Author: South Broadway Press

South Broadway Press is a publisher of poetry through books, print journals, and on our online journal.

South Broadway Interviews // Devon Bower

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

DEVON BOWER

Devon Bower (she/her) is a poet, editor, and bookseller in Northern Colorado. She has a BA in English literature from Colorado State University. Her work links lineage with landscape, often experimenting with eco- and docu-poetics. Devon is proud to have served as an editor for the Front Range Review and has a forthcoming publication with Blood+Honey.

Devon is our Content and Social Media Strategist at South Broadway Press.

Art is what helps us survive. It is truth among lies, hope among pain.

Devon Bower
SBP: WHAT IS FUELING YOUR CREATIVITY RIGHT NOW? WHERE DO YOU FEEL THE MOST CREATIVE?

DB: I place a big focus on landscape in my writing, so I often feel most creative after experiencing or researching my immediate natural world. Change—good, bad, or in-between—inspires reflection, making nature a prime source to energize my imagination.

SBP: WHAT MADE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY?

DB: My peers. I’ve learned from them that poetry isn’t just an expression of personal creativity—it is an ethos. Poetry is a way of living. It’s in our rituals and in our chaos and in our care for one another. I always used to think of myself as someone who just wrote poetry, until a writer friend called me a poet. This simple yet powerful distinction encapsulates the kind of art we inspire in each other.

SBP: WHO DO YOU HOPE FINDS YOUR POETRY? WHO IS YOUR ART FOR?

DB: My poetry needs to be for me first, but I hope it finds the person who is farthest from myself. I hope it finds someone who is the total opposite of my person and acts as a bridge between our two minds.

SBP: IF YOUR WRITING WERE A KEY, WHAT DOOR WOULD IT UNLOCK, AND WHAT WOULD YOUR READERS FIND ON THE OTHER SIDE?

DB: Whatever the door is that my writing unlocks, I know where it leads: outside. Outside the home, outside of stagnancy, outside the self. The door opens to the backyard, to the forest, to memory.

SBP: WHAT POEM THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN RECENTLY WENT TO A PLACE YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING, OR WHICH WAS THE MOST/LEAST CHALLENGING TO WRITE?

DB: I never thought I’d write an ars poetica poem, but a recent piece didn’t quite make sense until I added in that factor.

SBP: WHAT HAS BROUGHT YOU JOY THIS LAST YEAR?

DB: Building more of a writer community has been really important to me this year. From casual weekly workshops to book clubs to attending readings, my small but mighty cohort brings me joy and comfort.

SBP: WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT OBSESSION?

DB: My past, current, and always obsession is my cat, Benny. I adopted him in 2021 as a kitten and have loved growing with him.

SBP: WHAT MAKES SOMETHING HARD TO WRITE OR CREATE?

DB: The more personal the poem, the longer it takes for me to “get right”. But once either I or it have had enough time to put the words together, the more fulfilling the poem becomes.

SBP: WHAT IS THE VALUE OF WRITING AND ART IN THE CURRENT STATE OF THE WORLD?

DB: Art is what helps us survive. It is truth among lies, hope among pain. Andrea Gibson wrote a beautiful poem called “Yellowbird”, in which a line reads: “We have to create. It’s the only thing louder than destruction”.

Book Review: What the River May Bring by Erin Robertson

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA BY ERIN ROBERTSON

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Robertson gathers her words to advocate for the land and the confluence of both the Koyukuk and Yukon Rivers.  During her time in the Koyukuk National Wildlife Refuge she was embedded with biologists, collaborating with her craft through the Artist-In-Residence program “Voices of the Wilderness”.

Her poetry draws us in, witnesses to her experiences upon this land, and helps us envision her impressions of interior Alaska.  It all begins, “when the float plane’s buzz fades” as she first settles into her sub-arctic residency.  She meets the, “devoted swans, tender loons, [and] dancing cranes.”  She follows moose tracks and moss lined trails.  These relationships with the other-than-human creatures she encounters bring her company.

Glaciers, and clouds, and wild country greet her.  Upon arrival in the Alaska Interior she leaves behind “creature comforts” and chooses a new freedom; trading suburbia, her partner and children, for a growing winter white and jagged mountains.  It’s a new opening, a new era of possibility for her.  “Wilderness Eve” seems to recollect a childlike wonder, a new version of awaiting gifts below a Christmas Tree:

waiting to see

what this wilderness holds

sleepless and sleepy

dreaming the space

and the silence (21).

