I’ve neglected posting blog entries for many months (a mixture of grief and the state of the country) and was certainly remiss in not sharing this book review, written by poet and artist Lisa Sullivan, when the March 2025 issue of Pink Panther Magazine went to print. I posted the link to Pink Panther Magazine on the home page, as this is a publication worth purchasing. The visual art is every bit as arresting as the poetry and prose found on the pages. It truly is a beautiful product! I hope you’ll take a look at Mag Cloud, where the ordering and digital copy reside (this is where Pink Panther‘s webpage will lead you).
Many thanks to Editor-in-Chief Jen DeBellis for giving this review space in this gorgeous journal.
In a year of extremes, the deepest losses and the sweetest touches, I am here, my eyes open every morning (against my wishes) clear blue until the dark
sky moves in—the rain swift as a summer storm, turbulent air, and broken hair in high winds—just as suddenly, the weather passes and the statues of all I have lost stand
in the clearing: my sister and brother in the next world, the beautiful words we chiseled at the end of their lives; and I remember how love once looked like eyes
from across a crowded room, and my first- born son will soon join hands with his own beloved, and there is another first—my book of poems to usher in this spring, after some
cold has passed—the work that circles grief, even as I see (perhaps) at last, this journey is all about weather, weathering the weather—warmth and the worst of it—in varying measures.
The day has finally arrived: December 1st. Pre-sales are open for my first full-length poetry collection from Madville Publishing, Incidental Pollen. Sometimes, the universe gives us pain, and sometimes, beauty. I’m grateful this first book landed with Madville as the runner-up to the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize and that I received this good news at the beginning of a very painful year. I’ve lost two central people in my life this past year; someday, I’ll be able to write fully about these losses, but not yet. Today, I’m here to celebrate the collection dedicated to my father, my nephew, Jeffery, and my sister, Mary.
RUNNER-UP FOR THE 2023 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE
Incidental pollen refers to pollen that collects on bees as they forage for nectar—like the cumulative life experiences we cannot help but carry. The hive serves as a thematic thread in this collection that explores the space between past and present, shame and redemption, grief and resilience. Poetic forms lend meaning—like the villanelle that captures the grief-driven magical thinking of the speaker. Are recurring red fox sightings visitations from her deceased father and nephew? Trauma and loss appear in these tonally rich and imagistic poems, but the arc ultimately centers on the search for belonging, the attempt to recreate home.
I am most grateful to Madville Publishing’s founding director, Kim Davis, and poetry editor extraordinaire, Linda Parsons, for creating such a stunning final product. If you order Incidental Pollen, I hope it moves you and speaks to you. These poems were many years in the making.
Racing down the alley of August, I slow as I am alone among the rows, hidden in our game of hide-n-seek on Nana’s farm. Timeless summer. The stalks rustle and the breeze kisses my bare arms, fine hairs lift as my body cools. Silence as the in-between stillness settles. There, a monarch, russet and black-rimmed, lands. I swear I hear its wings flutter. Cicadas crescendo when the sun burns between cloud cover. I hear one of my brothers or sisters’ footfalls nearby, then retreating. Hush‒‒ the wind rushes around me. I will stay forever.
I’m announcing that my first full-length poetry collection, Incidental Pollen—2023 Trio Award finalist, 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist, and 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize runner-up—is forthcoming from Madville Publishing in May 2025. I’m astonished and grateful to the contest poetry readers (Joshua Rogers & Darius Stewart) and contest judge Marilyn Kallet (Poet Laureate Emeritus of Knoxville, TN) for recognizing my manuscript in this way. I am also thrilled to work with a women-led press (Founding Director Kim Davis and Poetry Editor Linda Parsons). Mostly, though, I’m grateful to bring this particular collection of poems dedicated to my father and nephew into the world.
Announcements have this nagging way of showing you how absent you have been from certain spaces. My intention to post a new blog entry every month has clearly fallen away. I have been hiding in these corn rows, brought back to those early years, as I navigate some difficult emotional territory. The formative years live so deeply in me that sometimes I believe I am back there, with all the people I love most in the world—especially my brothers and sisters—nearby. I know they’re there. I may not be able to see them, but I hear them so close I believe I can touch them. These moments are the most important to me. Composing poems is the closest I can come to capturing the ephemeral —sharing the sacred so I can fix it in time and space—and perhaps touch someone else at the same time.
