DIODE

In March, the Diode website crashed. Diode began in 2007, when an online-only poetry journal was still something that required explanation. There were doubts that the internet could be a serious home for poetry, and whether poems on screens possessed the permanence or gravity of poems on paper. We believed it could. More than that, we believed the screen offered possibilities the page did not: immediacy, reach, visual experimentation, and the ability for a poem published in Doha to be read moments later in Chicago or Manila or Beirut or Lagos.

Diode has always been a very small operation. The “staff” of Diode consists of two people: my husband, Law Alsobrook and me. Since 2007, we have kept submissions open year-round, charged no reading fee, and have almost always responded to every submission within thirty days. I mention this because by the time the site crashed, I had been thinking seriously about ending Diode. I am retiring from academia in 2027. That year will also mark Diode’s twentieth anniversary, and twenty seemed like a good number on which to stop. We could curate one final year, celebrate what Diode had been, and then close the doors with some grace.

Then the doors disappeared. And what surprised me was how odd it felt. I would go to the URL reflexively and find nothing there. Poems I remembered publishing fifteen years ago were suddenly inaccessible. Entire issues were gone from public view. Hundreds of poets who had trusted us with their work had, at least temporarily, vanished from the place where we had promised to keep that work.

We decided to rebuild even though it seemed impossible. The old site had accumulated nearly twenty years of workarounds, obsolete code, strange little fixes, and the digital equivalent of rooms built onto rooms. We weren’t simply making a new website. We had to figure out how to carry nearly two decades of poems into it. Then the remarkable poet and web designer T. De Los Reyes came into the project. Working with T. changed the question. Instead of asking, How do we put Diode back the way it was? we began asking, What could Diode become?

Together, T., Law, and I began rebuilding with the intent to not merely restore the journal, but also reconsider it. We wanted the site to feel like the journal we would make if we were starting Diode now: generous, beautiful, accessible, surprising, alive to what poetry is doing and might do next. My certainty about ending Diode disappeared. Loss is clarifying that way.

Volume 19 arrives after an interruption, but it doesn’t feel tentative to me. Quite the opposite. The work gathered here reminds me why a journal like Diode should exist in the first place. These poems are formally restless, intellectually alive, funny and furious and tender. They move through bodies and histories, intimacy and violence, family, language, memory, desire, grief, place, politics, the surreality of being alive now. Some announce themselves immediately; others work more quietly and then refuse to leave. They don’t share an aesthetic, and I wouldn’t want them to. What they share is the sense that something important is at stake.

So, welcome to a much-changed Diode, however one thing that hasn’t changed is our commitment to diversity. We believe that poetry becomes larger when more histories, languages, bodies, traditions, geographies, formal practices, and ways of knowing are allowed to enter the conversation. It means justice, inclusivity, anti-racism, and equity not as branding but as editorial practice: whom we read, whom we publish, and how seriously we take the responsibility of giving that work a home. It also means respecting writers. We have always tried to remember that every submission represents someone’s time, labor and hope.

I am profoundly grateful to T. De Los Reyes for helping us imagine it, and for the extraordinary care, intelligence, patience, and artistry required to build it. I am grateful to Law, who has been beside me in this work for so long, and who, when it would have been entirely reasonable to say maybe this is the sign that we’re done, instead helped ask what we could make next.

I am grateful to the poets. The poets in this issue, certainly, whose work makes the best argument for Diode’s continuation, and also the poets who have trusted us since 2007.

And I am grateful to you, the readers, because a journal can hold a poem, but only a reader can carry it away.

Thank you.

Patty Paine & Law Alsobrook

Check out the brand new DIODE!

The old Diode website is back!

Diode Poetry Journal

When the site disappeared earlier this year, it felt oddly unsettling. I kept thinking about all those poems just out of reach.

I’m happy to say they’re back.

The original site is online again, and the archive is once again open to readers. If you’ve been waiting to revisit an issue or track down a favorite poem, you can.

At the same time, we’re hard at work on what comes next.