Her time in Alaska and her observations while there is an unveiling where she comes to realize: 

I knew I hit the lottery

but hadn’t quite known

how many riches there’d be (25).

Robertson marvels at nature’s natural wonders.  For her, the Yukon River inspires just like Georgia O’Keefe’s infamous cloud-scapes or French Impressionists’ swirling lines.  The river:  

It bends and dapples and distorts…

Adding and subtracting shades (27).

Still, “You never know what / the river may bring… Everything comes down the river / if you watch long enough” (29).  And yet, like the old adage, one can never step in the same river twice, its purge and rejuvenation brings new waters that can both cleanse and drown.

Author Erin Robertson

In her poetic meanderings, Robertson also takes on the persona of “Other Animals” like otter, caribou, peregrines, and Swainson’s Thrush.  She watches their lives, their passage onto new territory, and their passing into the beyond.  It’s a moment, a flicker, a stillness juxtaposed to the more rapid pace of her life back “home” in Colorado.

Fire, too is a constant, not only in the Alaskan Interior but throughout the Mountain West like Robertson’s home upon the Front Range.  She notes:

after the fire

naked birches are

black and white tapers

all blown out (56).

Even after a “Severe Burn” she comments on the stark beauty:

The burn dazzles

despite a blackened past (57).

Seemingly, it is a reality that we all have to come to accept because out of destruction, the ashes can reinvent a newness, a regrowth, another possibility.

Robertson’s experience as an Artist-In-Residence is a testament to her “Vocation” (105).  She embraces where this has taken her:

so many options open

when you go where you’re called

when you do what you love

when you toss every last bitter pill aside…

the earth is humming

with so many ways to play

what will you try next? (105).

This is the challenge that she sets before us.  In her closing poem, “Accounting for Awe” she sets us straight, like one hiking boot in front of the other and asks:

What is the sum of these days of devotion?

An accounting of the endless ways to direct awe.

Anywhere you look there’s a one-inch bit of wonder…

To not let it all burn yet (107).

Here is our reason, in our act of love for nature, we will find compassion for ourselves.

Boulder County Poet Erin Robertson carries this love for nature and compassion forward. She is the founder of BoCo Wild Writers where she teaches outdoor nature writing classes.  Her work can be found at http://www.erinrobertson.org

WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA

BY ERIN ROBERTSON

AVAILABLE THROUGH RAW EARTH INK

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Brooklyn ave. Hymnal by Andy Riley

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
BROOKLYN AVE. HYMNAL BY ANDY RILEY

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

One of my main impressions of Andy has always been that he prints chapbooks like other poets print rejection slips. The first time I met him, at Wolverine Publick House in Fort Collins, he was carrying a bundle of self-printed books for the reading. Later, when he invited me over for homemade absinthe, he had more from the past year for me, from the “early years”. While I have long delighted in his exciting cacophonic phrasing and interesting imagery, what I have most admired from him was the nonstop DIY ethic which kept him writing and printing instead of waiting for approval. 

Thus, it is with great pleasure I am reviewing Andy Riley’s debut 87-page serial poem Brooklyn ave. Hymnal. A book about moving to Seattle that is so rife with character observations and daily ennui, chronic pain and stunted sex drives, that truly it will leave you searching for an answer to the question, why would you move to Seattle? 

 Maybe it’s so Riley could “get out to see Red Pine” from Seattle or live on the street of the “high school where sir mix a lot went”, perhaps it’s so he could live a ten-minute walk from “three old growth trees”. Or maybe Riley moved to Seattle for the same reason anyone moves anywhere, to see something new and make sense of it, to turn around and produce a work of art grounded deeply in a place and time that hadn’t grown dull from repetition. What we receive is a poem facing down the alienation and loneliness of being literally ungrounded. We receive addresses to the dead and separated, to long distance friends, and the ever-aloof state of Colorado. 

Author Andy Riley

We are introduced to a poet navigating public space and the struggle for connection between strangers. I delighted in the man in camo pants trying to train surf, the howler under the tunnel on the light rail, and the couple who waves back at the narrator from under the bridge. The poem builds us a world of characters vying for attention, a series of exhibitionists mirroring the short, showy writing of the poetry itself. 

