Diode Editions

Jane Satterfield

Jane Satterfield’s The Badass Brontës

Superstition Review
The Badass Brontës | Jane Satterfield

Jane Satterfield’s poetry collection The Badass Brontës, published by Diode Editions, explores the lives and legacy of the Brontë sisters, some of the most iconic literary figures of the 19th century Jane’s poetry illuminates the traumas, decisions, and aspirations of Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë.

Jane Satterfield’s beautiful new collection The Badass Brontës reimagines the world of the Brontë sisters. With a range of forms including ekphrasis, letters, a cento, a sestina and even a quiz—“Which Brontë sister are you?”—Satterfield’s poems are both daring and inventive. The poems investigate the Brontës’ vivid world of imagination and envision the sisters’ lives in our present moment, during the pandemic lockdown and the climate crisis. I love The Badass Brontës for its lyric grace but also for its boldness and wit. As Satterfield writes in the poem “Volumes,” “A book’s an invitation, / excoriation, sustenance, pilgrimage…” and this exhilarating book is all of this and more.

—Nicole Cooley, author of Girl after Girl after Girl

In 2022, Jane wrote about her interest in the history of the sisters as their images filtered through pop culture in a PopPoetry article. It’s a wonderful look into her enthusiasm for writing about literary influences throughout history.

“Would you / say the here & now is a horizon / to eternity?” asks the poet of Emily Brontë in the proem that introduces Jane Satterfield’s remarkable new collection. With consummate empathy, the poems of The Badass Brontës seek nothing less than to interfuse historical, personal, and artistic horizons, and do so with such formal and tonal vibrancy they accomplish something close to a co-presence of the Brontës’ haunting and haunted world and our own fraught and frangible one. In Satterfield’s work, the voices of these figures emerge as from a proverbial mind-meld with the poet’s, such that every detail feels conjured alive, awake, so each becomes, like all of us, “one bright strand / in the story of time & / vanishing.” 

Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors

You can pre-order The Badass Brontës here. Visit Jane’s website here. Her nonfiction piece “Mother Tongue” appeared in issue 17.

A photograph of Eric Tran.

Eric Tran’s Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke

Superstition Review
  • The cover of Eric Tran's book "Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke."
  • A photograph of Eric Tran.
Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke (Diode Editions, 2022) | Eric Tran

Congratulations to Eric Tran for his new poetry collection Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke, published by Diode Editions. Winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Full-Length Book Prize, this collection “grieves a lover lost to addiction and also swims in the intoxication of desire.” Tran explores themes of grief, lust, and queerness using a variety of poetic forms. Although not limited to one type of poem or one specific subject, Tran’s poetry remains united to create a cohesive piece. Poems selected for the collection are visceral and candid as Tran dives into his own emotions, writing “I’m lousy and bloated / with love.” His poetry is perfect for those searching for a deep discussion of intimacy.

Wounds, here, are not ornamental. Tenderness, here, is as restless and resilient as pain. The poems refuse transformation, superficial resolutions. Instead, the language—unsparing, striking—attends to addiction and death with grace, awe. The emotional complexity is mirrored structurally: the lines waterfall and halt, a sonnet crown jolts awake the mind, sentences simmer with lyrical momentum. Eric Tran’s second book is heart-rich and deftly written—the poems will stay with you long after you finish reading it.

Eduardo c. corral, author of guillotine

Eric Tran is a queer Vietnamese writer and physician. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke is his second book of poetry, and his work has appeared in RHINO, 32 Poems, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere. To learn more about Eric Tran, go to his website.

I resent no one / the instinct to run’ writes Eric Tran in his brave and beautiful Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke. But this is a poet who never runs. In fact, he pushes deep into the raw center of desire, admitting ‘I’ve wanted your picked-at / scab, your broken voice through a / morning-night call.’ This is a book of lust and brokenness, of ‘suffering as hot / and clean as a pistol’s mouth.’

Aaron Smith, author of The book of daniel

To purchase Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke, go here.

Eric Tran’s poem “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” appeared in Issue 18 of Superstition Review.