosts; we transform under the night sky and haunt our own minds as the words encourage us to strip back the skin and expose rawness and vulnerability. A beautiful collection!”--Sara Tantlinger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil’s Dreamland

"A striking meditation on the body and its ghosts, this collection is a blossoming of bones and the trauma we hold inside, a gorgeous homage to the fever dreams and nightmares we collect, break, and survive with each and every day."--Stephanie M. Wytovich, author of The Apocalyptic Mannequin

In “the smallest of bones”, blood, bones, skin, and flesh are placed on the sacrificial altar as an offering to the gods, beautifully laid out to represent life’s journey: love, identity, volition, pain, destruction, and finally, enlightenment.

Raw, visceral, and powerful, each word in Walrath’s poems is selected with the care of a surgeon for the perfect incision. It is a journey we all walk and this is its handbook. —Christina Sng, Bram Stoker award winning author of A Collection of Nightmares

May '21 Madhouse Recap

Hello friends and fiends—

Can you folks believe it’s already June? It just doesn’t seem possible to me even with May being such a crazy month. Reminder to self: remember to breathe and sleep this month. Maybe even sneak some yoga in here and there? I finished off the Spring semester and dove right into summer. I’ll be taking two eight-week classes this time around in philosophy and psychology. Seems like a good idea to stay sharp, learn some new tricks, and keep me on my toes when it comes time to write new lectures and reinvent old ones. I’m also teaching a graduate class right now in speculative fiction and we’re having a blast so far. A few of the books we're tackling together are The Changeling by Victor LaValle, Circe by Madeline Miller, Recursion by Blake Crouch, and The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin—all great readings, some old friends, some new. 

As to publications this month, I’m thrilled to be joining the TOC for Shadow Atlas, an anthology focusing on dark landscapes in the Americas edited by Carina Bissett, Hillary Dodge, and Joshua Viola. My poem “Blood, Like Chocolate” will focus on invoking the chocolate-brewing witches of Latin America. I also published an essay with LitReactor about finding horror in unsuspecting places titled “When the Answer Isn’t Always Edgar Allan Poe” and sat down to chat with Books in the Freezer podcast about all things witch and lit! One of the books I talked about in the episode is The Nightgown and Other Poems by Taisia Kitaiskaia, and you can read my review for it here.

On the horror front, I watched Willy’s Wonderland, Honeydew, Wickerman, American Mary (which was a first for me!), finished watching both seasons of Creepshow, and I actually started off the month by throwing my dad a Sasquatch-themed 60th birthday party, so yeah, it’s been a wild couple of weeks. I also took R.L. Stine’s Masterclass, which I absolutely loved. I laughed a lot, learned a bunch, and definitely rewatched some of my favorite Goosebumps episodes in between lectures.

My reading for the month was filled with tons of poetry and it looked like this:

• 45 Mercy Street by Anne Sexton
• Words for Dr. Y by Anne Sexton
• Deluge by Leila Chatti
• Ebb by Leila Chatti
• Sixty Poems by Charles Simic
• Nothing is Okay by Rachel Wiley
• Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
• Bestiary by Donika Kelly
• Ask Baba Yaga: Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times by Taisia Kitaiskaia

I also listened to a good number of podcast episodes this month:

• Faculty of Horror: Episode 87, Mother Monster (Pyewacket, 2017 and Hereditary 2018)
• Faculty of Horror: Episode 81, You Bring me Closer to God (Seven, 1995)
• Faculty of Horror: Episode 77, Human Nature (Under the Skin, 2013)
• Evolution of Horror: Mind & Body, PT 34—Saint Maud (2020) and Possessor (2020).
• Evolution of Horror: Mind & Body, PT 6 –Carrie (1976)

June will be filled with tons of philosophy homework and even more poetry as we get the judging process moving with the HWA Poetry Showcase. A big thank you to everyone who submitted something, and a huge thank you to my judges Sara Tantlinger and Angela Yuriko Smith as we deep dive into all the delicious spookiness that awaits us. Looking forward, I’m also planning on posting a recommended poetry reading list for Pride Month where I’ll talk about queer poetry and some of my favorite poets, so keep a lookout for that, too.

Until next time! 

Spread love & stay weird,

Stephanie M. Wytovich