The Writers

Morgan Eldridge writes in an attempt to be in the everyday does not define as a writer. She creates and shares in an attempt to open but leaving you to decide the what.

Michelle Gottschlich (b. 1990) lives in Bloomington, IN. She works at two restaurants and runs the Second Sunday Poetry Open Mic. Her chapbook Void Sets was published by Monster House Press in 2015.

Wendy Lee Spacek is a poet from Indianapolis, IN. She has published one book of poetry, Psychogynecology (Monster House Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Blotterature, Monsterhousepress.com and in LVNG Magazine by Flood Editions. She works full time as an Arts Administrator and curates the Soft River Reading Series.

The Books

Morgan Eldridge’s Pretty Pretty Prison is a pointed & sincere dream-meandering through the mercurial world of human relationships, against the impulse to shortcut to feeling by way of nomenclature, categorization & expectation. These poems, in their illuminative micro-macro syncing, interrogate patriarchal power’s (un)conscious & structural attempts to curate and organize ‘care’, ‘love’, ideation, narrative, and most every other aspect of human relationships. There is the finger that points and then the hand that takes the finger and points it back at itself. There is the historical & momentary weight of the social performance of gender in American society—of woman as worker, as emotional laborer, as entertainer. There is a brave digging up and communicating with, across, & for. Eldridge’s poems conduct a compassionate doom-saying—a beckoning for something felt, but not yet manifest. Positioned within, but spinning & writhing to be let out, Pretty Pretty Prison actualizes an untethered mode of relation, an unparalleled, non-commodified & total form of care—be gentle with me i am you.

Michelle Gottschlich's debut collection of poems, Void Sets, bears an acute & tender hand toward the inscrutable nature of being. Engaged in the milieu of void sets (code elements that do not show in surface content) & employing interruption, (day)dream, & other fragmented mental activity as valid manifestations of voice, these poems evince & commune with the buried codes & elements of repressed & othered worlds. Embedded in a culture latent with cruelty & expectation, here are poems that make space for the beautiful aberrations found in the socially estranged realms of mental illness & gender nonconformity. Void Sets emits a harrowing & necessary glow, one that extends across the enigmatic chasm between persons & reveals forgotten corners, untouched depths: The dream of mine / where you’re endless water / and I’m a tiny diver.

Wendy Lee Spacek's Psychogynecology is a mythic manifestation of feminine energy cured into a spell. An inconceivable moment jarred from the maw of a bird’s warble, a worn banister in a house left to rot. These poems tussle & chew with the repression housed and implanted historically and culturally, through centuries and narratives, in the female body. Like storage units, these poems elicit a feeling of forgotten objects, of power to regain. A counsel of women driven to a last pack in a rural Indiana gas station. The relation of the man with the woman, the woman with the man. The invisibly dark matter tabooed out of tradition. Somehow ancient & precisely of this moment, Wendy Lee Spacek’s poems minutely & intricately eschew the distinct beauty, sorrow, & tragedy of the customs and relations between genders—between humans and what they have made.