As frustrating as the crash was, it also gave us the chance to ask a bigger question: what could Diode become?

As the journal approaches its twentieth anniversary, it feels like the right moment to redesign, and to renew our vision.

Submissions remain open year round and we still respond within 30 days. We’re especially eager to read reviews, interviews, and essays. But we’re also creating a new Special Features section as a space for work that doesn’t fit comfortably into existing categories. Hybrid projects. Collaborations. Visual essays. Archival explorations. Conversations across disciplines. Genre-defying experiments. Things we haven’t thought to ask for. If your work expands our understanding of what a poetry journal can publish, we’d love to see it.

Nineteen years ago, Diode began with a simple belief: that contemporary poetry deserves an editorial home that is adventurous, generous, and deeply attentive to the work. That belief hasn’t changed. If anything, rebuilding the journal has reminded us why it matters.

We’re enormously grateful for your patience while we’ve been rebuilding behind the scenes. The support we’ve received from contributors, readers, editors, and friends, has made it possible for us to imagine not simply recovering, but returning stronger.

Until the new Diode arrives, we want to celebrate the remarkable writers who have made this journal what it is . The link below will lead you to our 2nd Anniversary issue.

Diode's Second Anniversary Issue

Abou Rashed’s work is striking for its emotional range and for its integrity and precision. The recurring “theories” threaded throughout the book allow an examination of the mechanics of displacement and occupation without flattening them into a single narrative. The result is a collection that feels intimate and expansive, one that moves fluidly between the personal and the political, the inherited and the chosen. Grief is present, but it does not define the work. It exists alongside love, humor, resistance, and a fierce clarity about what justice demands.

In the conversation that follows, Abou Rashed reflects on how her understanding of return evolved as she wrote the book and how poetry can hold contradictions that history often doesn’t. She speaks candidly about language, inheritance, and the tension of writing across Arabic and English, as well as the ethical questions that shape her work. What emerges offers insight into the making of Theories of Return, a deeper sense of the stakes behind it, and what it means to write from within a condition that is ongoing, unresolved, and urgently present.

DE: Theories of Return frames return not as a single event but as something lived, imagined, deferred, or refused. When you began writing these poems, how did your understanding of “return” change over time, and where did it ultimately land by the end of the book?

Sara: Ever since I was a child, I learned of return as inseparable from the condition of being Palestinian. In Syria, for example, we legally didn’t hold Syrian citizenship because it’d denounce our possibility of return as refugees. Every Palestinian poem I’ve written has been wrestling with this notion—as a right, a promise, a fantasy, an approaching reality—but throughout the book, I interrogate it from multiple angles, sometimes logistic, other times emotional, and it was surprising. I arrived toward the end of the book at the realization that it’s much more complicated than a simple “pack up and go.’’

As Palestinians in the diaspora, it stacks against our many languages and displacements and even poses the question, “Are we recognized as Palestinian enough to Palestinians still there?” A line I cannot stop thinking about from Noor Naga is, “Is it arrogant to return to a place you’ve never been?” When I met her in person, she signed my copy of her novel If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, and wrote, “There’s no arrogance in your return, only liberation.’’ I hold onto that.

DE: Several poems adopt the structure of “A Theory,” blending lyric language with conceptual inquiry. What did theory allow you to do emotionally or politically that a straightforward narrative or confession might not?

Sara: I find theoretical frameworks very rich material as a creative writer. Of course, I’ve lived exile long before I studied it academically, but many of the texts I read ultimately inspired me to put lived experience and abstract language side by side and generated some of my favorite poems, such as the sequence poem “Theories of Return.” This type of thinking and speaking also allowed me to be a much more detached and colder writer who, by calling attention to the facts and mechanics of occupation, exposes its inhumanity and cruelty without needing to plead a personal case or restrict the occupied to the mere status of pitiful victims.

DE: The book repeatedly returns to inheritance, not only of land and displacement but also of language, memory, and even bodily responsibility. How do you think about what is inherited versus what is chosen in the making of identity?

