Bound Together :: Zoe Tuck & Emily Hunerwadel
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THE MANUSCRIPT
“The Book of Bella is an epic poem whose sections I am publishing serially. Before I transitioned and settled on the name Zoe, I struggled to appear under a different name, Bella. I began thinking about this self who almost, but never quite emerged. The tenderness I feel for her motivates me to write this epic as a space for Bella to be and to speak.” -Zoe Tuck
THE AUTHOR
Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts. She is co-curator of Belladonna*'s Close Distances reading series and the Northampton, MA-based But Also reading series. Zoe is the co-editor of Hot Pink Mag. She has been published in The Canary, Guest: [A Journal of Guest Editors], jubilat, Black Sun Lit: Digital Vestiges, Bæst, The Adroit Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She edited and wrote the introduction to Peter Gizzi's A User's Guide to the Invisible World and has poems forthcoming in Northern New England Review, Ayin, and Matters of Feminist Practice.
Tuck Excerpt
...At the time
that bella was the female in me
waiting to be born as me,
that is, in Texas, I could only
get close enough to press my
body lustily against the pane
glass of Female. A book about
a butterfly girl in Book Woman—
Luna? Or a moth woman, pure
as moonlight or ultra-pasteurized
milk from the jug. Who had
known since birth, whose ways
had always been feminine. As
for me it never would have occurred
to me. Gender was and I
completed the assignment.
Wasn’t I good? Wasn’t I guy?
Couldn’t catch a fly
ball but good enough for
primogeniture. Pressing my body
lustily against the pane
glass of your female body
asking it frantically to be a mirror...
THE MANUSCRIPT
“Like [Zoe’s] Bella, Peach Woman calls back to a figure that could have been me. Writing this, I was obsessed with the idea that memory isn't like a filing cabinet or database, but instead like taking a copy of a copy, each time losing fidelity. I wanted to rewrite the past, edit the copies. I also wondered how desire impacts the past. I remember past fantasies as vividly as the memories. I believe too that when you're a body in hiding some of the sweetest memories are those spent in your imagination. Peach Woman is my insistence that I can write what I want and have her become less shadow as she is read and thought of, living in the heads of the thinkers.” -Emily Hunerwadel
THE AUTHOR
Emily Hunerwadel is the author of the chapbook Professional Crybaby, selected by Kyle Dargan for the Poetry Society of America’s 2017 Chapbook Fellowship. They won Columbia Journal’s 2019 Fall Poetry Contest, judged by Monica Sok, and their work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets, Bustle, Fonograf Editions, the Vassar Review, Quarterly West, Burrow Press, The Pinch Journal, Hold: A Journal, Dream Pop Journal, Hot Pink and Windfall Room, among others. Hunerwadel holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Born and raised in the deep south, they work as a book designer and writer in Western Massachusetts.
Hunerwadel Excerpt
a half-heartedly blown up pool toy, I sit here making contracts
with places
and belongings like sand in a watered afternoon
She admits it’s softer to treat your heart like a bad knee acting up
to see it like a hand held over the top of the flashlight
the man on the podcast is saying the universe is expanding so rapidly
we might rip apart And I’m at the mirror, analyzing the way it
stretches my skin
She’s saying the lightning and being the only tall structure for miles
and I’m saying the liquid, sexy in its glass
and kudzu like veins in her
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