Isla is the first-ever winner of the Sundress chapbook contest.
“Beginning and ending with dreams—first ‘of milkfish and of becoming a doctor’ and finally of ‘an exoskeleton’ left by a ‘parrot…bounded into the air’—Stebbins guides the reader on a tour of the Philippine Islands. Yet this is no mere sightseer’s catalog; Isla is as much meditation as it is documentary. Stebbins has (re)created a landscape that wavers between the exotic and familiar, drawing you in until you, too, are haunted by the distant afterimage of water.”
-T.A. Noonan, Sundress Publications Chapbook Contest Judge