Having read shorter renditions of Riley’s writing, the sometimes-eclectic chapbooks he described as his “EPs”, I was excited to see how his style would take to a book-length poem. The use of short sequences allows for concentrated bursts of energy sympathetic to his style, while the relationality allows for an opening up into moments of satori. One of my favorite sections in the poem is election day which both contains the rapid fire “bodily steam footfalls mirage/ like climbing a ladder” and the wide-open couplet “hate of the unknown is traditional/what of this hate of the known”.  The book also shares my love of nouns you can grind your teeth on. Brooklyn ave. uses to full effect the regional “noggins”, the scientific yet punk “oxytocin boot black”, and a whole quatrain about “priapism”. More space allows Riley more exploration in word choice and sound, and it’s lovely to see him opt for a yummy and timely dialect.

The building blocks of short poems translate into a feeling of discovery throughout each that Riley deftly sustains through the book.

Riley’s adjective phrasing, which delights in novel syntax while also bending the grammar of sentences, help him create metaphors from bite sized lines of language. Lines like “no flower columbine”, “smack gridlock/migraine-iacal car-ships” or even the simple “ATM smoke shop” recreate adjectives from modifiers into carriers of essential natures for each of the nouns. The building blocks of short poems translate into a feeling of discovery throughout each that Riley deftly sustains through the book. 

The only places of the book that confused me were moments of rhyme where the poet slips into a register more reminiscent of Shelly and Dickinson than Weiners or Spicer. Compared to the breakneck speed at which the poetry generally moves the section “the dawn nay dies/it flies.” or “ah/T-shaped wisteria” felt lethargic. However, the register never seems to be employed without irony or self-awareness and there are plenty of moments where rhyme or abstraction is seasoned to taste in the poem. There are also brilliant sections subverting form such as the telegram-like “when I speak” section. Overall, the spots that stick out and interrupt the flow of the poem are done with subtlety and creativity that brings the larger project in balance with itself. 

We may never know why one moves to Seattle. However, we do know what one does with the experience. Riley gives us an istoria making sense of public space and loneliness in a large explorative sequence. Brooklyn ave. Hymnal is an assertive ennui filled poem making sense of the daily mess that we each navigate to produce art. The creativity and power of his style is on full force here while his craft remains a love letter to poets like John Weiners and Frank O’Hara that have long informed his work. It’s a delight to have such a strong showing from such a young western poet.

BROOKLYN AVE. HYMNAL

BY ANDY RILEY

AVAILABLE THROUGH PILOT PRESS

Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Mountain Bluebird Magazine.

Editor Interviews // Chris Bullock

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

CHRIS BULLOCK

Chris Bullock, otherwise known as Tall City, has self published a few volumes of his work, and has been presenting his poetry at open mics and showcases for quite some time now, even reading for audiences with a rudimentary grasp of English. He has written and been published by South Broadway Press, has displayed art and curated exhibitions at The Lab on Santa Fe, has toured the country a few times with The Nicotine Fits, has sung his poetry inspired lyrics along his autoharp at venues and open mics, has spun original beats for freestyle rappers in Colorado and New Mexico, has studied in China on scholarship from community college, among other activities, and has recently decided to get a little more serious and diligent about something.

Writing is a way to formulate an ideal thought that is fluid and perfect from beginning to end. Some readers find life and emotion in it, others find some kind of death and a doubt of self.

Chris Bullock
SBP: WHAT IS FUELING YOUR CREATIVITY RIGHT NOW? WHERE DO YOU FEEL THE MOST CREATIVE?

CB: I feel the most creative when I am bored and my thoughts start playing around.

SBP: WHAT MADE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY?

CB: Failing at almost everything else I have tried.

SBP: WHO DO YOU HOPE FINDS YOUR POETRY? WHO IS YOUR ART FOR?

CB: I am not sure people will find my poetry and I usually write it to get it out of my head, and if I think it’s pretty cool, then I leave the apartment and go share it with someone, and I am not too concerned with whether they like it or not.

SBP: IF YOUR WRITING WERE A KEY, WHAT DOOR WOULD IT UNLOCK, AND WHAT WOULD YOUR READERS FIND ON THE OTHER SIDE?

CB: Writing is a way to formulate an ideal thought that is fluid and perfect from beginning to end. Some readers find life and emotion in it, others find some kind of death and a doubt of self.

SBP: WHAT POEM THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN RECENTLY WENT TO A PLACE YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING, OR WHICH WAS THE MOST/LEAST CHALLENGING TO WRITE?

