This award, named for our founder, is for flash nonfiction. From January 1 thru January 31, we accept original work that has not previously been published. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. You may submit as many entries as you would like, however, please limit your essay to 1,000 or fewer words. All submissions are read blind.

One of the recent winner of this contest, "Conversations in Colic Season," by Caitlin Gunthorp, was just named as a Best American Notable Essay in 2025.

To submit, please use our online submissions portal via submittable, Complete contest information is also available on our website. where you will find further guidelines. Each entry fee is $15. We abide by the CLMP code of ethics.

Perry is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Poets & Writers Notable Nonfiction Debut, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick; and Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover, a memoir in 100 short essays that came out in February 2025 from Mariner/HarperCollins.

Perry teaches in the graduate program in Creative Writing at the Colorado State University. She was the 2019 McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College, and will return in the role in spring 2026. They have also taught at Columbia University, the University of North Texas, Manhattanville College, The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and Catapult. Her writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, Off Assignment, Elle magazine, The Guardian, Literary Hub, and other outlets.

The Pinch Journal Online published your work "Some Baleen Whales Have Learned to Sing at Frequencies too Low for Predators to Hear". How did you feel about the process of being published with Pinch, and what did it mean for you?

Pinch Journal Online is one of the journals I turn to when I hope to re/find creative sparks and human connection. I love when a good journal is able to share content online without a paywall! So, when Pinch Journal Online accepted my poem, I was thrilled. What I remember most about the publication process is how they curated the image to accompany and share the poem on social media. I found it thoughtful … and not all journals come across that way after accepting one’s work.

Your poem "Some Baleen Whales Have Learned to Sing at Frequencies too Low for Predators to Hear" is a poem that seems to be applicable both to present times as well as outside of time all together. What do you feel is the importance of discussing the current state of our world through poetry, and do you feel it is a medium that is effective towards change?

Poetry is a form of human connection, and it’s for, because of, and through human connection that we continue to heal ourselves, repair, build, imagine, feel, listen, and thrive in the face of ongoing and escalating violence and war. While I think it’s possible (and sometimes fashionable) for poets to try to write outside—or in negation of—the world we live in, I don’t think it ever really happens. The one thing we can’t surrender while we’re alive is our human perspective, which is deeply personal and political all at once. I write because I have to, and I only benefit from the connections made when I write.

What does it mean to be a writer in the current age of A.I.? How has it changed your perspective as a writer?

I don’t think A.I. has changed what it means for me to be a writer. It has changed the way I teach, for sure, and the way I work as an editor. But I am still a writer because I have to be, whether or not people think I ought to (or can) be replaced.

Poets and creatives have been responsive and innovative in the face of major shifts in technology for centuries. Most of us learn to adapt by understanding and, honestly, subverting and questioning. Some of us don’t, sure. (I mean, my god, I had an English professor who insisted that communicating via email was a silly fad; he bungled our schedules constantly by communicating via typewriter. All he proved was that typewriters are neat but as an advisor, he was more obstacle than aid.)

What’s concerning about the rapid expansion and dependence on A.I. is the humans at the controls and their reasons for designing and implementing it [A.I.] in the way they are. I want to live in a world where art and human experience are valued. It’s possible to do this in a world that can also tell me exactly how many photos of my cat are on my phone; it is threatened in a world that devalues the artistic process and inspiration by stealing it from the people who are committed to it. 

I don’t mean to sound indifferent or unconcerned because I’m not, but I do believe this new shift is, in many ways, familiar to us as humans and artists. We are already adapting and resisting in ways that protect and nurture our craft.

Your recent work, Recovery Commands, considers what it means to be a military spouse. Throughout the collection, there is a juxtaposition of the peace desired with the reality of being constantly confronted and associated with violence. What was it like finding a balance of wording and language to express this experience? What do you hope the reader can discover?

This book does include my perspective as a military spouse, but my perspective as a pacifist is, I think, even more in the forefront. I am asking how people who disagree and struggle to understand each other cannot only accept one another but make themselves into a family. And yes, my particular circumstances may seem unique in a few ways, but really, this is what millions of people are struggling with today: how to love. How to disagree, how to get to know. How to differentiate between the human component of any relationship and the traditional systems of division and isolation that we sometimes obey without pausing to wonder about the harm they cause.

My poems are often inspired by the strangeness and oppression of military culture, but they’re relatable to anyone who’s ever felt wholly out of place, marginalized, joyful, furious, resistant, afraid, or dedicated to truth telling.

Reading through Recovery Commands, there is a mix of consistent form with some variety of structure throughout. How much focus do you put on form in your poetry? What would your advice be to new poets when it comes to that writing and editing process?

I don’t really think about form much while I’m writing individual poems, but I definitely take them into account when I’m pulling a manuscript together. I like to create books I’d want to read, and I prefer a little variety in poetry collections: it’s good to remember that there are many ways to create a poem, a thought, a book, a movement.

I learned this the hard way, probably, as a young MFA student who believed their only form could be long, narrow, clipped lines of free verse. I was, for some reason, hellbent on a signature style until a mentor simply asked me about it and I had to pause and reflect. I realized I was cutting off all kinds of other ways of using my voice for the sake of being someone with only one signature. So, I expanded, reluctantly at first, to see if I liked trying new things, and I found there was a lot I still wanted to try and learn. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have preferences, and I’m glad I enjoyed writing that way, but I’m also glad I took the time to read and learn and write more expansively. I am not just me; I am everyone I’ve been in the past, too.

I find myself constantly pulling inspiration from the shows and books I am presently consuming. What are you currently watching or reading that has sparked moments of creativity for you, and how have they been interpreted in your work?

I just finished reading Soraya Chemaly’s The Resilience Myth, which disassembles and analyzes traditional (and often harmful) methods and reasoning for the concept of resilience. I think it should be required reading everywhere, but especially for military families, who are over-prescribed the encouragement to be resilient at steep costs to themselves and their communities.

The last television series I watched and enjoyed was The Residence with Uzo Aduba. I love the idea of a White House full of complex, interesting people.

You have spent many years dedicating yourself to a literary journal that has uplifted adults, but Collateral has also worked with youth on corre y corre sin detenerte. What has been your experience being a part of a project focused on children, and what has been the significance in that experience?

Collateral’s mission is to provide a platform for those writing “the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone.” That includes countless people and perspectives, including, especially, the immigrant and refugee, the advocate, the survivor of violence, and the memory. When I found out there was a facility holding youth detained for existing in the United States “illegally”, I was sick of feeling like my only options were helplessness or an out-of-reach power to stop all these seizures and deportations. It left me in a place of perceived helplessness, and I am not helpless, and I can act.

