Contributor Update, Colleen Abel: Get Liberated with “deviants”

How does the day find you, readers? It finds us supremely excited, as we’ve got some great news for you. The wonderful poet and friend of the Superstition Review, Colleen Abel, recently was crowned the victor of Sundress Publications Chapbook Contest for 2016, and as is often the case with these contests, everybody wins with the release of her upcoming chapbook “Deviants,” which is available FOR FREE over at Sundress Publications’ website, found here.

Regarding “Deviants” Victoria Chang writes:

“Colleen Abel’s wonderful book, Deviant, is mesmerizing—once I began, I couldn’t stop reading. The speaker provides a moving account—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes wry, and oftentimes both—of what it means to be ‘fat’ in this world. The central piece is called ‘Fat Studies’ with references to sociologists and humorous pieces about Jackie Kennedy. Ultimately, Deviants is a beautiful book by a talented writer on material so many of us can understand and relate to, but oftentimes don’t have the opportunity to read in this form.”

Staci R. Schoenfeld, the judge for the Chapbook Contest, writes:

“In Deviants, ‘The eye alters all that it falls on.’ And the eye is everywhere—in every poem and in the lyric essay, ‘Fat Studies.’ There is no escape, even in the darkness: ‘It’s true I like you better in the dark. / Deep dark. Where I can’t even see your face.’ And the eye is keen in its appraisal. What it sees is what is most often offered up for alteration—the female body. The poems and the lyric essay all deal in issues of body. These bodies are not, however, places of comfort and safety. Instead the body is dangerous: ‘My heart is not a heart, it is a little nest of razorblades. I look soft, but if you touch me, your hands will be instantly pulverized, as if you had slammed them into concrete.’ Or the body becomes something to escape: ‘If it helps, I don’t want to be myself / either—to slip out of this body when / when you enter, to exchange within the puff / of magic smoke my life for another. / Leave me other.’ The body is in turns stark and lush and finally ‘the body / is a planet you tilt / on its axis spinning.’ Deviants left me both spinning and altered. It made me want to say, Thank you for helping me understand.”

Check out the full press release from Sundress Publications here.

Download, read, and be as inspired as we find ourselves by Colleen Abel’s “Deviants.”

Read this chapbook!
The cover for Colleen Abel’s “Deviants.”

 

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Colleen Abel

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by poet Colleen Abel.

Colleen AbelColleen Abel is the author of Housewifery, a chapbook (dancing girl press, 2013). A former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow, her work has appeared in numerous venues including The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, West Branch, The Journal, Cimarron Review, Verse Daily, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares’ blog, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from UW-Milwaukee and is currently the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.