Sara: I realize I make the argument that “Everything I am, I inherited,’’ a few times throughout the book, which is something I discovered along the way and completely stand by. I believe we’re way more inherited than we are self-made, and this shows in big and small ways: our career choices, our hobbies, habits, likes, dislikes… but mostly, our memory and frame of reference. Who are we to ourselves, and how do we see the world? Those, to me, tend to be predetermined by what we’re given. What we can choose, however, is what to do with our inheritance and how to carry it or even perceive it.

DE: Your work holds grief at multiple scales: the intimate, the familial, the historical, the collective. How did you navigate writing from personal experience while refusing to let grief become consumable or explanatory for a reader?

Sara: Personally, I refuse to succumb to grief. Omnipresent as it is, it is not the end of our capacity to feel. It is there alongside joy, love, resistance, hope, and hopelessness. I didn’t want to write a Palestinian book that is any one mood or impression, but one that simply is in all the complexity and range of emotions that an occupied nation might experience at once. I’m also trusting my reader to recognize nuance and receive the work capaciously.

DE: Arabic and English move through the book not just as languages but as sites of tension, loss, and survival. How does writing primarily in English shape what can and cannot be said about exile, memory, and Palestine?

Sara: I’ve recently experimented with translating a few of these poems into Arabic, and it was the most fascinating experience. Many of these poems began as story seeds told to me by my grandmother that I then planted and watered in English. The poems themselves wrestle with language and become sites of exile because I write as an Arab poet in English and as an English-speaking poet in Arabic. It’s something I’m embracing and is very reflective of how I’ve grown throughout my writing journey. I started writing in Arabic at the age of six but now feel more comfortable in English because I can use poetic elements such as line breaks, stanzas, sentence fragments, and even extended metaphors very differently. I don’t think the choice of language is obstructing what can or cannot be said because I don’t self-censor, so I’m very grateful for the ability to translate and experiment across languages.

DE: Many poems resist closure, offering instead repetition, fragmentation, or refusal. What does it mean for you to leave a poem unresolved, and how does that gesture relate to the political realities the book addresses?

Sara: It’s very difficult to write neat poems about personal and collective upheaval. As I write in “A Survivor’s Chant,” “There’s no beginning for what you might find yourself inside of.” Similarly, there’s no end. I try to let the poems become time capsules or echoes of what’s happening around us, airy and open, not fully formed and rigid things that suggest finality. They’re very much of the moment, and the fact that the Palestinian occupation has gone on for 77 years and counting gives any writing about it a different relationship to time and events... as if they’re frozen in memory and always reoccurring.

DE: Several poems directly interrogate concepts like peace, reconciliation, and liberal empathy. What conversations do you hope this book complicates or disrupts within literary and political spaces?

Sara: Palestinians aren’t looking for pity, and our cause isn’t a simple “difference of opinion.” I am making every effort to shed light on the injustices we have faced, the horrors of massacres, and the everyday violence of the occupation at home and in exile, where even the bodily and intimate space is invaded. I hope my work moves us away from humanization and empathy to conversations about justice, reparations, and what a liberated Palestine might look like. A few of my poems also call attention to the strained relationship between Palestinians and Jews due to the occupation, and I am hopeful we can interrogate this relationship and the violent hierarchy it creates, stripping both from the chance to know one another as humans instead of occupied and occupier.

DE: As this book enters the world, what do you hope it offers readers? What kind of reading experience do you imagine, or hope for, when someone closes the book?

Sara: My hope for it is to deepen conversations on Palestine, return, ethics of war, even of love, inheritance, and motherhood. I hope readers think of it as a powerful book, a book that commands, not pleads. I can’t wait to hear which poems or lines readers end up remembering for a long time. I also hope it poses more questions than answers and that it’s read as a universal book of exile—one that speaks to that condition of being on the “outside” and connects different diasporic communities who have endured violence and continue to await their return. Of course, it’s ultimately a love letter to my hometown, Haifa, and to my grandmother specifically.

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Thank you to Sara for sharing these wonderful photos!

