#tupelo quarterly

[bones-ivy-breath]

True Fresh by Genevieve Arlie, from Tupelo Quarterly, vol. VI, issue 27.

[these-summer-nights-in-december]

The 1st of the 5 poems of mine in the Portfolio of Poetry in the brand new issue of Tupelo Quarterly (Issue 34)

[pairedaeza]

Kathy Wu, from ‘White Asters’. Published in Tupelo Quarterly.

[neoyorzapoteca]

Laughing is better than crying, I think. There is an absurdity in illness. What a waste of life to not be well. Wellness is hard won. There is a lot of work that goes into living. I have respect for those suffering from illness, but not for the illness itself. I often feel unable to write. I write in my dreams, but forget the specifics. I forget my dream writing because the words aren’t clear, and I have a visual memory. I can’t spell waking or sleeping. Writing with and alongside others is very important to me. (...)   Writing means everything to me. It’s my singular absolute.

Insurrection Shouldn't Be Against the Self: A Conversation with Katie Ebbitt On Her Epistolary Letters to Ana Cristina Cesar – curated by Vi Khi Nao - Tupelo Quarterly

[finishinglinepress]

POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Trespassing My Ancestral Lands by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/trespassing-my-ancestral-lands-by-kalpna-singh-chitnis/

Trespassing My Ancestral Lands is a deeply resonant poetic journey through varied landscapes of emotion, #cultural #history, and self-discovery. It delve into the complexities of the #immigrant experience and the loss of native identity, blending themes like human grief, the duality of love, the impact of war, and the cycles of existence. #Kalpna #Singh-Chitnis masterfully intertwines the personal with the universal, offering a unique voice that speaks to the core of human experience. The book invites readers to profoundly engage with the text, offering a space for introspection and understanding. It’s a book that is expected to leave a lasting impact, remembered for its emotional depth, cultural relevance, and poetic mastery.

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is an Indian-American #poet, writer, filmmaker, and author of six poetry collections. Her works have appeared in notable journals such as “World Literature Today,” “Columbia Journal,” “Tupelo Quarterly,” “Cold Mountain Review,” “Indian Literature,” “Vsesvit,” “Silk Routes” (IWP) at The University of Iowa, and Stanford University’s “Life in Quarantine.” Kalpna Singh-Chitnis has been referenced in renowned publications such as the New York Times and Huffington Post, and featured in The Telegraph, OC Register, Los Angeles Times, Daily Pilot, and others. She has made appearances on major broadcasting platforms like ABC Channel 7, Voice of America, Fox News, India’s National TV Network, Doordarshan, KPFK Radio, and various additional television and radio networks. Her poetry has been translated into twenty languages and has been included in college and university curricula in India and in the UK.

Website: www.kalpnasinghchitnis.com

PRAISE FOR Trespassing My Ancestral Lands by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis

“Trespassing My Ancestral Lands” captures the poet’s eye roving the landscapes to see and discover the many layers of self in a multi-layered world of family, nature, and cycles of life. Kalpna Singh-Chitnis’ voice is a hypnotic opera of cautionary tales. These heart-wrenching poems burn and sing to understand the primordial codes and rituals we depend on to give our lives meaning: “Mothers fold sorrows like laundry. An astute observer of the smallest details, she grips us with the travails of having feet firmly planted on both sides of the worlds and cultures: “School desks were chipped/into kindling.” This brave poet walks the precipice and captures the testimonials of human grief, the dangers of love, loss, and war. Singh-Chitnis creates a voluminous experience of color and imagery rendering the mystical traditions and the hope in chaos. Kalpna-Singh Chitnis blows the shofar and shows how the power of language and story can lift us from despair, to reclaim our passions and our ghosts, the only way poetry can. This collection is indelible, you will come back again and again to a Motherland of wisdom—a talisman and guide to living with the fullest of fire and breath.

–Cynthia Atkins, author of “Still-Life with God.”

