Texas Review Press

Winner of The 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn

GHOST :: SEEDS Poems

Sebastian

Merrill

Set on a remote island on the Maine coast, GHOST :: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a trans speaker and his “ghost,” the “girl-ghost” of the self that he left behind to become the man he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave. Alternating between prose-like elements and lyric meditations, the book’s expansive form makes full use of the page from margin to margin, creating space and breathing room for complicated investigations of memory, gender, and grief.

SEBASTIAN MERRILL’s poetry has appeared in wildness, Passages North, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. He has served as a reader for The Paris Review and has received fellowships and support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Friends of Writers, and the Academy of American Poets. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and a BA in English Literature from Wellesley College.

“Every poem happens in the body, yes, but the poems in Sebastian Merrill’s GHOST :: SEEDS are doubly embodied. This collection foregrounds the somatic nature of poetry’s choreographed language in order to make flesh an emergent speaking self who cherishes his hard-won existence. Like a muscular dancer whose soft landings turn effort to grace, these poems handle the weightiest concerns with a lightness of touch that amazed me across the book. I need a new word to name the emotion evoked by the lucid palimpsest of transformations Merrill enacts in this celebration of what can only come into being by letting go of what was—or by holding what was, even when it’s gone. Every poem is this stunning debut is an alchemical swirl of eye, ear, tongue, and lung. These poems made me breathe deeper.”—Jason Schneiderman, author of Hold Me Tight

November

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Winner of The 2022 George Garrett Fiction Prize, selected by Vi

Khi Nao

Churn

An Illustrated Novel-in-Stories

Chloe Chun Seim

Siblings Jordan and Chung face a costly existence on their family’s Kansas farm. On a conciliatory trip once again turned violent, Jordan and Chung escape the chaos of their parents’ fighting to the middle of a lake. When something pulls them under, a voice speaks to them. In their long trudge back to the living, they find their chemistries altered. Jordan breathes smoke when angry. Chung flops like a fish out of water when provoked. In the years following, they navigate their parents’ separation, their father’s alcoholism and mother’s growing paranoia. In adulthood, Jordan and Chung grieve, love, and come into their own. From the plains of rural Kansas to hundred-acre towns, the end of the universe to its primordial breath, Churn mines the uncanny to tell a story of rural Kansas like you’ve never seen before.

CHLOE CHUN SEIM’s writing has appeared in LitMag, Potomac Review, McNeese Review, Split Lip Magazine, and Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She won the 2021 Anton Chekov Award for Flash Fiction. She earned her BFA in Art History from the University of Kansas and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Chloe lives in Lawrence, KS.

“Astro-biologically capacious and hypnotically drawn, Churn is a luminous, dense star that collapses upon itself in order to expand into its ever widening, swelling, coming-of-age, lacunal sphere, its complex, difficult futurehood. Taking within its magnetic, compelling, centrifugal, childhood/adolescent cosmos, the work presents the queerest, the quasi-Asianest, the farmest-agriculture of semi-Korean-shaded familial grief (maternal torture and paternal despair) and inexorable divorce and intransigent abuse and damage and dysfunctionality in the most poly-monochromatic fashion. Poly-narratological in its perspectives, Churn seeks closure and fearlessness through magical visibility and accountability from pre-pandemic compulsions right into the heart of Covid culture. Designed to hold the readers hostage, it is a spell-binding book, rich in art and emotional, lacustrine, interstellar, eccentric, gay materials. An indispensable antidote to hopelessness.”—Vi Khi Nao, contest judge, author of Funeral

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6x9. 185 pp. 15 b&w illustrations. 1 b&w photo. Literary Novel. Collection of Short Fiction.

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