My family of origin lost our brilliant and gentle father in December 2017. At age 93, his death was expected and (thankfully) peaceful. Just three weeks later, we suddenly lost my talented and equally gentle nephew, Jeffery Cox—my sister’s son—under traumatic circumstances. These losses feel like a lifetime ago to me (I’m sure my experience of loss is different from others in the family), but they weren’t. In many ways, these first significant losses had an outsized impact on all of us. I’ve been carrying these poems around for several years; it’s finally time to let them go into the world with the dedication page that’s been fixed in place since the book’s inception.
Nana’s farm, Fabius, N.Y. (photo provided by cousin Dan Dwyer)
Ireland (Fabius, N.Y.)
Tucked between pastures on Nana’s farm,
riddled with ravines, tangled trees, crisscrossed
creeks: a wild place. We hiked open fields to enter
the woods—in full leaf, sunlight changed
to dusk when we passed over the threshold.
We called it Ireland, as generations had before,
named for the hungry, rocky place left behind.
How long before their clearing and plowing
brought them to the edge of this green place?
Was there something in the cut of the hill,
or the way the breeze lifted their hair, licked
the leaves, or was it the smell of sweet grass
that gave them glimpses of an older place
across the sea?
We inherited the longing for home
without being told—the way Ireland
was whispered with cloudy blue
far-away eyes, shoulders shrugged,
at times a passing sigh. Inside
the trees we claimed our tributaries
from fairies, climbed mossy rocks,
believed we were transported afar.
Back in school one Monday, a nun asked
our younger brother to write what he had done
over the weekend. We went to Ireland,
he inked. We just got back.
*published in Verse Virtual, April 2023
https://www.verse-virtual.org/2023/April/austin-li-ellen-2023-april.html
About Ireland
Even though I wrote the gist of this poem several years ago during a day-long writing retreat on the Ohio River, it was just recently curated on Verse Virtual (thank you to editor Jim Lewis and all of the guest editors at VV). It’s not like I’ve tried many times to get this piece out into the world. I’ve been holding back, hoping to find the right journal. And speaking of holding back, how is it possible that I last posted a year ago? I suppose I needed to settle into a different writer’s space long enough to compose a blog post. I’m still not settled, but I’m starting to move in a new direction.
I graduated with my MFA in Poetry last year (thank you, Solstice MFA in Creative Writing, now at Lasell University). Since graduation, I’ve spent the past twelve+ months joining new writing groups (Greater Cincinnati Writers League and Cincinnati Writers Project), continuing with other long-standing gatherings (an informal group of women writers who first met at Women Writing for a Change, and “The Writer’s Table,” a generative workshop led by Sherry Cook Stanforth and Richard Hague, both legendary local Appalachian writers) and even starting a new generative writing group. I’m also participating in Pauletta Hansel’s “Draft to Craft” seminar-style writing series. All of this is to find a new way forward, a new literary home—this home made of many pieces.
No surprise that the poetry manuscript I shaped during my time at Solstice centers around finding a home and creating a sense of belonging. And the current state of this collection? You guessed it: I hope these poems land in the right home this year. This riff brings me back to “Ireland (Fabius, N.Y.).” Even though this poem may lead you to believe I’ve written about a mythical place, this Ireland exists—at least in the hearts of my extended family—in Fabius, N.Y., a rural area east of Syracuse. My mother was raised in a large Irish Catholic family, with ten children, including Mom, on a dairy farm. By the time her generation married, dispersed (except for two brothers), and had children, this wild area—accessed by crossing fields and sometimes, at least once that I recall, being chased by a bull—was a magical place where we played. The “we” being me and my five siblings and various combinations of our thirty-six Dwyer cousins. We all logged time exploring in the trees, the ravines, and the creek(s) in “Ireland.”