Diode: The Badass Brontës reimagines the Brontë sisters as historical figures, literary ancestors, and living presences. What first drew you to them as subjects, and how did your relationship to them evolve while writing the book?

JS: Thanks so much for these questions—I’ve had a long fascination with the lives and art of Emily, Charlotte, and Anne. There’s something magical about the fact that there were these three sisters, daughters of a clergyman, for whom writing begins in childhood as a kind of role-playing where they’re spinning tales of imaginary kingdoms, and gradually this gaming evolves into strong literary ambition. Then they write superb, gothic-inflected novels that continue to resonate beyond the Victorian era in which they lived and wrote.

The parsonage they grew up in is a few steps from a church and graveyard, but also looks out to factories and wild moorland. Today, it’s a museum that regularly attracts literary pilgrims—Plath and Woolf both wrote terrific accounts of their visits. The poem “Haworth of Other Days” captures my impressions from my visit in the mid-nineties, when I was living in the U.K. (the postcard portrait of Emily I picked up is still on my desk). The day I saw the dining room table where they wrote, the dresses they wore, the tiny books they compiled, hand-lettered to look like newsprint, was when they truly came alive as presences.

I knew a book had to do more than recount familiar biographical details. What might their lives and art teach me? Why do they continue to inspire readers and writers? Literary scholarship offered some answers, but I also looked to film, TV, and other pop culture adaptations. “Which Brontë Sister Are You?” responds to internet quizzes (who knew?) that playfully align your personality traits with Emily, Charlotte, or Anne’s. And the villanelle, “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever,” pays tribute to the fans who annually re-enact Kate Bush’s dance performance for her 1981 hit, “Wuthering Heights.”

Diode: The word “badass” carries humor, defiance, and cultural charge. What does reclaiming that term for the Brontës allow you to do poetically and politically?

It’s a playful way of showing that every era reinvents the Brontës in its own way, including our own. It’s a way of showing that the Brontës stood up to attitudes and obstacles as enormous as any in our own time –obstacles only a true badass would be willing to take on and triumph over—and it also reminds us that behind those Victorian dresses and beautifully crafted prose, these were women driven by intelligence, talent, personal tragedy, and ambition to succeed in being heard against all odds.

Diode: How did your use of imaginative dialogue or monologue across time, letters, seances, etc. (including the Bell pseudonyms) allow you to cast light on issues of gender or authorship?

The idea of the sisters’ literary masquerade is fascinating. The Brontës decided that posing as men under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell would both preserve their privacy, improving their chances of publication and snagging good reviews. It was a clever ruse. But their work spoke so deeply of women’s interior lives and didn’t shy from presenting readers with what Anne called “unpalatable truths.” In the cento “Costumery” I take a wry look at early reviews of the sisters’ work (those of Wuthering Heights were especially vicious; plenty of artists can relate, including perhaps director Emerald Fennell whose new adaptation of the novel is receiving plenty of mixed press!). Rumors swirled around the identity of the Bells: were they one writer posing as three, were the novels co-authored by a husband and wife? How long could such a masquerade last? These questions are the backdrop of “The Brothers Bell Plead Publishers Not to be Unmasked.” It’s enraging to think of the broader cultural context behind their choice; at the same time, the book also celebrates the ferocity of the Brontës’ individual spirits and creative vision.

Diode: Many poems foreground women’s labor, intellectual ambition, and creative survival under constraint. How do you see the Brontës’ struggles resonating with the lives of writers, especially women writers, today?

The more time I spent with the Brontës, the more parallels I found between their time and our own. They watched their local landscape get chewed up and polluted by industrial development; disease was rampant—that’s just a small part of the historical connections.

At the same time, quite a few poems reference the stress and tedium of domestic work, as well as the exploitation of teachers and governesses by employers. “Owning the Charlotte Brontë” does this through the lens of an actual McMansion model named for the author—another example of contemporary marketing glorifying the darker realities and constraints of the past. Ordinary homes would not have been outfitted with advertised amenities like sunken tubs or expansive closets for stashing craft supplies—in the Brontës’ world, needlework was necessary clothing repair. It’s a strange irony to see an author turned into a brand and writing portrayed as a luxury lifestyle choice, for sure.