CB: A poem about the many elements of my diverse background, which felt like a rant, but the outcome was that it was praised as one of my best.

SBP: WHAT HAS BROUGHT YOU JOY THIS LAST YEAR?

CB: Sleeping really well, I forget when it was.

SBP: WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT OBSESSION?

CB: Accumulating enough money to afford Denver rent and stay off the street. Otherwise, Colombian style salsa dancing, boleros, reading books in languages I don’t fully understand, and eavesdropping on strangers on public transit.

SBP: WHAT MAKES SOMETHING HARD TO WRITE OR CREATE?

CB: Reluctance and avoidance.

SBP: WHAT IS THE VALUE OF WRITING AND ART IN THE CURRENT STATE OF THE WORLD?

CB: Fairly low but as George Wallace, poet laureate of Suffolk County confided to me, “Poetry is a vow of poverty.”

Editor Interviews // Debra Keane

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

DEBRA KEANE

Debra Keane (she/her) is a Denver poet, artist, advocate, social worker, facilitator, and identical twin. She’s written over 1,000 daily poems and simultaneously squirms at and strives for creative vulnerability in her everyday. Her work has been published by Twenty Bellows, Beyond the Veil, Last Leaves, South Broadway Press, 40West, and ALA Editions.

I don’t know that writing, art, ​or poetry will save us​, but it can save its individual creators and receivers for a little while. It gives us a way to lean in, to make sense of, to understand what it means to be alive​ in our particular moment, and in all the moments past and in whatever’s coming.

Debra Keane
SBP: WHAT IS FUELING YOUR CREATIVITY RIGHT NOW? WHERE DO YOU FEEL THE MOST CREATIVE?

DK: I am relishing this particular moment in my own brain, heart, and spirit. I have structured my day-to-day to be filled with creative practices and deadlines, so my creativity is fueled by the routine of my commitment to meeting the page/paper/canvas at intervals. It’s such a dang treat to encounter myself over and over again against our backdrop of global and individual pain and joy and grief and knowing and not knowing.

SBP: WHAT MADE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY?

DK: Poetry came along in my childhood and broke all the rules of language I was learning in this beautiful, strange, abstracted, and queer way. I’ve always been a listener and observer; poetry gave me a lens to search for the beauty of the world – the poetry of everyday conversation, sound, literature, trees, emotion, thought – all of it. Poetry also has such an efficient impact-to-word ratio! ​G​iving voice to the unmentionable with such brevity. What’s not to love?

SBP: WHO DO YOU HOPE FINDS YOUR POETRY? WHO IS YOUR ART FOR?

DK: I want my poetry to be found by anyone who could read or hear it and go, “huh” in some way. ‘Huh’ could be for a spark of recognition, a moment of delight, a confusion, a reckoning. I love the idea that one of my poems could save my own life and then simply go kiss someone else on the cheek as it passes them by. My art is absolutely for me first: it lets me know if it wants to be shared outside of my audience of one, and then usually won’t shut up until I get it to the right person or people in my life.

SBP: IF YOUR WRITING WERE A KEY, WHAT DOOR WOULD IT UNLOCK, AND WHAT WOULD YOUR READERS FIND ON THE OTHER SIDE?

​DK: My writing is the key to my own existence! By training or happenstance or personality, I have not always paid attention to what my brain/body/spirit is communicating, and so meeting the page every day is the way that I can re-/discover that I do in fact exist and am having a deep human experience that is simultaneously unique and universal. Behind that door, readers would find me and my host of speakers waving at them and shrugging and pointing at everyone and everything with awe.

SBP: WHAT POEM THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN RECENTLY WENT TO A PLACE YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING, OR WHICH WAS THE MOST/LEAST CHALLENGING TO WRITE?

DK: ​My poems have been walloping me with their grief surprises at the bottom of the bag. And then there’s a weird burnt french fry of anger that keeps butting in every few weeks as I write daily. I don’t mind them, though. People perceive me as a really joyful person, and I absolutely am, though I think only because I let grief and The Anger Fry speak in my work.

SBP: WHAT HAS BROUGHT YOU JOY THIS LAST YEAR?

DK: ​Meeting myself again in a really sweet, unrestrained way and embodying a sense of spaciousness. Trees, flowers, my nephews.

SBP: WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT OBSESSION?