Reader, if what you seek is an illusion, phantoms and figments of imagination written in fleeting, figurative language, then move on. Seeker, if what you wish to read is real, fleshed-out through direct, honorable verses which linger without pretentiousness, then don’t pass by this book. “If you are a woman,” Ms. Singh-Chitnis sings, “tell my story to your sons. If you are a man, tell it to your daughters. If you are a preacher, teach it as a sermon to the believers.” Here is a Human Being speaking equally to all other Human Beings, one who “trespasses,” too, across limitations of gender, ethnicity, nationality; whose story thus becomes a story worth telling, and retelling, and retelling again. For in the poem, “The Salt of a Woman,” as she writes so sublimely, “Her story is much older than her civilization…” The story found in “Trespassing My Ancestral Lands,” is in fact as old as Creation itself.

–Jennifer Reeser, author of “Indigenous” and “Strong Feather.”

I would like to stand on street corners asking people to read “Trespassing My Ancestral Lands.” The enduring necessity of this collection of poetry far exceeds the ordinary every day and as such, I would wish it to be widely shared. Very infrequently, in my role as editor, I come across a collection that blows me away. Figuratively, literally, and spiritually. Singh-Chitnis is a deeply modern writer, who dips her pen in ancient history and acknowledgment of what came before us. She blends these disparate worlds together in such a way we learn and grow with each insight. This is the sheer essence of a poet, to be both translator and third-eye for the reader. When we are unable to articulate our feelings, the poet can. Singh-Chitnis has an uncanny canary-in-a-coalmine prescience that feels at times like she’s reading our minds. If a poet cannot speak for her readers, she’s stuck in a confessional style that grows dusty with time. To stay alive long after her physical form has passed, she must transcend time and space and be the mouthpiece for our deepest fears and joys. I would go as far as saying if you don’t like poetry, you might well be converted by this poetry because it’s poetry, and it’s more than poetry. She will be a poet we talk about in two hundred years. Her name won’t simply be synonymous with good writing, it will be a legacy.

–Candice Louisa Daquin, Senior Editor / Indie Blu(e) Publishing and author of “Tainted by the Same Counterfeit” among others.

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is not looking for bystanders or onlookers to her powerful poems of personal journey. What she is looking for is a companion and to that end she uses her skill as a poet to draw the reader ever closer, so close at times that we hear her heart beating within these compelling narrative poems. Her fine writing holds a clarity that shows both how some distances can bring us near and how only words sometimes keep us apart. I think any reader that joins Kalpna Singh-Chitnis on her journey of memory and self-reflection will find themselves inwardly rewarded without measure.

–Beau Beausoleil, author of “Concealed in Language” and “Another Way Home.”

An unforgettable poetry collection for the soul it seeks and lays bare, and one that embraces and urges the reader to rise and perceive life in distinctive and myriad ways. As a true poet, Kalpna Singh-Chitnis finds poetry in everything, particularly in vocalizing immigrant experiences, loss of native identity, and the duality of the diasporic scaffold. She further fuses these vividly within the framework of the past, present, and future, thereby creating breathtaking edifices of life and memorializing our existence. Nostradamus-like, her poetry in turn signals our future as well. Singh-Chitnis’s historical, cultural, confessional, and observational views and words leave us probing, enriched, and satiated.”

–Anita Nahal, writer, and professor; author of drenched thoughts (novel) and poetry collections, “Kisses at the espresso bar” & “What’s wrong with us

Kali women?” among others.

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis writes poems with quiet urgency, poems highlighting and condemning violence and social persecution perpetrated against women, against immigrants, against anyone who has lost a homeland. But don’t expect rhetoric and abstraction here; rather, find intimate poems addressed to all of us, like letters hand-written with the language of loss: “What have I lost to deserve the beauty around me,” Singh-Chitnis asks, and there is no answer outright, but glimpses of one whose broken wings will stretch for a lifetime.

–Octavio Quintanilla, author of the poetry collection, “If I Go Missing” (Slough Press) and “The Book of Wounded Sparrows” (Texas Review Press).