When I shared this poem publicly, some cousins wondered who named this patch of land “Ireland.” In the writing of this poem, the answer to that question didn’t matter. It’s the longing for one’s true home I wanted to access. My Irish ancestors fled Ireland during the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s (or The Great Hunger), an immigration forced by starvation and desperation. An ugly and complicated removal that separated families and, I would argue, left a trail of silence in the wake of trauma. A reverence remains for a place one loves but must leave. My family set aside a corner of land to honor the home country (“the old sod,” my mother says). A place of joy, not grief. I will ask my mother—at 96, the last of her generation—if she remembers how “Ireland” was named and who did the naming. The farm, sadly, is no longer in the family. But that wild area, Ireland, still lives. At least in our collective imagination.
And a note on the home across the sea—I recently read this poem at a poetry series I co-founded in Cincinnati, “Poetry Night at Sitwell’s” (another attempt at belonging), and shared with the crowd how the Irish revere poetry. Poetry Day Ireland (April 27th in ’23) is an island-wide celebration. Their poets even get tax breaks! And a poet I studied under at Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival, Jude Nutter (who lives in Ireland every summer), says every Irish person you stop on the street can recite Yeats and Seamus Heaney as a matter of course. The Irish genuinely love their poets. Someday, I hope to study there, even if just for a brief time. The ever-present pull to go home.
Ekphrasis of a Face on a Tree
This palette of oak grows
with a marbling of pale green
lichen to frame its pain.
Sculpted on a trunk, two swirling burls,
a bulging body and a face
with the tough skin of bark.
A dappling of color to offset despair.
And what of the ivy that twines
towards this sight? An Almighty mind-
shift against survival of the fittest?
The unseen hand scrapes beauty
from wounds, injury as medium,
near-death the instrument of the master.
The features poised uppermost
on the tree express wonder broken-free
of the soil at her feet, eyes half-closed
in reverie, mouth open in an “O”—
Oh, I’ve known this sort of wonder,
metal staples holding together the skin
of life, this scar I wear on my torso.
*Published in SWWIM Every Day: https://www.swwim.org/blog/2022/2/9/ekphrasis-of-a-face-on-a-tree
One of my biggest challenges as a poet is staying in the present moment and really seeing (sensing) what is right in front of me. Sometimes, I fall into this misguided notion that a particular subject must inspire me before I start writing. Of course, this way of thinking only stifles creativity. The sensory imagery around us shows us what’s inside. The poet Mark Doty wrote in The Art of Description that “every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature on the world…[The] work of seeing offers, ultimately, a precise portrayal of the one who’s doing the looking.” In other words, our unconscious minds reveal themselves in our descriptions of the present moment. There are no secrets. The images we choose and the way we convey these images betray us.
Most of you already know that Ekphrasis means “description” in Greek. On the Poetry Foundation website, the definition of an ekphrastic poem is “a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art.” Ekphrasis can stay in the realm of imaginative description —a re-creation in words, if you will—or expand into a more personal musing, its meaning amplified through the artist’s senses. When I’m feeling stuck, creatively, there’s nothing more freeing than a trip to the art museum. When I sit before a sculpture or a painting, the focus is on the piece, not (blessedly) on “what am I going to write about today?” The subject is before me. I’m released from myself.
Or so I believe. The experience of the images comes from the inside. But, the illusion that I’m writing about something outside of myself is what gives me freedom of expression. In essence, I’ve tricked myself into believing that this writing isn’t about me. As seen in the poem above, a natural scene can present as art. In a “stuck” moment, I wrote about a tree. What burls—nature’s way of healing tree trunk wounds—represented appeared in the poem. My unconscious mind drew a parallel between the scar on my torso (my trunk) and the tree’s burls. I noted this evidence of healing. The way we incorporate our scars into a new self-image, but, even more, how they become a different kind of beauty. The expression I saw on the tree’s face seemed to express wonder. But, by now, you know that it’s my wonder I witnessed. My own surprise that I have thus far survived grievous injury and have stayed alive long enough to see the beauty in my scars. Or, at least, write about them.
Ekphrasis allowed me to experience a moment of recognition—and also transcendence. Ekphrasis can also be a lesson in trusting the creative process.
Petal Light
-after Seamus Heaney
The cherries igniting in season,
Flower in rebirth, a grand hope for not-so-grand people,
Not wanting anything from anyone but that they see
These blooms spring from living,
Having opened each bud against darkness.