I can request and organize access to young poets detained, and I can bring them poems. I can bring them time and conversation and maybe a place to put their grief.

In the case of these poets in particular, they mostly wrote about missing their mothers. They compared their mothers to roses, to stars, to water. They need reunion and protection and safety. Poetry cannot provide these things, but it connects people who can.

Opinions on tigers? Good or bad? Where does Memphis rank on the list of the Tiger mascots in your opinion?

My first thought was this poem I wrote at the beginning of the pandemic, which ruffled some feathers in my husband’s battalion. Short answer? I like tigers.

How would you define Pinchy? On the Pinch website, you can see some of the definitions that MFA students have written if you need some help in the right direction.

A pinch, to me, is a seemingly quiet way to wake a person up, to direct their attention, to make a little space for their attention.

Aaron Templeton, a first year MFA student in fiction, received the opportunity to interview poet, author, and editor Darren C. Demaree. In this published interview, the conversation touched on a wide array of subjects, including Darren’s catalogue, his thoughts on artificial intelligence, and the importance of poetry. Darren has a nuanced but powerful view of writing that comes from years of devotion to a craft he will die for.

We published your poem "Emily as I Receive a Handwritten Letter Asking if Darren is My Dead Name" earlier this year. What did it mean to you to get published in the Pinch?

It was a joy to be in Pinch. I’ve admired the work included in Pinch for years, and it was a great experience to have an “Emily As” Poem published by you all. 

What do you think it means to be Pinchy? Or for a piece to be Pinchy?

I think it means you don’t mind the friction of the living; that sequitur and non-sequitur, nonsense and a great hope can all be together, and the work included in Pinch requires those tensions.  

Our world changes at such a rapid pace. Twenty years ago, no one thought about Artificial Intelligence, at least no more than the evil robots in Terminator and Matrix. Now that we are effectively living in the age of Artificial Intelligence, what does it mean for you to be a writer in it?

When I found out A.I. had been trained using some of my work without my permission, I got pretty worked up, and I’m still hesitant to embrace A.I. in any of my work (poetry and libraries). To the specific question you asked though, I think the pace of the world can be an entry point or an exit point. You can join the torrent or say no thank you. Most artists tend to play jump rope with that concept. I’ve got no idea what the future will look like for my children, but the decisions they make will be similar to the ones we have to make. The contexts will be different, but I imagine the decisions will be similar. What do I want to give myself to? What do I want no part of? 

Generic sports question - Memphis Tigers, any thoughts? Specifically, do we have a chance? Do you like us? Give us your honest opinion.

Depends on the sport. Basketball, maybe. 

Generic travel question - Memphis. Have you ever been? And if so, what did you like about it? We can guess the Barbecue, Elvis, and Blues.

I have. One of my favorite bands, Lucero, is from Memphis. I love visiting. The food and music are incredible.

In your bio, it's mentioned that you received a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant. It is indicative of certain writers like McCarthy and even the age old painters and composers who received patronage toward their arts, especially when not many people were eager to support them. Did being a recipient of that grant make you feel more connected to some of the great artists who have come before, especially those you admire in any medium?

Not really. It’s nice when a grant or an award happens, but it’s never expected and I have no idea what it actually means. It doesn’t make me a better poet to win something or be acknowledged in that way. It has tangible value in terms of the money and what it allows you to do with your time, which hopefully means you’re getting a chance to experiment more or be more generative. I’ve been writing poetry for a long time, and I’ll write it until I die. It’s the routine and process that matters. It’s being a lifer, giving your life as much poetry as possible, that I think about that a lot. It’s why I don’t mind a project that fails. I still got to spend all that time with poetry, trying something, playing with the music and energy of words, and that’s the bit I love. 

You have written twenty-three poetry collections, which is impressive enough to say, more to think on. Have you been writing poetry all your life? Is it something you started later and if so, did you have a mindset going in that you would write in this medium exclusively?

I’ve been writing poetry since I was ten, publishing it since I was twenty, and hopefully I’ve got another fifty years with it. The mindset is to stay curious and be challenged. Poetry does that for me in a way no other genre ever has.

 Getting past the fact that a writer is a writer, you're also human and us people love our music and films. I had the feeling as I was reading this work that you were capturing aspects of Imposter Syndrome, particularly in how writers struggle to come into their own in light of being in established canons. I think your poem really hammers that with mentioning your other works connected to Emily Dickinson and that "[you're] slowly removing Darren from this world." Did you find anything like that when you were writing this poem or in other works you have penned?

I’m fascinated by Emily. She’s real. We’ve been married almost twenty years. The assumption that the larger project of the Emily as poems have something to do with Emily Dickinson or some other focus has always struck me as an interesting reading of the work. My own fascination, as we near 900 of them published, is in what the self and the ego has to do with using someone else’s name to live longer. You die, your work lives on (hopefully), and what does it mean to lift another name above my own? For me it’s love and the abandonment of the traditional goal of winning or succeeding. My therapist always wants me to say more about this idea I have of these poems, but it feels like if I answered the full question of why(?) then the poems would lose their searching. I want to be playful with Emily in the place I’m most myself, and that’s in these poems.

 On a similar vein, your last verse says "This one erases me & I don't mind that so much." Are you speaking to your own authorship blending in with the style and rhythm, everything that makes an Emily Dickinson poem an Emily Dickinson poem, because you are so inspired by her? Or are you speaking to the fact that books are made from books, that every idea has come from another and so on?

I think it’s much more the idea that art is a confluence of other, of self, of purpose, and (yes) of other art and that all creates tethers. What if we cut those tethers and let it fly? What then?

 The least explicit and least iceberg level deep question, when did you know you wanted to be a writer? Because writing is difficult, it requires a lot. It should be a simple, go go go kind of thing, but ask anyone and you would get a million thoughts on why you write before you hear an answer. So, tell us, when did you know it and furthermore, why?

 I knew when I was ten, and I got in trouble for writing a poem that I would never want to stop. Poetry is the best kind of ornery.

This Year's Ghost is a haunting experience, not only due to the ghosts in the realities created on the page, but also the lingering contemplation of existence it leaves behind, long after reading the last page. Lives just off from our own reality featuring gambling with one's remaining lifetime, the extinction of dogs, and even clown college; portray humanity with startling accuracy.

The Pinch published your titular story “This Year's Ghost” in 2019. What did that mean for you as a writer? Did having that acceptance help push you towards publishing the rest of the book?

I was so honored to publish “This Year’s Ghost” with the Pinch. I consider that story the first thing I wrote after I completed my own MFA at Oregon State that I really liked and believed in. Placing it with the Pinch was a great affirmation that I could write good material removed from the MFA community that had meant so much to me.