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetrybook #read #poems

[hyejungkook]

Tomorrow I read with the fabulous Jenny Molberg and Anna V.Q. Ross for A Common Sense Reading Series! Thank you, Jordan Stempleman, for hosting us.

Details:

Saturday, October 14th at 7 PM at KCAI Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice, 4415 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

Link to register: https://www.jordanstempleman.com/events/hyejung-kook-jenny-molberg-anna-vq-ross

Hyejung Kook’s poetry has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Other works include essays in Poetry as Spellcasting and The Critical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Hyejung now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. She is a Fulbright grantee and Kundiman Fellow. Find her online at hyejungkook.tumblr.com.

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal(LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.

Anna V. Q. Ross’s most recent book, Flutter, Kick, won the 2020 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and the 2023 Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry. Her other books include If a Storm (winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize) and the chapbooks Figuring and Hawk Weather. A Fulbright Scholar, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, and poetry editor for Salamander, her work appears in The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. Anna teaches at Tufts University and through the Emerson Prison Initiative and lives with her family in Dorchester, MA, where she raises chickens. Find her at annaVQross.com.

Jordan Stempleman (host) is the author of nine collections of poetry including Cover Songs (the Blue Turn), Wallop, and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). Stempleman is the co-editor of The Continental Review, editor for Windfall Room, faculty advisor for the literary arts magazine Sprung Formal, and curator of A Common Sense Reading Series.

[theoffingmag]

B.B.P. Hosmillo is a practice-led researcher at The University of New England, Australia. Author of Breed Me: a sentence without a subject / Phối giống tôi: một câu không chủ đề (AJAR Press, 2016) with Vietnamese translation by Hanoi-based poets Nhã Thuyên and Hải Yến, their writings have also been translated into Indonesian, Bulgarian, and Korean. Founder and co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia: a literary journal of transgressive art, their poetry has appeared in The Ilanot Review, Palaver, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly as well as in anthologies Bettering American Poetry 2015, The Bookends Review Best of 2018 Anthology, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore Anthology. B.B.P. Hosmillo has received fellowships from The Japan Foundation in Tokyo, Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia. They have served as a guest poetry editor for Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and Anomaly. In 2019, they were awarded Honorary Mayor by the city government of Jeonju, South Korea. In August 2023, they are participating in Winter Blooming, a festival that celebrates First Nations, multicultural, LGBTQA+ arts, culture, communities, and allies; co-curated by Dr. Christina Kenny of The University of New England and Rachael Parsons of the New England Regional Art Museum in New South Wales, Australia.

[antigonick]

Red. It held us we held on I used my legs and later you knelt down. Hand. Inner knee.

Rebecca Lindenberg, excerpt of “He Asks Me to Send Him Some Words (Here in His Garden)”, published in Tupelo Quarterly

[agirlnamedbone]

--pub. in Tupelo Quarterly

[lifeinpoetry]

I loved   being   alive    the winter I lay / so close   to loving     I thought I’d die.

— Jessica Abughattas, from “Love Lyric,” published in Tupelo Quarterly

[bostonpoetryslam]

I am a poet writing in English and so I lay claim to everything that poets before me have done with the language. And though I understand that this is a tradition that never meant to include me, I take from it anyway, using everything at my disposal to help me sing new songs.

John Murillo, interviewed by Dora Malech for Tupelo Quarterly

[these-summer-nights-in-december]

The 4th of the 5 poems of mine in the Portfolio of Poetry in the brand new issue of Tupelo Quarterly (Issue 34)

[moon-cake2]

2018 & belated updates

I spent this winter thinking back on the troubling year--the constant hum of anxiety and my unhealthy defense mechanisms. I want this next year to be a turn: I want to reclaim my daily rhythms and textures, my experiments, my internal and external motionings. To that end, I'm concocting various intentions and plans, small things such as take more walks or learn to embroider, and bigger ones, too. I am intending to be a tiny bit more confident with book matters this time around. I am intending to give more space to my triumphs (rather than to give all the space to my shortcomings). I am intending to seek/build meaningful community by being less afraid. I am intending to resist paralysis/inertia/staying silent/dehumanizing infrastructures. I will probably largely fall short at all this, but I also trust that I will make tiny steps. So much of 2017 was spent in murky, chaotic anxieties (my panic attacks resurged), but I hope this year I can attempt to gather the threads of my inner life once again.