For me, the Brontës have come to feel like literary kin; they speak to a need for literary sisterhood that transcends time and place. It’s wild to think of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a popular author in her time, seeking a literary sister through supernatural contact, as I explored in “Charlotte Brontë: The Séance,” based on actual accounts of her experiments in spiritualism, which Stowe shares in transatlantic correspondence with fellow female novelist George Eliot.

Diode: What are you working on now, and are there upcoming readings, events, or projects you would like readers to know about?

Thanks for asking—the Brontë sisters were fond of animals, and there is strong environmental awareness in their work, which is interwoven throughout The Badass Brontës. My new book, Luminous Crown, a collection of ecopoems, is really an outgrowth of this poetic dialogue. I was honored that the book won the Tenth Gate Prize and will be out in the summer of 2026 from Word Works Press.

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Jane Satterfield is the author of six books of poetry, including The Badass Brontës (Diode Editions, 2023) and Apocalypse Mix (Autumn House, 2017). Her memoir Daughters of Empire received multiple national nonfiction awards. With Laurie Kruk, she co-edited the anthology Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland.

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Maryland State Arts Council awards, and major poetry prizes in the U.S. and U.K., including the Bellingham Review 49th Parallel Poetry Prize and the Ledbury Festival Poetry Prize. She has held fellowships and residencies at Sewanee, Bread Loaf, the Arvon Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. Her work appears widely in journals such as American Poetry Review, The Common, Ecotone, Missouri Review, and Orion. Born in Corby, England, she holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.

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I selected Dark Star Requiem for publication because it is a book animated by attention to language, music, the body, and the fragile and enduring textures of lived experience. Its poems are sensuous, formally assured, and deeply felt, carrying memory, place, and feeling without reducing them to explanation. They move through the body, through music, through food, cities, objects, and small rituals that carry memory and loss. They dwell in nonlinear time, where grief loops, pleasure persists, and history is felt in the muscles and skin as much as it is remembered. Poetry is not redemption or resolution but a way of surviving, of resisting erasure. The interview moves from Fairouz and Abdel Halim Hafez to diaspora cities, from domestic minutiae to the ethics of making art during an ongoing genocide. It asks what poetry can do when it feels insufficient and indulgent, and why artists persist. What emerges is an unsentimental, deeply human account of writing as witness, as archive, and as an act of stubborn insistence.

Diode: The collection repeatedly resists consolation, even as it insists on beauty, sensuality, and music. Were you consciously pushing against the expectation that Palestinian or Arab writing should “explain,” “educate,” or offer moral closure?

Hind: Consolation is probably an energy that exists in sweet personal encounters between people, or in the act of receiving language that feels intimate, among strangers. Perhaps the text itself should not explicitly console a reader– no words can help those who experience brutal violence firsthand.

I console myself by writing. And I have stopped being defiant or hopeful. When I was younger, my writing attempted to “stand up” to oppression, or declare triumph, but now in middle age, it seems I am more interested in simply divulging the aches and pleasures of Palestinian living, and allowing the reader to find solace in that, however they might. It is a terrible time for our people. Information is readily available in the millions of headlines. There is no moral closure for this occupation, not yet. And so, those who wish to learn about the Arab world have tremendous resources available. But my poems are an expression of one person’s path– it is not information meant to illuminate factual histories.

Diode: Many poems situate the body as both an archive and a battleground, a place where memory, violence, pleasure, and refusal coexist. How do you understand the body’s role as a site of historical knowledge in your work?

I have not considered this much before, but I suppose I am not a very spiritual person, nor religious, and I do not occupy an academic cerebral space either, leaving me with the physical body as a ground to chew on life. It stores the stimuli that comes my way, the imprint of relationships I build or kill, the desire for familiar skin, the anger at the constantly horrifying news, the sighs of my community as families suffer in cities of my diaspora, the surging tectonic power of music rushing the tendons, the bitterness of smoke, coffee and smog. The body is a fine place to attach meaning to. It fixes me in the here and now, as opposed to abstract poetics of the mind. Because I have no training in poetry, the language mostly emerges from a corporeal moment, whether it was shivering dread, heated fury, or mellow pleasure.