When I started thinking about this book, placing this story with the Pinch was a good signal this story was not only a viable choice to include in a collection, but a worthy choice to place as the “title track.”

We have our own interpretations at the Pinch, but we were wondering: How would you define Pinchy?

I think of the Pinch as hitting a sweet spot as a journal that’s super selective but also down-to-earth—a little gritty, a little weird, and I’ve never left an issue and found the work pretentious or over my head. It’s a great space to occupy in celebrating a range of work that’s all functioning on its own terms but doesn’t require its readers be too deep in the weeds of literary theory or canon to be along for the ride.

How do you feel being a creative, specifically a writer, in the age of generative A.I.? Does it worry you? Are you unbothered by the implications?

I’m not enthused about A.I. in art, though I’m also not overly concerned at this point. In the short-term, I am concerned would-be creatives are going to lean into use of A.I. to make their art for them which, to borrow an image from one of my teaching colleagues, is like sending a robot to lift weights for oneself at the gym.

There may be a larger concern about A.I. taking the place of real artists in different capacities down the line as the technology evolves. We’re not there yet, and I think it’s some ways off, if it occurs in my lifetime at all, but it is worrisome to think about that in the larger scope of humanity. 

What do you think about tigers?

The first place my head goes on this one is my favorite pop culture tiger, Hobbes from “Calvin and Hobbes”. Big fan of him; I can’t say I’ve had any real-life interactions with the animals, though, and I suspect I’m better off for it. 

Have you ever been to Memphis? If you have, how was it?

I stopped in Memphis on a cross-country road trip in 2016. I’m a huge pro wrestling nerd and have always been fascinated by the mythology around wrestling in that area. I’m not sure if it’s as vibrant as it once was, but I remembered reading about it in magazines when I was a kid and always wishing I could check it out. Anyway, I had lunch at King Jerry Lawler's Hall of Fame Bar & Grille on Beale Street, including indulging in the delicacy of deep-fried ribs. I’m not sure my cholesterol levels have ever been the same. It was a fun, quirky place to eat, though, and I took a lot of pictures. I’ve always hoped I might have the chance to come through again and also engage with more of the musical history anchored in Memphis. 

When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Was there a specific time or event that pushed you towards writing?

My father taught me to read, and I discovered a love of writing years before my love for reading. I started writing stories based on Nintendo characters around the age of six before moving on to fantasy-oriented stories—riffing off the knights and princesses and dragons that showed up in a lot of the stories I consumed at the time. I started writing (quite bad) novels in middle and high school. I had a novel I drafted at sixteen that I wound coming back to and spending a lot of my twenties reworking and trying to sell, before ultimately accepting it wasn’t meant to be and that the lessons learned from that project were more valuable than that book itself was ever going to be as a finished creative work.  I think everything escalated in my late twenties and early thirties—after I let that book go and then when I started my MFA at Oregon State in 2014.

I was a quiet kid for a lot of my youth and have considered myself socially awkward in most contexts, most of my life. I think that’s a big part of what drew me to writing, where the words come out right and I can best communicate what I want to say. 

What was getting your most recent book published like? How did that process work for This Year's Ghost?

It was quite a journey for this book. I first drafted a couple of the stories in it as far back as 2011-2012. I distinctly remember thinking I had a collection in 2018 and starting to send out that earliest version that fall. This Year's Ghost is the seventh book I've published; I think it's telling that the first book hadn't even been picked up yet when I started shopping a version of this one around.

The collection got shortlisted for a couple contests and had some notes of encouragement, but I had trouble finding a home for it. In the meantime, I switched up the order of stories, transitioned some out altogether, and added some in—some new material, some repurposed from other, larger projects that hadn’t panned out. The last two stories, which I now think of as pretty essential in tying the book together, were not a part of the project until the last couple rounds of sorting things.

Of the ten stories in the final version of the book, six were included (in some form) straight through the process. I think the biggest version of the book had around 15-16 stories.

In any event, the great Juan Martinez selected the book for JackLeg Press in 2023; Juan, Jennifer Harris, and the rest of the team there were fantastic to work with, including being super collaborative around editing and cover design. On the cover, I think it was a real testament that after I pushed back on the first option they ran past me, their team came back with five new mock-ups, three of which I really loved, so then I had the nice problem having to pick just one from that bunch.

Are there any writers that you look toward that were influences for your creative process?

I read super diversely, and I think everything I read has some influence on my work, consciously or not. For this specific book, I can directly trace the DNA of some stories back to reading Kevin Brockmeier, Joe Hill, and Shirley Jackson in particular. Maybe even more so than reading them, teaching their stories really pushed me to figure out the mechanics of how their writing works and helped me borrow strategies that I could make my own in this collection. 

I noticed while reading, the stories in This Year's Ghost mostly have a sort of introduction into the concept of the story, very clearly, at the beginning. You don't spell it out, but you give the reader some idea of what exactly in the world of your story is different than the real world.  Do have a sort of formula you use to do that, or does it naturally happen when you're building the story? Do you actively consider reader understanding when setting up your concepts?

I don’t have a formula per se, but I am sensitive to the point that a story with a speculative premise demands helping out the reader to understand the world we’re operating in. My best friend since childhood is an adamant realist who doesn’t really do genre. We’ve never seen eye-to-eye on that, but I think that friendship has helped me keep a critical eye toward what a reader like him must understand to enter the world of a story. That perspective also helps me see when it’s a good idea to rein things in to not alienate the kind of reader who prioritizes keeping one foot in the realism half of magical realism. 

Is there anything you are willing to tell us about what you have planned next? Do you have any projects in progress?

I have so many—probably too many!—projects. I don’t like to get into particulars before things are really in motion, but I can say I have pretty complete drafts of four new books that are in different stages of revision or editing; I’ve started testing the waters on sending out some of this stuff the last few months. I’ve learned to trust the process and that it’s hard to predict if, when, how, or in what form a project will actually make it into readers’ hands. I’m cautiously optimistic folks will hear more from me before too long, though.

Shipman’s work appears in journals such as Fence, Poetry, Sixth Finch, and The Southern Review, among many others. He is the author or coauthor of six books and four chapbooks. His poem “The Three-Year Crossing” was a winner of the 2015 Big Bridges Prize, judged by Alice Quinn, and he has twice won the Editor’s Choice for Rattle’s ekphrastic challenge. With his partner, artist and all-around badass Dr. Sarah K. Jackson, and his spellbinding daughter Finn, he lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he teaches literature and creative writing at New Garden Friends School and plays drums in The Goodbye Horses.  Find him online at cshipmanwriting.com.

My first question is what kind of a unicorn are you? You have your newest collection of poetry Mortar coming out, but you are a musician and write and work closely with an artist spouse and teach. How do you understand your identity as a creator and how has that influenced Mortar?

