Jessica Purdy’s Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023) is a striking collection of poems about murder. After Frances Glessner Lee’s “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” dioramas, each poem in Adora...

In her poetry collection, Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone Press 2024), Ellen Kombiyil explores the nature of love, as well as what it means to continue from a foundation of familial dysfunction ...

Small Girl (Small Harbor Publishing, 2024), a collection of micro-memoirs by Lisa Fay Coutley, stands tall among modern-day literature. Through fifteen beautifully crafted works of flash, Coutley deta...

Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts (Bottlecap Press 2025) by Annalisa Hansford explores the turmoil that comes with trauma, loving, and being loved. It’s a soul-gripping poetry chapbook etched with t...

Tinamarie Cox’s A Collection of Morning Hours (Bottlecap Press, 2024) is a love letter to morning and the birds accompanying those first hours of the day. In this chapbook, Cox considers her role as a...

In Emilia Phillips’ Nonbinary Bird of Paradise (The University of Akron Press, 2024), God is many things: they are “a knot / that knows how to untie itself,” “the first/war,”  a “voyeur, who gave / [t...

In T. De Los Reyes’s latest chapbook, And Yet Held (Bull City Press 2024), each poem feels like the lyrical embodiment of coming home and sinking into a soft mattress. This sensation arises not from a...

In her chapbook, In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022), Valyntina Grenier explores the destructive human impact on the environment as well as society’s inhibiting effect on natural human freedoms. Dr...

In What Good is Heaven (Texas Review Press, 2024), Raye Hendrix writes at the intersection of love and pain. Their crisp descriptions of Appalachia are unmistakable and accessible. Published in the So...

Rachel R. Baum’s How to Rob a Convenience Store (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2024) is a collection of interconnected poems that highlight the banalization of gun culture, the power associated with guns, as...

Ally Ang’s Let the Moon Wobble (Alice James Books, 2025) is a timely poetry collection rich with bold reclamations of life from systems designed to harm. Ang’s unapologetic poetic voice is inspiring; they announce their queerness with the power of community behind every word, writing, “queer as in death to cops and politicians! / May … Continue reading Sundress Reads: Review of Let the Moon Wobble →

Simultaneously, our lives change and stay the same. We always end up where we began, our home. With regards to family, home can be complicated or simple or both. Each year I age, I settle into the ide...

Isabella Santana’s Abuela Lore (Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press, 2024) revolves around the author’s grandmothers, emphasizing their fortitude, love, and magic. Santana guides us through a m...

When I first read M. J. Gomez’s poetry collection love letters from a burning planet (Variant Lit, 2023), I was in a mostly empty coffee shop, drinking an iced vanilla latte, eating a croissant, and t...

Child of Light by Jesi Bender (Whisk(e)y Tit, 2025) is a complex and gripping story that explores identity, language, and family dynamics as Ambrétte Memenon journeys through discovering who she is an...

In String (LSU Press, 2023), Matthew Thorburn chronicles a teenage boy’s journey through an unnamed war. Thorburn brings a breathless quality to the entire volume, with almost no punctuation in any po...

Moon Meridian Novella Award Winner, M.S. Gardner’s Wolf’s Bane (April Gloaming, 2025) toes the line between renowned fable and grotesque reality in a captivating account of one woman’s past, the secre...

Cavar’s sophomore poetry collection, Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026) is a visceral dissection of postmodern anxieties through the lens of trans* and Mad experiences. Reminiscent of Joanna Klink and Lyn Hejinian’s surreal work and, more broadly, a long lineage of Mad literature, the collection also uses quotes and footnotes to engage in conversation with … Continue reading Sundress Reads: Review of Differential Diagnosis →