Category: Featured Artist

“Everyone is to be held accountable for these stories. Everyone has the ‘sharpest parts’ as a part of them.” Our new Online Editor, Justin Phillip Reed, interviews Phillip B. Williams, author of THIEF IN THE INTERIOR, about the lives of poems, performance and survival, real love, and Beyoncé.

We give you Managing Editor of Sundress Publications & Creative Director for Sundress Academy for the Arts at Firefly Farms, Erin Elizabeth Smith.

How to Get Dry  The first question of course was, how to get dry again?                                                                                …

Alice Attends Bonne’s Wedding Once  you lean into the hole, there’s no going back.  First the fall with its fisted jam and bric-a-brac, your body that hit the leafy earth with a murmured oomph.  There are no ladders tall enough to get you out—here, there is only forward momentum, your lily stilleto tottering toward an…

Sesquicentennial Alice A hundred and fifty years, and it’s hard to believe I’m no longer a girl, aged into bluebonnet dresses and spooned-up hair-dos.  I have become a woman turned upside down in behind-the-scene featurettes, all Redbox demure, gazing with Victorian reticence into the CVS parking lot. How I got here, I never know, following…

Susan O’Dell Underwood, co-founder of Sapling Grove Press, asks, “What if we aren’t practiced enough to recognize [the sublime] when we’re face-to-face with it?”

Gnosis   I can’t give you everything I know, even if I wished nature held that kind of sway. Take for example the thousand heads I want to show you of grasshopper weeds, their tips like fragile, flaming fleece, bobbing one wave in the final pentecost of dusk. Go with me while I walk, each…

God as Redbud   The spring pink fog of simple ghosts like hosts of harmonizing choruses, their low strummed alto sostenuto revives and revives and revives along the highway, this stepping forward sprightly lithesome line nothing like bright dogwood sopranos, but a whispered tonal wayward zone, a wily tribe, their every twig singing with tremulous,…

Annunciation   You have to believe this gospel is man-made, the oil paint luminous as pain, the angel dressed in blood red. No woman would frame this sacred moment inside a gilded trap so garish and so public. No woman gestates willfully the glory of certain death. Here is sacrifice forced upon her, the rapturous…