But every day your breath ebbs in your cave,
Shapeless and still, a wraith wrapped intently
In its shadow waiting for its kill;
So you walk outdoors toward the blossoms
And the monster loses its hold in the trees
And you stand beneath the pink and crimson,
Its scent-feast you pray will cleanse and release
As the petals rain down in a shower.
My second poetry chapbook, Lockdown: Scenes from Early in the Pandemic, now exists in the world. I’m grateful to Leah Huete de Maines at Finishing Line Press for once again giving my voice a home. When I wrote the poems in this collection, the coronavirus pandemic had a foothold in the U.S. and the country had gone into lockdown. We were all experiencing fear: personal and communal. So much was unknown about COVID19: the exact mechanism of spread, its rate of infection, how much danger we were in every time we walked out the door. If we were brave enough to venture out to the grocery store, many of us developed elaborate disinfection procedures for our groceries. Schools, restaurants, and entertainment venues shut down. Like so many other parents of college-aged children, I drove fourteen hours to pick up my son when the college dorms closed. Along the way, I stopped in my hometown, but couldn’t stay with my elderly mother for fear of inadvertently infecting her. We knew the elderly with COVID were not surviving and, worse, had to die alone. I stayed in a nearby hotel, wiped down the surfaces with Lysol, and sat on the edge of the bed. Numb. What was this strange new world?
Disconnected from extended family, alone with fear and uncertainty, most of us found our own methods of coping. Writing and daily walks in the blossoming Spring were my salvation. Inside, we watched the news reports from New York City with horror. Saw footage of emergency rooms lined with stretchers and wheelchairs occupied with people struggling to breathe, doctors and nurses wearing ski goggles and welders’ masks as makeshift PPEs, refrigerated trucks as makeshift morgues. But outside, trees and flowers were awakening from their deep sleep.
I don’t need to remark on the particular fear of this time, during what’s become known as the “first wave” of the coronavirus pandemic. I did, though, feel compelled to write about my experience of it. I’ve known fear—we all have—but this fear was its own kind of beast. Personal, yet shared. I wanted to capture its essence in poems—the best vehicle to deliver encapsulated moments. And didn’t we all have “moments?” Too many moments.
“Petal Light” is the final poem in Lockdown: Scenes from Early in the Pandemic, a poem written as a snapshot of resilience. Overwhelming fear does not happen only in a pandemic, of course. But, we all must walk to the other side of fear, no matter the cause. I hope this poem reminds you of your own moments of uplift, your own resilience. And, if you are willing to look back at how far we have collectively come in this ongoing pandemic, check out Lockdown (click on the book image to the right to take you to Finishing Line Press’s bookstore). May this pandemic become history soon.
From Riparian,Poetry, Short Prose, and Photographs Inspired by the Ohio River. Sherry Cook Stanforth & Richard Hague, editors. Dos Madres Press, Inc. 2019.
Back in our Boston days, early in our courtship, my husband took me to Dim Sum in Chinatown. I had not yet experienced this authentic Chinese brunch and watched while J. waved over carts heaped with bamboo steamer baskets and lidded metal dishes. I listened while his voice, once familiar, wrapped around the soft sonics of Mandarin, asked and answered questions from a side of him I could never know. His queries were answered with nods and rapid-fire Chinese, lids lifted from the dishes about which they had clearly communicated. A cloud of steam rose before my husband’s face. He looked for a moment like the images I’d seen of mountains in remote China: an alien landscape, mysterious, shrouded in mist, unlike anything I’d seen before.
I had no clear preconceptions about Asians before I met my husband, but perhaps this illustrates what I have heard him, in rare moments, drop into our conversations — this perception he holds that Asians are invisible. From the first time I saw him, I was drawn to his singular appearance: the way his irises, so black, make you feel as if you are falling into a well, the way his eyelids look as if they’re expertly lined with jet-black eyeliner, the perfect dark arch of his eyebrows, his soft full lips so unlike my own. To me, there was nothing common about him.
But, what happened that day in Chinatown lent fuel to his perception of invisibility. Just before we sat down to our first Dim Sum together, we had waited in a long line that extended out the door, down the steps onto Beech St., then wrapped halfway around the gritty block. I left J. in line to go inside to use the restroom. While looking for him when I returned, I walked past him in both directions, twice—until he grabbed my arm.