*

In writing news, I still managed to publish work in 2017 from my forthcoming book. Chen Chen reached out to me for the National Poetry Month issue of Iron Horse Literary Review, where he also interviewed me on the negative space between things and using untranslated language. The editor of Tupelo Quarterly, where I've published before, also reached out. A couple poems made it into the Asian American publication Hyphen.

Foundry nominated a piece for the Pushcart Prize. The Adroit Journal nominated a piece for Best Small Fictions.

I'm ready for this year to be all Moon 🌑🌒🌓.

[neoyorzapoteca]

Poetry saved me in many ways, and the publication of “Another Life” was the best thing that ever happened in my life. Poetry saved me in a religious way — that it touched me and brought me into a space of healing and artistry that I was so desperate for it hurt, and I knew that a healing space was available and I was searching, but wasn’t sure where to search and not until poetry came to me, and in many ways not until the publication of “Another Life,” did that search for a healing space subside. I did a reading with Judy Grahn and CA Conrad and Judy said “speak up, because you have something to say.” And I thought, I want to always be quiet, and insurgent and make people listen closely and in turn listen very, very closely to others. I feel so much life force and love feeling and I want those feelings to burn the world. I do have a space of authority working as a clinical social worker. There is very little creativity in being a therapist for me, in the sense that therapeutic intervention is based on rules and specific modalities, and while you blend and intuit these practices, it’s from an automatic, prescribed space. Poetry for me is about the body, but an etheric body. My work as a therapist is not about me. It’s about facilitating a space of healing for the people I work with. Poetry is mine though.

Insurrection Shouldn't Be Against the Self: A Conversation with Katie Ebbitt On Her Epistolary Letters to Ana Cristina Cesar – curated by Vi Khi Nao - Tupelo Quarterly

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Stop and Smell the Fractals (and Everything In Between) by Caroline Jennings

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/stop-and-smell-the-fractals-and-everything-in-between-by-caroline-jennings/

Caroline Jennings is the author of Stop and Smell the Fractals (and Everything in Between). Her poems have appeared in The Diamond Line, Tupelo Quarterly, Black Moon Magazine, and elsewhere. A native of Arkansas, she completed a Bachelor of Arts in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics at the University of Arkansas, both of which influenced this collection. She currently works as a regulatory affairs consultant in the medical space but makes time to write any chance she gets. #life #poetry #mathematics

PRAISE FOR Stop and Smell the Fractals (and Everything In Between) by Caroline Jennings

Caroline Jennings’ Stop and Smell the Fractals (And Everything In Between) is a striking chapbook. Jennings’ poetry innovatively explores everyday #life through the lens of one of our world’s strongest foundations: #mathematics. From equations to odes, poems approach complex moments with calculated candor. In “Life as a Function Where x=Time,” the poet tracks a young nephew’s life along the X-axis. In “Asymptote, a spine mimics a graphed line, blending the body with geometry. Stained glass windows appear as personified “octagonal geometry” in a cathedral. People’s “laughter blends into one uniform wave function.” This chapbook embarks on a gorgeous quest for the world’s patterns and solutions while acknowledging the forces that complicate them. Caroline Jennings is a poet with a mathematician’s eye and a generous artist’s heart. Stop and Smell the Factals (And Everything In Between) is an important chapbook to read.

–Elizabeth Muscari

Tormenting geese, a stolen parking spot, stain glass from a cathedral’s windows, the lack of precision in a nautilus shell, poor posture: in this chapbook, Caroline Jennings delivers a disarmingly earnest and often humorous study of a mind obsessed with the perfection proposed by mathematical equations. By the end, we learn her way of tolerating and trusting the insights of all that refuses to add up. As Jennings so movingly puts it in one these marveling poems, “but I search anyway.”

–Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

[andrewseguin]