When I think about my identity as a creator, I’m quickly transported back to senior year of high school, when the incomparable Jo Ann Steed introduced the first creative writing assignment I can remember—to write a parody of a horror story. Without going into detail, my life at the time, for various reasons, was something like a horror story—defined by fear and depression. This simple assignment, however, allowed me to look at not only my life but life itself with different eyes. Every experience I have had from that moment forward has been tinged with fascination and ripe for exploration. It is no surprise that I ended up a teacher of English and creative writing. I know very well what life can feel like without art. I don’t want that absence for myself, and I don’t want it for my students or anyone else.

Around the time of the pivotal assignment in my senior English class I began (very badly) playing music with a small group of friends just as lost and depressed as I was. We had no idea what we were doing. But, like writing, it allowed me to find the joy I desperately needed to find, and I have been in bands ever since. I have been writing ever since.             

My work as a poet has always been informed by personal experience. More than anything, my poems tend to be about my family and relationships (romantic and plutonic) in one way or another. Unfortunately, that has also meant that my poems often explore trauma and grief. It is clear to me now that Mortar is what that fateful assignment in my senior English class was always leading me to write. In this way, Mortar feels like my debut collection. I have always written for both myself and others. Mortar is as much for a grandmother I was never able to meet as it is for my father and his siblings navigating life after the tragic event of her murder.

But it is also for me—my attempt to come to terms with a childhood/relationship with a father that was defined in many ways by the trauma left in the wake of my grandmother’s murder. Ultimately though, at least for me, at the heart of the book is my daughter. Amid so much attention to the past, I write about my daughter to ground myself in the lived experience of the present and to reach toward a future for her that is not defined by the past that haunts the majority of the book’s pages. Overall, like anything I have produced as a poet or musician—anything I have managed to offer my students as a teacher—I hope Mortar is for anyone who might in some way benefit from spending time with it.              

I especially love the very brick-like poems. I am tempted to call them prose poems, but the importance of lines and enjambment and all the other poetic devices that separate prose from poetry are in operation in ways that feel unique. Do you think of the poems(“Missing Headline” “Ulteriority” “Education” “A Traditional Story of Exaggerated Consumption” “My Father’s Grief” “Missing Story”) as formally different from “Here Comes the Rain”? What about these ‘brick-thick’ poems makes them feel so fit for the content? What is going on for them/you in the poems?

I’m so glad you asked about these poems specifically as they are by far my favorite in the collection. The best teacher I’ve ever had, Rodger Kamenetz, often talks about the power of the image to purge afflictive emotions. He would also say that poems come from the same place dreams come from—what Coleridge might call the primary imagination. These poems are my favorite because they are absent of the kind of analytical thought that unfortunately weasels its way into many of my poems.

A poem can be essayistic, and I would describe the bulk of my poems over the years as exactly that. But to me a poem seems more authentic when thought is absent. I do believe that for me the initial impulse to write a poem always begins with the image. More often than not, however, the connection to the image becomes, maybe not severed entirely, but more confused and deformed by too much thinking. Rodger once said, in the first class I was lucky to have with him in grad school at LSU, that to analyze a dream (or poem) by adhering to the rules of the waking world is to do it a grave disservice. I didn’t understand at the time what he meant by the statement. Maybe I still don’t. But I felt its truth—I felt it like the image of a flame in what Yeats would call “the deep heart’s core” of the imagination.

Many of the poems in the collection come from a place of knowing—a place of intellect. I know the facts of my grandmother’s murder—names and dates and actions and consequences—and many of the poems sprung from that knowledge. But the poems you reference here are informed by images that carry with them the emotions that led me to write this collection in the first place; images that I did not understand but felt; images that rose up inside me. In these poems I managed to let the image go where it wanted, and the poems came quickly and with very little revision needed. In many ways for me they function like dreams. They are speaking from a place of imagination that managed to allow me to purge afflictive emotions, and the brick-like structure is simply the result of not concerning myself with thinking, as much as possible, about line breaks. 

Your other poetry collection, very different, Getting Away with Everything, displays a playfulness and sensitivity to form AND a willingness to stretch (maybe near tearing?) formal constraints. What do you think of the form overall? Its role in our poetic venture, its constraints and ways formal experiments might help poetry as an art?

I have found, more often than not, form takes shape as the writing unfolds. The collection you mention, Getting Away with Everything, coauthored with my dear friend Vincent Cellucci, is the second in a trilogy of collaborations. The third of which is now in the beginning stages. Among other things, for GAWE we wanted the title to suggest that we would exhaust our abilities in terms of both form and content. My poems have always looked very different from one to the next.

Other than the image, formal constraint (or their absence) is what allows poetry to exist. Without formal experiments poetry would cease to be what it is—its possibilities would cease to present themselves. I think poets should experiment with form as much as possible. My poems look very different from one to the next because I am willing to let the content and the craft of that content take shape along the way. I would write very few poems otherwise.                      

A popular form and one that seems to lend itself to displacement and grief, especially hidden grief, is the erasure poem. It strikes me that while you do not use the erasure, your poems deal with absence. Can you talk about the central theme of absence in Mortar (the word itself in anaphoric throughout Mortar), and how the writing of Mortar was a response, but also (maybe?) an attempt to heal or overcome absence? Is poetry a healing venture and how are some of the ways it functions as such for you?

Poetry is very much a healing venture for me. Like dreams, poetry—and music and all art—is medicine. Without it I would be lost. For this collection specifically, there is no question that absence and the ache to address that absence is a driving force.

There is the absence of my grandmother, who was murdered before I was even born. But my father was also absent the first six years of my life. That absence defined our relationship in many ways, but it was also informed by the absence that defined his own childhood.

Looking back at the process of writing, it’s clear to me that the absence that pushed the book to become what it became in the end is the absence of knowing what to do with the emotions and images swirling inside me along the way. I recognized that there was a connection between my father’s childhood and my own—a kind of generational trauma that erupted with my grandmother’s murder. But there was also the ache to be present for my daughter—to ensure that the absence that led me to the page would not haunt her as well. A desire to heal insisted that the final poem would be the final poem in the collection well before I finished writing it.      

I am very into the so-called poetry of witness, Carolyn Forche, etc., and several of your poems seem to speak into what Forche calls the space of the social, which she defines as “place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated. It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.” In “Making a Sound,” you mention Bertolt Brecht and some lines about police. While the line ‘a dead body is hidden’ seems to be what the poems circle around, I am curious about your thoughts on how we name our stories within a crumbling social landscape or wood? How, for instance, can we write poems about oceans, when they are full of deadly plastic islands? Or about family life when so many families are being decimated by poverty and unjust policy? Does the poet have a voice here? What might that voice sound like?

