Sundress Publications announces the release of this year’s craft chaps by Rajiv Mohabir, Meg Cass, and K. Iver.
Searching for the space between poetry and the world, and inviting writers to stretch into that space, Rajiv Mohabir plays with imagery and observation in Between Influence and Imitation: Poetry as Translational Act. Mohabir offers a meditative unfurling of exercises that consider the relationship between observation and observed, stripping away what is not needed and distilling an understanding of how poetry translates the sensual world into writing. Translation is further explored through layered exercises that examine the relationship between the art that moves us and how we communicate this movement, in turn creating a regenerative and fresh process in and of itself. Using image-as-agent, Mohabir establishes a poetics of translation, cultivating new ways to destabilize and reconstruct poems to bring forth new voices and perspectives.
Bringing queer and trans perspective to body horror in These Vital Ruptures: Body Horror as World Making, Meg Cass decenters the traditional cis-male narrative to reveal how the surreality of body horror can serve to challenge systems of oppression, cracking open the status quo world to reveal its strange and ugly insides. Drawing on a rich variety of examples from film and literature (think The Thing and writing from Carmen Maria Machado’s work), Cass examines how certain types of body horror, namely those that could translate to the lived experience of sexual and/or gender minorities, serve to disrupt and disturb narratives, calling forth new voices and perspectives while also allowing writers to draw closer to themes like grief, identity, and mortality. Cass concludes with a series of invitations to the reader that prompt a consideration toward how body horror can be used as a literary tool of subversion and rebellion, bringing to light fresh and exciting ways to consider the body within one’s writing.
K. Iver challenges writers to shed the rules of workshops and creative writing classes in “Becoming Mud”: A Neurodivergent Poetics Toward Movement. Weaving in lessons from movement and somatic experience, Iver calls for a return to instinct and embodied rhythm in poetry that embraces divergent ways of thinking instead of trying to control them. Infusing their experience as a neurodivergent writer into their musings, Iver invites other writers to see what it feels like to worry less about each word, each line, and instead to move with their poems, bringing in a sense of life-affirming wonder to the craft. For anyone who has felt stuck in their writing or bogged down by the rules and expectations of poetry, Iver provides a unique and revitalizing perspective that shakes off rules and sets aside expectations to return to the simple joy between the writer and their work.
Poet, memoirist, and translator Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry, including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria (Four Way Books, 2023) is his fourth collection of poetry and currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Meg Cass (they/them) is a queer, trans fiction writer and teacher based in St. Louis. ActivAmerica, their first book, was selected by Claire Vaye Watkins for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and was published in 2017. Recent stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Ecotone, Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, Honey Literary, Passages North, Mississippi Review, and manywor(l)ds. Their flash fiction has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 and in the SmokeLong Quarterly Best of the First 10 Years Anthology. They co-founded and co-organize Changeling, a queer reading series focused on works-in-progress located at the Granite City Arts and Design District. They were a co-founding editor of Craft Chaps and teach in the English Department at the University of Illinois, Springfield.
K. Iver (they/them) is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions. Their poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Iver has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a PhD in Poetry from Florida State University. For more, visit kleeiver.com.