Diode: Your poems often name specific cities, dates, and moments, yet they also dissolve chronology, looping grief and love across time. What does temporality mean to you in this book, and how does nonlinear time mirror lived experience under occupation and displacement?

People tell me this is how trauma memory works– moments might be revisited in utter distinct detail, but the years have jumbled into non-linear fugue states. I do not know.

But I think being a documentary filmmaker by profession and the daughter of a historian encourages me to pinpoint the time, place, cast of characters, story arc, credits, etc. The poems try to be short films, perhaps. I also feel adoration, nostalgia, and hurt for the cities I grew up in, and how fragmented and chaotic they are today, so bringing them into sensory personal declarations feels right. I’ve written in multiple countries, lucky as I have been to travel with my films, and so sometimes the space I am visiting will bring its own language into my hands.

I try these days not to compare and contrast the Levantine cities of my youth with the West and North of my adulthood, but I am sure some of that disdain for rampant capitalist consumerist individualism peeks through the poems.

The texts themselves have been written over almost two decades, so they are different versions of me from earlier iterations, which perhaps brings a non-linear element to this book.

Diode: Music, from Fairouz to Abdel Halim Hafez to Western pop and rock, pulses throughout the collection. How does music function for you, not just as a point of reference, but as a structural or emotional force shaping the poems?

Hind: I have not thought much about this, but looking back on the terrible poems I wrote as a teenager, I remember a few I wrote because of some Leonard Cohen or Bjork song, and ever since I was a kid, music has dominated large parts of my universe. Beirut is noisy. Brooklyn is noisy. Dubai is stagnant. Music helps block out these realities when the poems finally emerge, and often a beloved lyric or a melodic remembrance encourages them. For example, every section of “Lamentations In The Metropole” was written to old Arabic Tarab, or folklore, or nostalgic lullabies from our musical heritage, as a random YouTube playlist jolted me into gone lifetimes. The poem featured Arabic lyrics throughout the sections as breaks in the flow.

By the time the book was published, I had decided to remove them all. My friend said they had done their job as “scaffolding” for the poem and did not need to remain– too juvenile. And they probably were. But as a storyteller driven by physical sensations, music can be central to harnessing language, and often makes its way into the texts.

Diode: The book repeatedly grapples with the ethics of writing in the midst of ongoing genocide. How do you navigate the tension between writing as witness and writing as an act that can feel insufficient, indulgent, or even violent in its own way?

Hind: The past two years have been the most horrifying in my lifetime, in terms of visceral gore publicly broadcast. It felt like living in medieval times. Very savage. What is language, shared stages, or even tears in a community to do? I truly wished I were a nurse, or a truck driver carrying wheat, or a logistics coordinator arranging medical evacuations, or even a really rich philanthropist. Alas, I am both a coward and a trained storyteller. This is what I know how to do, in service of the Palestinian narrative. I wrote aggressively, many violent essays that will never be published, and some of the poems are in this collection. I did that for myself, as a way to pass the time, to archive the injustice observed all day. I wanted to share in live readings in the community in NY, because the people told me it was needed, appreciated– that language brought them alleviation. Catharsis perhaps? The genocide as news is different from the filtered poetics of a friend’s body, and so I have taken some respite in being able to share texts directly with audiences here.

But yes, the insufficient nature of literature in the face of entropy and imperial horror is keenly felt by Palestinian artists. And yet, we persevere. There is no answer to this dilemma. War after war burdens artists with flagrant themes that are unavoidable. In a different life, I would have probably written sexy comedies about love, and not homages to murdered children.

Diode: There is a deep attentiveness to domestic objects, food, plants, and small rituals, even as the poems confront large-scale destruction. How do these intimate details operate as forms of resistance or survival in your poetics?