I feel that it has always been and always will be important to write about oceans and trees—about love and family and beauty. It’s not only important—it’s an obligation we have to ourselves and each other. It is important to name the injustices and atrocities that wreck our planet and our lives, but it is also important to write about the beauty of what those injustices threaten. In doing so we remind ourselves what we are fighting for in that act of naming. We keep what matters alive both by celebrating it and by condemning what might come to take it from us. “Making a Sound” is my attempt to hold onto beauty amid the trauma at the heart of the collection—to remind myself that it will always be important to write about the trees. Maybe even more so if their leaves are hiding a dead body.     

So many features of the collection deserve exploration, the 12 repeating brick poems set as a kind of marker, the narrative italics that follow “Larry, 27, bricklayer”, and the numerous ways brick as metaphor are deployed in dozens of unique ways. I’d like to know about those elements individually, but because that would take a book, my question is, what do you hope these elements combined with individual poems accomplish for the reader?

Yes, that would take a book, and I fear I’ve already rambled on too long. I guess the short answer is that I wanted these poems to work for the reader as a kind of thread that is both metaphorical and narrative. They are just one poem (published in Denver Quarterly as “Brick”) that have been broken up throughout the collection. About midway through writing the book I decided to write an experimental performative piece that allowed the process of a brick’s creation to in some ways mimic the decision of my great uncle to murder his sister-in-law. Other than speaking with family members, this poem reflects the only research I conducted. In the end, the scattered pieces function like bricks in the sense that they are meant to hold together the story of my grandmother’s murder as well as the process of clay becoming something else. The clay becomes a brick. My uncle becomes a murderer, his chosen weapon: a brick.     

Pivoting from Mortar, I am interested in your poetic influences. I mentioned Brecht and I believe you mention Robert Hass in a poem. What book of Hass, green hued, were you alluding to? Your other collection, Getting Away with Everything, shows the possible influence of the Beatnik poets. Who are your poetic influences? What advice would you give to other aspiring poets about their reading lives and how what they read and listen to will affect what they might write?

The book by Hass I allude to in “Summer Reading” is Summer Snow, which is what I was reading before setting it aside to write the poem that mentions it. I would not necessarily count the Beats among my main influences. The evidence of that influence you see in Getting Away with Everything more than likely comes from poems written by my dear friend and collaborator Vincent Cellucci. I am quite fond of the Beats, but I don’t really think too much about schools of poetry.

I read voraciously as many poets as I can, and that is certainly what I’d suggest to anyone, poet or not. For what it’s worth, here is a list of some favorites (in no particular order), many of which I was reading while writing Mortar: Stephen Dunn, Diane Seuss, John Berryman, Ada Limon, Charles Simic, Natalie Diaz, Natasha Trethewey, Frank O’Hara, and Traci K. Smith. I feel compelled to add here, however, that my biggest influence during the writing of this book was listening to the music of Nick Cave, particularly his albums Ghosteen and Carnage, both which explore grief by dwelling deeply with images. My advice to aspiring poets is to read as much poetry as possible (there is so much good work out there!) and to listen to music that is born from the same emotional plane from which their poetry springs.            

Lastly, is there anything related to your work as a musician, poet or teacher, or related to any of your past or (hopefully) future work that you’d like readers to know about?

I’m not sure how to answer this exactly. I guess I hope readers will check out the new book, and if they find that it benefits their life in some way to maybe explore what’s out there that I’ve done in the past and to be on the lookout for what might come down the line. I try to ensure that everything I do in life comes from a desire to connect as much as possible to what it means to be human.

As Nick Cave said, “if we love, we grieve.” To not lean into what both can teach us would be to me like contemplating life without contemplating death. If we make it a point to connect to the wilderness of our inner lives—to explore and celebrate the aspects of ourselves that define our common humanity—we are made better by the effort. Writing, reading, humanities education, and playing music are the best ways that I know how to do this. Thank you so much for giving me a space here. So much gratitude for the time and energy you have devoted to my work. This experience has been a true gift.     

Tell us about “The Last Monsoon” which we published in our Fall 2025 issue.

This poem is a pivotal piece in my chapbook, No Fault of Water. It came to me in the hush of early morning, in that liminal space between waking and dreaming. I had been working on another poem exploring a similar theme, but it wasn’t capturing everything I needed it to. “The Last Monsoon” poured out in one unbroken flow before I even realized the pen was in my hand. When I read it back, I knew it was exactly what I had been waiting for. For me, this poem is the final gasp before surrender—the sudden, “oh, shit” moment when you realize you’re in over your head and there is no turning back. No life raft. No safety.

Is “The Last Monsoon” depicting more of location (New Orleans) or is it more of a reflection of past ghosts?

“The Last Monsoon” is rooted in a real experience I had in New Orleans with my partner, who was struggling with alcoholism at the time. If you’ve been to New Orleans, you know it’s a city surrounded by water, which makes it a city thick with ghosts—memory and spirits everywhere you turn. The poem marks a turning point—the moment the speaker realizes she must let everything go. The water is rising; there’s nothing left to hold on to. New Orleans was the perfect backdrop for that kind of reckoning.

How would you define Pinchy?

I like to think of the term “pinchy” in terms of food—a delicious dish with a twist. It’s the bite that lingers in your mind, the one you can’t stop thinking about. There’s a hint of mystery, that “pinch” of something extra you can’t quite name. It leaves you savoring the unknown. You don’t know exactly what the flavor is, but you want more.

What does it mean to be a writer in the time of AI?

I’m still trying to wrap my head around all things AI. What I find myself pondering most, in relation to writing and art, is the source of inspiration. As a writer, I find inspiration outside of myself—through experiences and relationships with the natural and spiritual worlds. I believe humans can communicate with the divine, and that art is the conversation that emerges from that connection.

In the world of AI, great thoughts from great thinkers are being regurgitated and presented in endlessly beautiful ways—but is that art? Is it original thought? Divine inspiration? Can a machine create art without any true experience of the divine? I have no answers, these are just some of the questions I wrestle with.

Tell us about being a Listener Poet.

I’m certified as a Listener Poet with The Good Listening Project, a nonprofit devoted to humanizing healthcare through the healing power of poetry and compassionate presence. Listener Poets hold space for deep listening and poetic reflection in one-on-one sessions, either virtual or in person. After each session, the poet crafts a custom poem inspired by what was shared. So much of my own work as a poet is rooted in listening, so when I discovered this organization and the beautiful work they were doing, it felt like a natural calling.

What do you think of Tigers? How about the Memphis Tigers?