​DK: I love my houseplants dearly. They all have names and enjoy visitors.

SBP: WHAT MAKES SOMETHING HARD TO WRITE OR CREATE?

DK: It’s hard to write or create when I have too specific a vision for a project and don’t leave space for the unfolding of what’s underneath what I think I’m trying to say. Or when I’m trying to be clever — oh my gosh, watch out. 

SBP: WHAT IS THE VALUE OF WRITING AND ART IN THE CURRENT STATE OF THE WORLD?

​DK: I don’t know that writing, art, ​or poetry will save us​, but it can save its individual creators and receivers for a little while. It gives us a way to lean in, to make sense of, to understand what it means to be alive​ in our particular moment, and in all the moments past and in whatever’s coming. I love that we can look back and recognize ourselves in the work of the ancients and our contemporaries. What a treat that things have both always sucked and always been amazing — writing and art is the record of that truth.

Book Review: In the Soup by John Calderazzo

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
IN THE SOUP BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Calderazzo is an accomplished Nature Writer and emeritus professor within the English Department at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.  In The Soup is his latest poetry collection.  Expressed in three sections Calderazzo relays how he feels, in the soup, in the thick of life-after-retirement on the “Big Day,” as he is “Gathering Voltage,” and one “Windy Day at the Dump.”

Calderazzo begins with his titular poem, “In the Soup” – a psychedelic homage to his inner-man found at the bottom of a can of turkey noodle soup.  Calderazzo ponders the ingredients. What makes a man, what makes the contents of life, what inspires our mindfulness?  The ensuing pages hope to reveal these answers.

PART I: BIG DAY

“Second Coming” wonders about our connection to fading stars and skies laden with floating feathers that cascade like snowfall (13).  Calderazzo takes up his lament for extinct and endangered species.  The Passenger pigeon, “that once blocked the sun” now, “bearing down on oblivion” (13).  Will their eradication be the future for howling wolves and roaring grizzlies?  The same goes for unshackled rivers, and sludge gray oceans.  What will their fate be as climate change deepens?  Some may deny these cause-and-consequence actions but, “even the wind-bitten crew of / the farthest-out whale boat… began to comprehend / what we had done” (14).  

In “The Secret Life of Mountains: Front Range of the Rockies,” Calderazzo explicates his home-place in a meditation of tercets:

Deep in,
a lupine meadow
scored with trails

softens, mists over,
dousing spot-fires
of glacier lilies (33).

It is Spring. The Front Range is emerging into new life.  The:

Pasque flowers
close their petals
like eyelids folding (33)

into meditation,
relieved from 
the trespass (34)

This is Calderazzo’s means of telling his reader to “Go lite” and “Think Like a Mountain” as Aldo Leopold implores.  Yet to also take on John Muir’s challenge, “The mountains are calling and I must go,” but do so with care in order to preserve their beauty, and to protect them from “boot scrape” and drone’s “beauty-lust” (34).

PART II: GATHERING VOLTAGE

“Way Stones” told in three numbered stanzas stories acts of subtle environmental activism.  Beginning with his friend who knocks over cairns – the way stones marking paths on trails.  His friend, who shakes his head in disgust and kicks the keystones which topple in disarray, demonstrating that he prefers, like Robert Frost, to take the road less travelled by.  However, Calderazzo actually doesn’t mind them.  The stone pyres, “suggest a tall dance / with gravity” marking where, “The trail / goes this way… [and] Death is that way” (43).  Calderazzo notes that in other lands, cairns value prayer, offer blessing, and lead the way, “A last ride / through the stars,” which is entirely a different matter.

Author John Calderazzo

PART III: WINDY DAY AT THE DUMP

“Windy Day at the Dump” is a necro-pastoral poem which details environmental decline’s  connection to humanity by listing the things discarded within a landfill.  The poem documents Calderazzo’s personal letting-go of things and moments in his life that now decay within the dump’s depths.  Medical records of a last parent to die, the draft of a youthful novel too embarrassing to recycle, love letters, a broken wall clock, a fizzling floor lamp.  These objects mark his passing of time and are his mile markers of maturation.  They are the cairns that lead the way to his end flight (68-69).

