Featured Title & Author

Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke

Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke howls and hungers. This collection, which won the Diode Editions’ 2021 Full-Length Book Prize, grieves a lover lost to addiction and also swims in the intoxication of desire. While the poems in Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke portray a yearning for intimacy, they create spaces to experience the duality of pleasure and mourning. Even when Tran writes under formal constraint, like the crown of sonnets, these poems struggle and break and, in doing so, explore queer and transformative ways of wanting and being wanted.

Eric Tran

Eric Tran is a queer Vietnamese poet. His debut book of poetry The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer won the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize and was featured in The Rumpus Poetry Book Club and the Asian American Journalists Association - New York book club. He serves as poetry editor for Orison Books and a poetry reader for the Los Angeles Review. He has received awards and recognition from Prairie Schooner, New Delta Review, Best of the Net, and others. His work appears in RHINO, 32 Poems, the Missouri Review and elsewhere. He completed his MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is a resident physician in psychiatry in Asheville, NC.

Featured Poem

Firing Squad

from Diode Poetry Journal 14.2

In our line of work,
three men must fire,
because we have three

women to go home to,
three bedstands with lamps,
three shaving mirrors,

and three straight razors
to convince it was
another man’s bullet

that hit its mark.

Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen's most recent poetry collection is Everything (Four Way Books, 2021.) She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More poems, etc.: andreacohen.org

Featured Organization

Black Artists + Designers Guild

"BADG is building a more equitable and inclusive creative culture by advancing a community of independent Black artists, makers and designers in creative industries. We are committed to honoring our ancestral legacy in design, by taking ownership of our narrative, and by creating spaces to celebrate Black excellence and culture in design."

Diode Editions has been fortunate to be able to donate to BADG and we hope that you might consider donating as well, if able.