Featured Title & Author
Hemlock
Hemlock, a chapbook chronicling a lonely summer lost to the brain’s raucous shouting, swings wildly between anxiety and joy, juggling questions and proclamations alike about god, the body, and gender-unrestrictive desire. Self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating all at once, the speaker here declares that “Yes, I belong to my excesses” but that the “body is // a mixed metaphor,” one that expands and contracts with one’s mental state, connecting to the world and retreating from it.
Emilia Phillips
Emilia Phillips is the author of three poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, most recently Empty Clip (2018), and four chapbooks, including the forthcoming Hemlock (Diode Editions, 2019). Her poems and lyric essays appear widely in literary publications including Agni, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She’s an assistant professor in the MFA Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Featured Poem
My Therapist Sez
from Diode Poetry Journal 13.3
My therapist says he has to cancel our first appointment to go trick or treating. If I ever had inclinations to off myself, I never will now because he helped me understand existential freedom. Moreover, I would never do transference with him—or any therapist after that. I might do it with a really abusive heterosexual boss though, a retail supervisor who looked remarkably like Dolly Parton, or a chiropractor with BPD and tiny hands. For Aquarians, variety is the spice of life, meaning, pathology should be disguised as it rises in a different uniform each time.
Koss
Koss is a queer writer and artist with an MFA from SAIC. She has work in or forthcoming in Diode Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Spillway, North Dakota Review, and others. Her hybrid book, One for Sorrow, is due out in late 2020/early 2021 by Negative Capability Press. She also has work forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2020. Keep up with Koss on Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular. Her website is http://koss-works.com
"Wrecked Polaroid" from @wrecked.archive
Featured Organization
RVA Bail Fund
"The Richmond Community Bail Fund exists to post bail for everyone in Central Virginia who needs it in order to help them avoid the many immediate and collateral consequences of incarceration. We work toward the abolition of not just cash bail, but pretrial detention and supervision as well."
Diode Editions has been fortunate to be able to donate to the RVA Community Bail Fund and we hope that you might consider donating as well, if able.