Hind: I suppose we go back again to the corporeal taking center stage in the impulse to write. Having lost people dear to me over the decades, I find some meaning in remembering the small things. Hairspray, Tupperware, phone books, guns, jam making, and silver rings. Someone’s nape crinkles around their eyes. There are gaps in my knowledge of philosophy, history, physics, and so my work can sometimes be confined to the immediate physical objects that pertain to atrophy, to decay, aging, and emotional ghosts.

Palestinian families are often compelled to permanently record our absent legacies because the actual material world is vehemently attempting to erase us. And so, however I can, the immediate world around me will learn of my mother’s Nazarene green eyes, the goat cheese of the village I never could live in, and so on.

Diode: The title Dark Star Requiem suggests both mourning and an astronomical body that still burns. What does the “dark star” name for you, and what kind of future, if any, does this book imagine or refuse?

Hind: The cosmos confounds and intrigues me, and I found it quite poignant when my close friend told me about the research into the “Dark Stars” of the galaxies. They don’t shine so bright, and they eat the dark matter existing within them, which makes up quite a chunk of the physical universe, and when they exhaust the dark matter, they implode. This is my basic and allegorical understanding of the machinations of dark stars.

The dark matter annihilates within them, creating black holes, and this is what it feels like to write my texts, inside my skin– a process of ingesting your own dark matter till your core implodes into language. The poems are almost all eulogies, and I come from an extended Catholic family, so my love for the meaning of a “requiem” made it into the title as well.

from Dark Star Requiem:

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Hind Shoufani is a Palestinian American filmmaker and writer based in New York. A Fulbright scholar and MFA graduate in Filmmaking from NYU, she was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2011. Her film work has gained international recognition, including a BAFTA and an Academy Award nomination for the short film The Present. Over her 27-year career, she has directed, produced, and edited hundreds of documentaries and experimental films. Her feature documentary Trip Along Exodus was shown in more than 40 cities, and she recently produced the Palestinian film Heavy Metal, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous international publications. For nearly two decades, she has curated Poeticians, a collective of poets and musicians performing in Beirut, Amman, Dubai, and Brooklyn. She is currently working on her second Palestinian feature film.

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DIODE: all children. moves fluidly between innocence and brutality, play and devastation. How did you think about holding those tensions together without resolving them, and what does that friction allow the book to say?

Shabnam: The form of all children. might be a sign of my own private experience of the world—I am deeply aware of the violence around me all the time, just as I’m aware of the innocence and beauty of children, of worms, of rocks in water. And for at least the first half of my life, I anguished over this juxtaposition of innocence and brutality. It was physically painful to me. My first book, ode to fragile is an ode to the fragility of humans, in particular in the face of darkness, devastation, cruelty and humiliation. It was so heartbreaking for me to write it, and while it’s a truly beautiful book, it’s also incredibly heavy. As are the three films I made from the material in that book. The aura of pain around those pieces makes it difficult for me to return to them. I think now, my relationship with darkness is more refined, and more aligned with my purpose. And I revel in resilience more. Yes, I’m here to engage with, to draw attention to, and to acknowledge, the darkness in the world. But I’m also here to guide people into their own power, to help them feel delight, and joy, and freedom.

The lack of resolution in the book is a surrender to expansion. I’m trying to avoid the death of a fixed answer. So much of my youth was painted by my ego, by the angry conviction of my position—in my case, a sense of moral superiority. Ego has an almost comical authority. It walks on wobbly legs, but wears a dress of fists. It performs certitude at the site of its biggest questions. There’s a lack of tenderness, a lack of attentiveness, and so much fear in the performance of ego. My biggest evolutionary leaps occurred when I sat down with my ego long enough, gently enough, for it to shed its disguises and reveal myself to me. It wasn’t painless, but there was always freedom on the other side.

Darkness does not want to be ignored, it does not want to be covered up with a beautiful blanket. Darkness does not want to remain darkness.

DIODE: The book borrows the visual and structural language of children’s magazines, games, and activities. What drew you to that form, and how did it shape the emotional or ethical stakes of the work?