Calderazzo’s closing poem of his collection, “Passing through” is his quest through Wingo, Kentucky in search of his final resting place.  However, “The casket shop has moved” and so he decides to, “pass on a casket, thank you.”  Instead he chooses for his final destination to be a “high flower valley” surrounded by “peaks of snowlit fire.”  He prefers for his ashes to “zephyr off while friends & family / lift their arms & sing” (87).  And in this way those who would remember him, mimic his chosen poetic lineage as they burst into a Whitman-like mighty yawp.

Calderazzo’s collection, In The Soup (2025) by Middle Creek Publishing & Audio nods to his literary community and those who came before him.  Through this gathering, he enters their company, and encourages others to tell their stories, communicate to the public about the importance of wilderness preservation, and find those ancient cairns while trekking among high mountains around the world.

IN THE SOUP

BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

AVAILABLE NOW!

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: compost your despair by hayden dansky

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

Book Review: compost your despair by hayden dansky

A BOOK REVIEW BY LIZA SPARKS

Compost Your Despair is Hayden Dansky’s love letter to Palestine, community organizers, to the “queer and weird and trans and disabled,” to the “dark and indigenous,” to “those of us who live in liminal spaces, or are kin to it,” to their past self, to anyone who feels empathy, anyone with a heartbeat.

The speaker in these poems writes with a fierce urgency that begs us to pay attention and asks us to move our bodies towards action.

In “Now That I Have a Voice,” the speaker defiantly asserts:

So let them
Burn me
with the rest of them
Burn me like they did
my ancestors before time and place
made me white
Burn me like the heathen they call
me for my love, desire, joy
Burn me with the rest because
now that I have a voice
I will never close
my mouth

These poems tumble down the page like spoken word and it does feel like Dansky is speaking just to us. They capture our attention. They invite us in to the prayer. This poetry is a communal act—a protest poetry spoken on the street.

They write in, “Until They Hear Us:”

What else can we do
besides scream from every corner

There is not a lot of excess in these poems; there is not flowery language, sentimentality, romanticization of struggle. They write with a conversational language that seeks to be understood. In “Climate” they write:

it really, really matters how we treat
each other

There is the examination of complexity and Dansky struggles with their own positionality of privilege and oppression. They write:

Peace is a process of
relationship to self
just as much as
relationship to other.

They write, in regards to the ongoing genocide in Gaza,

I will scream that this is not
my Judaism.

These poems demand a megaphone.

There is not the promise of peace or justice, but an impulse towards it. In “Until They Hear Us,” the speaker repeats, “I will try” and “I can try.” It is a vulnerable and humble sentiment. In times like these, what else is there to do but try? Trying is the first step towards action.

There is a force in these poems that is driven by the musicality of repetition, like the drumbeat of “Burn me” in the final stanza of “Now That I Have a Voice.” The speaker is not afraid to write in defiance of powers that will oppress them and the people they love, and they will say it again.

In the poem, “Climate” the speaker struggles with the power of words. What can words actually do in “a burning world.” They write, “How can I trust these words.” Yet, Dansky is driven to speak, to write, and to share. There is a deep desire to be heard. There is a fierce drive to express.

Author Hayden Dansky

These poems bring to mind the Audre Lorde quote: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” With that same sentiment—Dansky must speak, must write, must share.

There’s a hunger in the speaker to understand the past and the present, to make sense of the trauma and their position and responsibility.

In “Nex” there is a firm defiance against the powers of hate:

Our bodies are resistance.
Our love is survival.
Our identities are our anchors,
always in transition.

“Nex” is addressed to Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old non-binary student, youth, and precious soul who died as the result of anti-LGBQTIA+ policies. Dansky’s poems do not exist merely on the page, but are in deep conversation with the world around them.

And although the world around them is apocalyptic, there is hope in these poems. In “A Pandemic Note to the Creative Organizers,” the speaker writes:

You are not alone.
When you listen
you will remember
you never have been.

and in “A Pandemic Note to Self,” the speaker asserts:

Fall into the earth like it’s your home
It has always been.

Dansky’s impulse towards social justice is driven by a deep love for their fellow humans and for the world. In “Gaza” they write:

called by a deep love
of all humanity
of a belief
that nobody will be free
until we all are.

Compost Your Despair asks the reader to look at their own privilege and positionality—What drives you? What moves you? What do you love?

In “Pride,” Dansky reminds us that

Pride is not complacency

our lives are choices
and we are choosing to stay

Dansky’s poetry asks the reader: What are you choosing to do with your life? What are you choosing to do with your voice?

compost your despair

BY HAYDEN DANSKY

AVAILABLE NOW!

