Contributor Update, Emily Banks

Join Superstition Review in congratulating past contributor Emily Banks on the publication of her poetry collection, Mother Water. Emily’s poetry collection covers a wide range of topics and emotions as well as features poems from her past work with Superstition Review, including “Poem for the Juvenile Cardinals” and “On the M15 Bus” from Issue 22.

Mother Water centers on maternal inheritance in literal and figurative forms. Through its water motif, the book traces the speaker’s transformations as she absorbs, and often resists, lessons from the women who guide her. The poems explore the speaker’s sense of self through feminine genealogy and her mother’s voice, the mother figure becoming simultaneously nurturing and threatening, teaching her daughter to survive in a perilous world. Coming-of-age poems are here, too, and poems exploring gender mystique, balance, relationship, and understanding. The book’s last section considers how we are altered by loss and how that alteration challenges our notions of both individual subjectivity and bodily autonomy.

University of Washington Press

Click here to order your own copy of Mother Water. Also, be sure to check out Emily’s website and Twitter as well as her past Guest Post.

Contributor Update, Tasha Cotter: ‘Us, in Pieces’

Join us in congratulating SR poetry contributor Tasha Cotter. Tasha’s debut novel, Us, in Pieces, is available for preorder and will be released in July.

This coming-of-age love story is told by two alternating narrators, Adin and Lilly, who are close friends in college until Lilly disappears from Adin’s life without explanation. Close to ten years later, they reconnect unexpectedly and have to question where their relationship stands while old, unspoken feelings resurface.

More information about Tasha and her latest book can be found here. You can also find her poetry from SR’s Issue 16 here.

Congratulations, Tasha!

Authors Talk: Steve Howe

Steven Howe

Today we are pleased to feature author Steve Howe as our Authors Talk series contributor. In conversation with Zoe Speidel (of the Spoken Word Hour on KUNM), Steve discusses “Repossession,” his nonfiction piece published in Issue 18.

Specifically, Steve and Zoe discuss how the essay can almost be seen as a coming-of-age story, as it reflects Steve’s own awakening in Chicago, when he first learned how racism occurs on a systemic level. Steve discusses his own privilege and shares the importance of being “careful as a writer to not appropriate anybody’s viewpoint and language that’s not your own.” Steve also talks about his passion for research and reveals that “you need to do more research than ever gets on the page.”

You can access Steve’s piece, “Repossession,” in Issue 18 of Superstition Review.