“Oh! I didn’t see you,” I said
“We all look alike,” J. dead-panned, really without any sort of a laugh.
I sensed the pain behind his comment, even though I didn’t then know him well. This was one of the first times I felt the truth of another race’s experience. The memory of that day has stayed with me over twenty years later. I find myself cataloging these instances that stand out— when it is evident that we are from two distinct races, two very different cultures.
Our differences play out in myriad ways. When our oldest son, now 22, comes home for a visit, he walks around the house, snapping his fingers and whistling. While I see joy and comfort in these mannerisms (as well as the ghost of my late father who did these same things), my husband sees a display of idiosyncrasy, a weakness that makes one stand out.
“People will get the wrong impression of you,” my husband warns. “They’ll think you’re a lax person.”
As soon as my son’s hand goes to his hair while he’s making a point, my husband stops him: “People will think you’re insecure. You have to always be aware of these habits. Get rid of them.”
After my initial reaction, which is to think that my husband is too controlling, I stop to think about all the ways we have been taught differently. In my Caucasian upbringing, correcting a child for whistling or finger-snapping never happened (it would have been considered charming); in my husband’s Chinese childhood, parental directives on the minutia of behavior were omnipresent. Lest the reader incorrectly surmises that I am married to a harsh man, let me say that my husband tells our sons at every opportunity how much he loves them; he also hugs and kisses them daily, while I struggle to remember to do this. Do these differences have anything to do with culture, or are they behaviors specific to our particular families? Or, is my husband’s experience more directed by being a first-generation immigrant, striving to blend in, while mine is the more relaxed atmosphere of a fourth-generation family? I am not sure, but I know there are many lessons in this for me.
A Buddhist friend once told me that our relationships in this lifetime teach us what we need to learn for our next incarnation. I like the idea of this philosophy. I try (not always successfully) to look at our differences before I judge my husband. His experiences of feeling “other’ make me more aware of how culturally insensitive I can be. I wish to stay conscious of the different forces that influence another person’s behavior.
In this polarized social climate, many people of color feel a sharpening of their sense of “otherness.” My husband told me a story about something that happened at a work lunch this past year. While seated in the dining room with a group of Caucasian professionals, the discussion turned to their impressions concerning what they believe are the advantages that people of color receive, like in college admissions, for example. My husband, who considers himself a person of color, steamed silently while these co-workers continued with their loud musings, even as other POC bused dishes within earshot of their table; the co-workers talked about them as if they weren’t there. For him, this was a typical example of how white men (they were all men) ignore the existence (and experiences) of POC, effectively dehumanizing them.
Poets use their craft to witness the world around them. Part of writing poetry is to shine a light on complexity. I may not fully understand my husband’s cultural background, but I can write about my own experience interacting with it — I hope with empathy and without judgment. In the poem at the top of this essay, I hope I do just that: witness the mystery of difference.
Carved by an ancient glacier, its meromictic waters do not mix— this is the place we go where layers of sediment stratify in ribbons.
Meromictic waters do not mix; within my childhood home, chilled layers of sediment remain stratified in ribbons, blue-green fingers stretch across the surface.
When I am chilled inside my childhood home, I call for my golden friend, fingers stretch across the blue-green surface, warmer than my own blood.
I call my friend of gold to the place we go — warmer than our blood, we are carved ancient as a glacier.
We should all be so lucky as to have a friend who has known us for most of our lives — the holder of our secrets, the person who understands the way we move in the world. They know our families and our history. I am fortunate to have many friends from different points in my life, including many I have known for a relatively short period of time, but there is something elemental about a lifelong friend. I can still recall the expression we sang in rounds when we were young: “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.”
I remember a scene in a Crocodile Dundee movie from the 1980s. Paul Hogan’s character, the Australian legend nicknamed Crocodile Dundee, shares his views with an American woman on seeing a shrink to discuss one’s problems; where he comes from, he says, “that’s what my mates are for.” While I’m certainly not advocating against therapy (I’ve been seeing a therapist for over twenty years), I count my old friendships as invaluable to my emotional well-being. No one understands what triggers me more than a childhood friend. I catalog my troubles in my mind to share on my next meet-up with my most trusted resource, the friendship of a lifetime.