Well, I am a cat person. Once at the Nashville Zoo, I sat on the ground, gazing into the silent eyes of a majestic Sumatran tiger, he and I separated only by a thick sheet of glass. I could have stayed there all day, small hand pressed against giant paw. It was magnificent.

Is there a writer or poet who has influenced your work or your journey as a writer?

There are so many! But I’d have to say that Marie Howe’s The Good Thief set a course for me. Here was a poet unafraid to look God in the eye, one who used darkness as a kind of transcendence. I don’t think I blinked or took a breath until the end. She taught me that there is power in vulnerability, in claiming your own story—especially as a woman. I feel a deep, instinctive recognition with women poets, an unspoken strength to draw from. What beauty and wisdom a woman can offer when she dares to use her voice.

Tell us about your Memphis associations.

One of my dearest friends lives in Memphis, but for me, the city will always be tied to traveling home for the holidays. Memphis sits halfway between my home in Nashville, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, where my parents lived for more than twenty years.

It marked the turning point on the drive—once we hit I-55, we were finally heading south, the road that would carry us home. Even the air seemed to shift, waking the kids and teasing my taste buds, aching for fried catfish and pickle sandwiches. My dad has since passed, and my mom now lives in Nashville, so I really miss that anticipatory feeling of going “home.”

What is the most significant advice you might give to an aspiring writer about your publishing journey?

Don’t settle for good enough. Wait. Give your words time to marinate on the page. Hit “submit” when every line rings true for you.

What's in store for your future works that you are willing to share with us?

On my desk sits a draft of a full-length manuscript, quietly begging for my attention. I plan to spend some meaningful time with it this winter.

Tell us about your second book, the Honorable Mention selection in the Backwaters Prize, which will be published in March 2026.

Nine Persimmons has taken shape over more than a decade. My first book, Bangalore, came from a place of urgency—those poems carried fear, survival, and the shadow of military life. This book moves differently, through pilgrimage and transition. I’ve lived in more than twenty-seven homes and attended eight schools, so change has been a constant.

The book traces those passages, each poem like a threshold crossed. I’ve worked jobs my whole life, taught and studied through graduate school, supported myself through grants, and finally settled again into teaching. Many of the poems carry those crossings, bound to a lifelong search for steadiness. Nearer the South—Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Virginia, now Georgia—Nine Persimmons gathers those fragments into a kind of stillness. To me, it’s a record of finding a few steady poems amid years of motion.

What were your influences while writing this book?

When I think of influence, I like its earliest meaning—when it referred to the flow of energy from the stars into human life, from in-fluere, “to flow into.” I’m drawn to that sense of permeability: how the world and language pass through us, one current at a time, until some form of coherence takes shape. My poems often begin with the ordinary: old jobs, what I’m reading, what I’m listening to, phone calls with family, small routines, and somewhere in that mix, images and phrases begin to align. My family, friends, mentors, and fellow poets are in there too—their voices threading beneath like roots in the yard. That’s how the poems, and eventually the book, formed; the world’s moving parts find their frequency, and the camera focuses.

What did it mean to have your poem “Fever Dream” published in our Spring 2022 issue?

Pinch has supported my work for nearly two decades, publishing “Waiting for Fire,” “Arachne’s Tapestry,” “Atomic Bible,” and “Fever Dream.” “Waiting for Fire” appeared later in my first collection with Copper Canyon, but your editors were the first to believe in it. It’s a long, surreal poem, and over the years I’ve tended to send you work that pushes further into risk. “Arachne’s Tapestry,” for example, is told from the perspective of Arachne after she’s been transformed into a spider—it fuses myth with a domestic scene of putting her daughter to bed. Pinch has always felt like a home for work unafraid to blur perception, to court strangeness until it makes its own kind of sense. 

What do you think it means to be a writer in the time of AI?

Maybe the oldest questions are still the best ones: what’s real, and how do we recognize it? The tools change, but the mind behind the words—its hunger and wonder—remains the same. Writing now, I try to hold onto that, to trust the work of the hand and the limits of what it can know.

Nine Persimmons is your second book; your first was Bangalore, published by Copper Canyon. Can you tell us a bit about your process of putting a collection together?

As a manuscript takes shape, poems, images, and ideas begin to gravitate, repel, and circle until patterns emerge. This book has worn many faces—different titles, shifting sequences, poems that arrived and later fell away. It’s been a long dialogue. Ultimately, the finished version marks a moment in time, a still point in that ongoing movement. Each section reflects where I paused to listen—the instant when the dialogue among poems felt clear enough to name.

You were a faculty member for the 2024 Poetry in the Woods Workshop in St. Louis, MO. What was that experience like for you? Did anything from that weekend stay with you as a teacher or a poet?

The organizer, my friend and fellow Saluki, Travis Mossotti, invited me to teach alongside my longtime mentor and friend, James Kimbrell. We spent a weekend in the woods, reading, hiking, and talking poems with an extraordinary group of writers who brought thoughtful, ambitious work. As for what stayed with me most, it’d have to be the wolf howl. Travis gave a participant the honor of calling out to them, and a few seconds later, the woods answered. We went still; for a moment, language thinned to a single vowel, and we listened.

Which university do you think has the best tiger mascot?

LSU—their Tigers have that bayou swagger, purple and gold under the lights. But when I think of the Golden Tigers, I think of the great students and colleagues from my time at Tuskegee. It’s where I learned as much as I taught, and where the legacy of Black American literature runs deep—Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and the many writers they shaped. I was fortunate to mentor two students who went on to fully funded MFA programs at Alabama and Florida State, both of whom have since graduated.

 Is there a piece of art, literature, music, or film that you’ve interacted with recently? What did you think about it?

Yes, the last few books I’ve read are John Liles’ Bees and After, Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things, Mia S. Willis’ the space between men, and Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993—all fine books. I was especially glad to see Zoccola’s debut on shelves this year. I’d been following many of those poems in journals before they found their home in a collection, and I included the book this fall in my Advanced Workshop.

The students lit up. Zoccola drags Helen out of the Iliad and drops her into a sticky '90s Tennessee suburb, all minivans and muted furies. She reimagines the mythic as sharp and domestic, Helen unraveling her housewife apron while the old stories hum somewhere in the background. Zoccola doesn’t just modernize Helen—she gives her a voice that’s funny, cutting, and tender in equal measure. The poems blur the epic and the everyday in ways that sparked real conversation: What does it mean to rewrite a face that launched a thousand ships into one that’s simply trying to survive the neighborhood potluck? (Editor’s Note: Zoccola is a native Memphian).