Liza Sparks (she/her) is a student in the 2025-2026 Poetry Collective at The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. Liza follows her literary obsessions and collects books the way toddlers collect rocks and pinecones (beloved friends, sacred treasures). She is a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net nominee.

Book Review: Leaf Manifesto by Laurel Radzieski

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

WILD NATURE, WILD WOMEN, A WILD ECOPOETICS:
LAUREL RADZIESKI’S LEAF MANIFESTO

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Laurel Radzieski welds her pen to manifest an embodied poetics and advocacy for the wild.  Wild nature. Wild Women.  This collection is unique because she plays upon the page physically and artistically in form, as many of these poems take shape within female curves. The growth from within is her child, and in this way the verse thrives.

The collection follows a flora lifecycle.  Each section reminds the reader of this beginning to end:  Seed, Germination, Sprout, Seedling, Sapling, Tree, Flowering, and ultimately the tempestuous Fruit.  Radzieski sets out upon her poetics journey stating, “One day I said aloud / I might like to be a tree” (11) and so she entices her reader to figure out what this may mean.

Throughout Leaf Manifesto Radzieski prompts us with questions: “What is a woman?” (15). And provides multiple choice answers, that only lead to more internalized questions.  Through this feminist lens she taunts her reader to poke at their own preconceived perceptions.  “Who gets to be a woman?” (16).  “What use is a woman?” (17).  “What’s it like to be a woman?” (21).  Once again, she tests her reader through a True / False dichotomy.  She dares us to shade in our answer fully with a #2 Lead Pencil.

In “How to Identify as a Tree” (38), Radzieski considers identity, origin, and belonging.  “Consider what others would want to know about your bark patterns and inner rings.”  Yet how a tree-body-person may appear doesn’t describe the within.  Rather, “roots and family tree” nudge toward fuller truths.  Especially as it oft happens, “If you are on unseeded land, know the history of the ground, how it got that way.”  In this way, Radzieski alludes to those who came before us.  She acknowledges that the land of her manifesto is of indigenous origins and birthright.

Author Laurel Radzieski

Throughout her collection, Radzieski offers up Ven Diagrams.  In “Woman Tree” (69), she encloses what these two entities have in common: branches, limbs, mistakes, leaves, organs, roots, flesh, rings, family, pain, and flowers.”  At least with this last word, she ends on hope.

Radzieski’s final poem in the collection, “Past Life Regression” (121) is a haiku:

Fallen walnut.  Such
a long way down, but then
soft idea of grass.

This seasonal form representing a walnut tree’s lifespan, culminates in a fruit-nut’s finality.  Not eaten, but allowed to cascade to an end-place.  Tranquility lands in grass.  Her bed, which begins again the tree’s lifecycle as the seed buries into soil knowing she will sprout once more. 

Laurel Radzieski won the Halycon Award from Middle Creek Publishing & Audio for this collection.  It is her second full collection of poetry.  Other poems have found a home in Rust + Moth, The New Your Quarterly, and Atlas.  She lives in Reading, Pennsylvania and is the Director of Grants at Alvernia University.

LEAF MANIFESTO

BY LAUREL RADZIESKI

AVAILABLE NOW!

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

2026 Pushcart Prize Nominations

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

We are incredibly excited to announce South Broadway Press‘ 2026 Pushcart Prize nominations! Please join us in celebrating these wonderful poets.

The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America – including Highest Honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Every volume contains an index of past selections, plus lists of outstanding presses with addresses.

The Pushcart Prize has been a labor of love and independent spirits since its founding. It is one of the last surviving literary co-ops from the 60’s and 70’s.

Pushcart Prize Nominees

FROM SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS’ SUMMER & AUTUMN 2025 EDITIONS

Because Every Girl Has a Pomegranate Poem In Her

BY MONICA FUGLEI

One Foot in the New Year

BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ

Geranium

BY ASPEN EVERETT

they say the rice won’t grow without blood

BY SREEJA NASKAR

Scribe

BY T. LYDIA MCKINNEY

I Do Not Care if You Are Across the Country

BY WHEELER LIGHT

Artist Feature: Rachel Mulder

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment
  • Your Gentleness Is Powerful, 2025, toned cyanotype on paper, 22 x 30 inches.
  • I Can’t Stop Drawing Angels, 2025, cyanotype on paper. 22 x 30 inches.
  • Portal (Twins), 2024, toned cyanotype on paper, 34 x 44 inches.
  • Discernment Spirit, 2025, cyanotype on paper, 22 x 30 inches.
  • Lovers, 2023, bleached cyanotype on paper, 30 x 43 inches.
  • Intimacy Loop, 2025, cyanotype on paper, 11 x 14 inches.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is a swirling devotion to process and surrender.