A few times a year, I travel home to visit family and friends in Upstate, N.Y. A long time ago, a tradition developed between one of my dearest friends and me. We walk the path around Green and Round Lakes near where we grew up. There’s something about walking a wooded path alongside pristine water that makes words flow, especially when your companion requires no explanation of your ramblings and doesn’t judge your craziest thoughts. By the time our trek reaches the more secluded Round Lake, we are compelled to pause and look in unison at the still water and the trees reflected on its surface. I know I can speak for both of us when I say this is a moment of reverence — broken only when one of us decides we need yet another “selfie.”
Surrounded by old-growth forest, Green and Round Lakes are two of only a few lakes in the world deemed “meromictic,” meaning there is no seasonal mixing of the upper and lower water levels as with other lakes. These glacially-carved lakes are deep and stable: Green Lake is 195 feet deep and Round Lake is 180 feet deep. The unusual features of these lakes create an otherworldly aquamarine color to the water. Growing up in this area, I took this beauty for granted.
I know that there were also times that I took my friendships for granted. Many years ago, I received a card that said: “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” It’s worth it to hold these words close and to live by them. Our old friends will be with us long after our parents have gone — they are a rare treasure, deserving careful attention. It seems fitting that Round Lake, a rare place, is the scene of my rendezvous with my old friend.
“This sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without is one of the commonest entries in conversion records…And that such a glorious transformation as this ought of necessity to be preceded by despair …”
-William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience
Without ghost lines of turned-down pages, I pulled the unread book from its wedged perch, opened to a tale written by a drunk sage. Without ghost lines, no turned-down pages, I unlocked the door of my cage — from weathered story sprung the answer to my search. Without ghost lines of turned-down pages, I awakened in this printed church.
Although told in a deliberately obscure way, this poem, midway through my poetry collection, Firefly, marks a turning point in the story of my recovery from alcoholism and addiction. Within the lines of this poem, I sketch the spiritual experience that changed me.
Alcoholics and addicts do not often experience a sudden upheaval in our way of thinking — most seem to have a gradual reordering based on learning how to live sober. I feel fortunate to have experienced a dramatic, unexplainable moment that filled me with light. I don’t see this as a mark of me being “special,” but rather as the universe gifting me with the only thing that could break through my intractable desperation.
This poem went through several iterations until I settled on an old form, the French Triolet. The Triolet, which means “clover leaf” in Middle French, is a medieval verse from the thirteenth century. Enlish poets began using this form in the eighteenth century. The age of this poetic form, with its repeating lines and tight rhyme scheme, felt like an echo of all the people who came before me who had also received this spiritual gift.
My awakening came at a moment when I was certain to lose my family, my husband and young son, if I drank again. Earlier that day, I carted all of the booze at home over to my in-laws’, but I was in the house, alone. It occurred to me that I could easily drive to the store and buy more alcohol. I knew I could lose everything if I did this, but I felt certain that I would drink. I shook with both fear and desire. Not knowing what else to do, I called a sober friend, a woman who had become my mentor. She asked if she could return my call in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! That was so long. How could I stop this overwhelming urge to drink?
I paced in my bedroom, looking at the clock; its digital numbers seemed frozen in place. The fear that I would drink consumed me. My twisted brain whispered, only a drink will relieve this fear — this fear that I would drink! (only an addict understands this logic). Finally, desperate to forestall my impulse, I picked a book about recovery, one I owned but had never read, off the bookshelf. I opened to a story written by a drunk. Within these pages, something changed inside my brain. It was more than merely recognizing myself in someone else’s story: the knowledge that I suffered from a spiritual disease became clear to me. Alcohol and drugs were substances I used to fill the void in my soul. That was what was wrong with me! I had a soul-sickness and it could be treated. This man had gotten better and so could I.
By the time Sharon called me back, minutes later, I was utterly changed. Breathless and giddy, I asked her: Have you ever read this story? Do you know about what happened to this man?
Well-acquainted with this famous story, Sharon merely laughed.
Ellen Austin-Li 