 Tell us about what you associate with Memphis

Memphis has always felt like a portal, a place where the ordinary world and something otherworldly meet. Once, the Greyhound broke down downtown, and I spent the night in the bus station, waiting. Somewhere in there, I ended up talking with a musician, and we walked to a diner together. It was pouring rain, and we just sat there, him talking music, me talking poetry. I’d memorized a few Coleridge lines, some other odds and ends, and we filled the gaps where we could. It was unreal. By the time it came to get back on the bus, my idea of going home would never be the same.

How would you define “Pinchy?”

Pinchy poems trust that strangeness will carry them through. They aren’t afraid to stumble toward meaning, or to let the image lead the logic. A Pinchy poem keeps its nerve when the world starts to tilt.

The first time somebody’s son tried to touch me on an unlit street, only a block from my apartment, a scramble of words came to mind: loud and fire and people will listen and eyeballs and kick and run. And then I screamed. Screamed the name of the doorman (who was, in truth, also a son), who would possibly hear my cry. This son bolted, a moment too soon: I was prepared for a fight, prepared to unleash the rage that lived in the body inherited from my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and those before them.

From my mother’s side of the family, I inherited bones prone to breaking, a genetic heritage of fragility. Drink more milk, it’s good for your bones. In this body they made, I drank glass after glass, a liquid prayer to stay unbroken. I once read, from a source long forgotten, that women should scream fire rather than help when attacked by a son. Bystanders are more likely to hear the inherent danger in the threat of flames. After the incident, I befriend everybody who works on my street: other doormen and shop owners and night guards. I wonder if any of them would come if I screamed help instead of fire.

***

Months earlier, another son had used my body for what he wanted, in the tradition of his father and grandfather and great-grandfather and those before them. Afterwards, everywhere I traveled became a sea of bodies. Bare skin, wandering fingers, spread legs. My body contorted to avoid touch, twisted sideways to prevent an accidental brush against passerby, squeezed tight to make itself less noticeable. The grip of my Midwest home began to suffocate me: I wanted to see the world beyond the miles of wheat fields and highways. Beyond cities competing for tallest building and biggest museum and world’s largest ball of twine. Beyond sons who hollered at me from the lowered windows of their pickup trucks. I left with a bag the size of a small child on my back and another in my hand. I craved freedom—of escape, of being lost.

In southern Poland, I found a volunteer position as a hostel receptionist at a wooden home that may as well have emerged from a fairytale. Beams of sunlight warmed the porch bench in the mornings, illuminating the vines of purple and pink irises that trailed along the sideboards and the surrounding field of knee-high wildflowers. If I had stumbled upon the cabin while lost in the woods, I never would have left. When I went into town, I dropped breadcrumbs as I walked so I could find my way back. I met women I instantly loved, who could draw beautiful sketches and cook delicious meals out of the most basic vegetables and whose laughs were contagious. I wanted to ask them if they, too, had been touched by somebody’s son. We worked together in the wooden home, letting people stay and eventually watching them leave. We hung keys in an unlocked cabinet and counted bills in the cash register drawers and folded cotton linens on top of mattresses. We were a powerful team of collaboration and compassion—until somebody’s son came to work with us. He touched me when he passed by me with a squeeze on my shoulder or a wandering hand on my hip. In my mind, I yelled at him to keep his hands off me, met the bone of his nose with my knuckles. In the wooden home, I stayed silent. Everything in and around us was easily flammable, waiting only for a lit match.

In Prague, on a weekend trip away from the wooden home, the tour guide told the story of when, decades earlier, the Soviets invaded the city and somebody’s son lit himself on fire as a protest against the occupiers. Two of his peers followed suit, an emboldened sacrifice for the city they called home. In modern-day Prague, crowded with tourists and their selfie sticks, it felt too distant to be true. Later, in a beer garden courtyard, the bitter foam had just reached my lips when somebody’s son sat beside me. He wrapped his arm around my waist like it was an extension of him; he rubbed my back as if he was trying to comfort me, yet he must have felt the tension in my muscles. Somebody’s son had had too much to drink. Somebody’s son could not keep his hands to himself. Somebody’s son was slipping, falling, would one day disappear beneath the ground which had carried him. Perhaps he was the son of the son of one of the sons on fire. The son of flames searing through skin until all that remains are bones. The son of a city’s male legacies, whose stories are shared with tourists as a reminder of its noble history: and here this son is, sloppy drunk in this beer garden with his unwanted arm around me.

***

On the journey through the land from which I come and the land on which I stand, people I meet tell me how brave I am to move across the world in the way that I do. I want to ask why they call me brave, but I already know the answer: brave because I know the nature of sons but I still choose the plane on the runway, the twin mattress in the shared room, the trust in a stranger. Brave because I do so without the protection of a son. When the thoughts of the legacies of sons becomes too much, I come instead to the generations of my foremothers, now underground layers of beaten hearts and brittle bones and breathed-in lungs. I imagine them in their wooden coffins, hands outstretched toward the sky they can no longer see, raising the earth as high as they can lift it. I want to ask them not only how they survived, but how they persevered. How I can persevere?

***

One sunny morning in the south of France, I broke all the rules I had learned about strangers, and cars, and danger. From the side of the road, my thumb pointed up to the sky in the universal gesture. I was with a friend, the woman from the hostel who drew. Two was better than one, if it came to that. Although it was February, the sun beat down on our exposed forearms, which we had slathered in sunscreen that morning. Two boys at a nearby bus stop, reeking of weed, asked if we had a lighter. We didn’t. A car slowed, stopped, asked where we were going. The son in the passenger seat spoke softly, eyes darting to the backseat, said he wasn’t sure if there was enough room for both of us. He could not make up his mind, so we said thanks anyway, someone else will stop. Finally, the son found his words in a nervous rush: “I’ll take you if you suck me.” My friend said no: not loudly, but defiantly. The car’s back tires kicked up gravel as he sped away, as if he had been preparing to escape all along, empty car seat still in the back. Was it meant to hold a son?

In Bogota on a layover, I was lost, a foreigner in an airport in a country whose language I did not speak. Somebody’s son, wearing a suit with an employee badge clipped to the chest pocket, approached me to ask if I needed help finding my gate, and I said yes. As we walked, he asked about my travels, told me about his wife and kids waiting for him at home. Right after he had directed me to my terminal, just before I entered the security line, he asked me for a kiss, please. I said no, adios, and somebody’s son watched my back grow smaller in the distance. I imagined him going home to a hot meal and a honey, how was work? I imagined how he would raise his sons, if they would grow up to have the audacity of their father. I don’t—can’t—imagine him as the father of daughters. A lineage of son to father traces back to the first time somebody’s son touched a body he shouldn’t have—grabbing at something he knew didn’t belong to him, but that he wanted nonetheless.