Since 2019, cyanotype has taught me subversive techniques via states of play, acceptance and transformation. This alternative photographic process uses light-sensitive chemicals which are applied to a surface like paper or fabric, exposed to UV light, and developed with water to create brilliant blue and white images. Additional processes like bleaching and toning (with everyday kitchen witchery like baking soda or tea!) make for additional color possibilities using the same old chemistry.

Both imagery and process are relational, with my work often revealing my own emotions to me before I’m even aware of their presence. I often explore this terrain by painting shapes with the chemistry, placing objects onto the surface to resist the light, rinsing and repeating this process in multiple layers. The paper holds the memory of each new layer, dodging destruction while creating space for possibility. 

Conversely, there are also magical moments where the image snaps into place in one exposure, as if by a flick of the wrist. The simplicity can be electrifying. The paradoxical nature and generative inertia of making these painterly cyanotypes continually invites me to learn and my work to transform.

INTERVIEW

South Broadway Press asks Rachel Mulder a few questions to get to know this artist a bit better.

SBP: WHERE ARE YOU FINDING INSPIRATION AS OF LATE?

RM: As a leo (sun, mercury and mars), I feel really grateful that a major part of my practice is actually worshipping the sun! Cyanotype is such a whirling dervish of magic, it’s really easy to be endlessly captivated by the process itself. I also enjoy listening to podcasts while I work, including Dean Spade’s Love in a F*cked up World (named after his most recent book, which I haven’t read yet) and Margaret Killjoy’s Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff (especially the four-parter on how the Surrealists were even cooler than we thought!)

WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH, IF ANYTHING, WITH YOUR ARTWORK?

Currently, I feel like I’m at a kind of journeyperson stage with cyanotype; I have a lot of confidence and trust with the chemistry and timing but I feel as though I’ve barely begun deepening the secondary processes available to me, like toning or adjacent methods like anthotype or Solarfast (the latter offers lots of different colors outside of the traditional blue!). I’m also passionate about sharing this magical process with others, and am on the lookout for an ideal, accessible location where I can continue to offer more masks-required cyanotype workshops for people of all ages and abilities here in Portland.

SBP: WHAT IS BRINGING YOU JOY RIGHT NOW?

I’ve been spending a lot of time in parks lately, and I feel really lucky and grateful when a dog or baby locks eyes with me and demands to become my friend. Like, when a dog you just met gives you The Lean or crouches beneath your legs like you’re its protector, that’s like the highest compliment. 

SBP: ANY UPCOMING EVENTS?

My solo show SUNWORK will be on view at Elbow Room in Portland, Oregon next month! The opening reception is on Sunday, October 26 from 3:00 – 6:00 pm and will be up through November 27. I’m also part of a little co-op called Grover’s Curiosity Shop where I sling prints, stickers, cards and more, and we host sweet and weird events there. My website is rchlmldr.com and there you can easily sign up for my newsletter or find my online shop. I offer a selection of prints where 25% of my sales are shared with Palestinians and mutual aid efforts in Gaza, like the anticapitalist mutual aid fund Bridge of Solidarity. Last, I have a Patreon where at the $5 tier or higher you get monthly postcards in the mail as well as behind the scenes process stuff, discounts in my shop and more.

Rachel Mulder (she/they) lives in Portland, Oregon, with her two cats, Opal and Tomasina. She was born in rural Wisconsin and when she was small she spent a lot of time sitting in the grass staring, obsessing about animals, watching cartoons and peeling her skin off. Now she makes drawings using a variety of media that often yield printmakerly textures – residual effects from earning her BFA in Printmaking at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2007. A process-oriented artist, her work vacillates back and forth between the meticulous and obsessive to playful experimentation and experientiality. Whether it’s drawing with human hair, mud, cyanotype, gel pen or graphite, her imagery explores human connection, expression, and the strangeness of existing in a body. Encouraging others (and herself) to create/exist sincerely is a parallel passion of hers that braids itself into her visual work.