***

And still, I continue to move through this world in which my mother and grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought to carve out space for me, this world that echoes with the refrains of what we tell our sons. People tell me I am brave, then they ask me if I am afraid. Beneath my façade, of course I am. Not of the rumbling planes or foreign words or unfamiliar streets, but of the sons who inhabit them. And yet from beneath me, there is strength. A slight push raises me upward: the weight of the women before me. Their bodies have been squeezed and grabbed and degraded; they know what it is like to call for help that isn’t coming. Still, they are always with me, their legacy a reminder of how we can set ourselves on fire without burning alive.

—

About Author

Laura Santi (she/her) is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared in Business Insider and Literary Namjooning. Having spent the past six years living and traveling abroad, she thrives off solo travel adventures and exploring new places. She can be found on Instagram and Threads @thecandidconnection.

Contributors: Lisa Allen, Orion Allen, Maddie Barone, Eben E. B. Bien, Mason Best, Aditi Bhattacharjee, Timothy Boudreau, Andy Butter, Elizabeth Childs, Paul Christiansen, Stasha Cole, Whitney Collins, Brianna DiMonda, Hasan Dudar, Alan Elyshevitz, AJ Francia, Gabriela Denise Frank, Gianna Gaetano, Mark Gallini, June Gervais, Dan Grote, Amy Guidry, Jason Hardung, Sophia Hoag, Sophie Hoss, Christine Kai-Lin Huang, JDG, Karen Kao, Lena Kinder, Marianne Kunkel, S.A. Leger, Kelsey D. Mahaffey, Marina Manoukian, Nasta Martyn, Kristi Maxwell, Thomas McEvoy, Bo Hee Moon, Erik Moyer, Amanda Nyren, Läilä Örken, Boluwatife Oyediran, Hari B Parisi, Lexi Pelle, Thomas Puschautz, David Raskin, Stephanie Reddoch, Victoria Jean Reynolds, Megan Ritchie, Stephen Thomas Roberts, Suqi Karen Sims, Slater By The Sea, Misha Tentser, McKenzie Teter, Alyssandra Tobin, Rachel Turney, Amy Renne Webb, Justin Williams, Shelby Wimberly, Jean Wolff, Tina S. Zhu

Editor-in-Chief: Courtney Miller Santo

Managing Editor: Joshua Carlucci

Associate Editor: Aether Henry

Online Editor: Bethany Rose Datuin

Brand Director: Gloria Mwaniga Odary

Assistant Brand Director: Chelsea Panameno

Contest Coordinator: Jacob Williams

Art Editor: Isaiah Kennedy

Event Coordinator: Sabrina Spence

Lead Prose Editor: Caleb McKee

Lead Poetry Editor: Obiageli A. Iloakasia

Poetry Editor: Martins Deep

Editorial Assistants: Emily Binkley, Kaylie Dawe, Marilyn Jackson, Alana King, Baylee Less, Sydney Mabry, Brett Maxon, Justine Okwarachukwu, Denise Kerlan, J.B. Washington, Sam Williams

Intern Readers: Rachel Adkins, MaKenna Beck, Joshua Pipkins, Audrey Rollen

Intern Social Media: Bee Wade

Editorial Board: Mark Mayer, Eric Schlich, Emily Skaja, Kendra Vanderlip, Marcus Wicker

Cover Artist: Amy Renee Webb “She Looms”

“To be Pinchy is to be irreverent, to push back against the mob mentality, and, most of all, to write about it, document it, list it, engage it, and talk back—to be born standing up. It is a certain universal truth that Pinch (not so silently) advocates for what all too often are: silenced voices.”

“Pinchyness is a story with a unique perspective of a mundane situation; it is an interesting piece that grabs you and stays with you throughout your day.”

“The pinch on your arm means no harm, It’s just a warming of our thin skins, like livewires, sparking in the darling night. Beware It betokens the swarming, of words, or a warning of what’s to come, wants to come. Wasps & images, innuendo’s form & cost— crescendo of cursing & loss. Mad-dogging. Now, pick up your pen, kin, start writing.”

“And what does it mean to be Pinchy? In one word, unadulterated. In many words, it is a work that hammers, strikes, and pinches a reader.”

“It’s elusive and sometimes takes you a bit off the beaten path but is always inspiring. It makes you think of the world, and your place in. It is diverse in form, and in content, in craft, and in narrative. “

“Pinch and her works are not eccentric for the sole purpose of achieving uniqueness to the point of triteness, but rather with precise intention and narrative purpose. Pinch is real life, pinchy is the 180-degree turn required to communicate that reality in a refreshing and poignantly unconventional way.”

“Pieces that are Pinchy will be unique in their own ways. They grab the attention of a reader, not always due to first line hooks but due to being particularly thought provoking in their content and themes. “

“It is to be stylistically innovative and to push against the readily accepted definitions of literary genre. To be Pinchy is to be weird, unapologetic, and sometimes irreverent. Is it plots that go sideways, poems that tell a story, and endings that are unexpected.”

“Pinchy can mean many different things, but for me, it means stories that stick with you, that make you want to reread and contemplate the story.”

when i try to find the man who resurrected 

the world’s smallest waterlily i instead find

there are some things i don’t want seen 

coming out of me when i die. like the past. like

a man who died. the last thermal lily was gnawed

to extinction by a german rat, but a man listened to

my sleeping shields, clutched coins, everything 

except my past-self, every bandage inside

the hot springs and tore this tiny flower 

from the past like broken bread, like scattered seed

the saviors of this world help me sharpen 

the way i carry myself through uncharted waters: 

i had searched man saves smallest lily pad 

from dying, instead i received california man died 

i swim past every dark throat of every well where

i tossed down my wasted voice, my shoulders heavy 

trying to save drowning kids he had never met.

carlos magdalena could not get past his obsession

with small phantom feet i could have carried 

into a better sunrise. but the past is the past

and, thus, the thermal lily lives on. 

but if the past has taught me anything, it’s 

not everything ends in bloom. 

and now i thirst into inspiration;

how a swimless man can spot drowning kids, 

unravel his past, throw turban twisted like hope

into uncertainty. manjeet singh was an age 

not far removed from when i too was a fresh face

and, even after all this, we still discover a new

town of thermal lilies tucked inside another spring

addiction—a time and place when every river 

looked to me a deep but final breath.

About the Author

Amanda Nicole Corbin is an award-winning Ohio-based poet who has had her work published or forthcoming in The Notre Dame Review, Contemporary Verse II, The London Magazine, Door is a Jar, Palette Poetry, and more. She is the winner of the 2025 Mississippi Review Poetry contest and her work was nominated for Best Microfiction 2024 & 2025. Her debut full-length collection, addiction is a sweet dark room, was published by Another New Calligraphy in 2024. You can find her playing Magic the Gathering or on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.