Shabnam: When I was writing the book, I was really intentional about infusing it with Light. And I had to ask myself, what makes me feel the most delight? What makes me feel the most free? And at the time, the answer was children. Being around kids, expressing my own kid-side. So the first thing I did was give myself permission to play, even in the midst of stories that are devastating.

I also wanted a format that invited play. I want you to find the animals drawn into the scene of the mother and daughter. I want you to do the word puzzles. I want you to see the rough drawings and feel inspired to make your own art. And I want to nourish you, to offer you love and tenderness and levity as I walk you through the dark.

The recurring sections like “Can You Find the Animals in This Picture?” and “Once Upon a Time” feel both familiar and destabilized. How do you see repetition functioning across the book, formally and politically?

Both familiar and destabilized. I like that.

Honesty is integral to how I love. I think it’s beautiful when friends listen and have your back no matter what you say, but that’s not for me. I need everyone around me to be honest with me, even if it’s not easy. I’m not here for short-term gains, I’m here to evolve. And the more I evolve, the more I can creatively, joyfully, and freely offer evolution to others. So the destabilization is related to disrupting illusions that prevent accountability, or repeat harm, or reinforce mythologies of separation.

The familiar part is because I want you to feel safe. I was an only child until I was about 12 and half, and I grew up reading a lot. And a common text was Highlights Magazine, which had repeated segments like Goofus & Gallant, or letters & drawings from readers, or short stories with illustrations, or arts and crafts. And I had a subscription, so I knew the magazine would arrive every month. Another repetition. There was comfort in the repeated structure, and also a wonder and curiosity for the shifting storylines and ideas. So the familiarity in the book is deliberate. I use it as a way to be tender with myself, and as nostalgia for me and readers. It’s a way to build comfort into the dna of the book, while also serving as a portal directly to the child in every reader.

And, honestly, I’m aware of what the dissonance does. The way the more difficult parts of the story are amplified or re-cast in this more child-like setting. But sometimes it’s children who are experiencing it, and I think I found that for this project, this structure conveys the depth of the violence, and its relation to light, in a more faithful way.

The voice in all children. often speaks from multiple positions at once: parent, witness, child, narrator, citizen. How did you navigate voice while writing, and did it shift over time as the book took shape?

Two of my spiritual gifts are that I am an empath, and that I channel. For a long time that meant my feelings were messy and confusing because I didn’t know why I was feeling the way I was. I’ve gotten so much better at discerning what’s mine and what isn’t, including emotion, voice, energy. It’s a benefit because I can really receive and embody people and experiences, and the more I refine my craft of writing, I can communicate those people whole. I can always sabotage the work by overthinking it or trying too hard to control it. But when I really surrender and I’m being discerning, I can co-create with them to make something really beautiful.

DIODE: Several pieces engage real-world events and public language, particularly around state violence and neglect. How did you decide when to incorporate found or journalistic material, and how to transform it poetically?

Shabnam: That’s a great question. I think sometimes I need to point at the world and say, See? Right here? This is what I’m talking about. Look at this one individual person, this one beautiful child, for example, look right at them.

I’m drawing connections between fixed stories about specific people in the news with other people from different times and geographies who share the experience of violence. In the poem Current Events, for example, I’m talking about siblings who were gassed to death in Syria while hiding in a basement, a terrified and crying 10 year old Black boy in Chicago who was handcuffed by adult police in front of his grandmother’s house, migrant children who journeyed all the way to the US/Mexico border only to be forcibly separated from their guardians and sent to abusive shelters, and kids who daily suffer domestic abuse in their own homes.

In Current Events I juxtapose these “real-world” excerpts with poems which are permeable and infinite, even if they’re sad. It’s like planting a portal there. Poems are so special—they can connect anything together, revering the relation between even the most seemingly disparate things. There’s an abundance in this, an inexhaustibility, an infinity that I hope nourishes the reader and feeds the people in the stories I’m sharing.

DIODE: This book resists easy categorization as poetry, prose, or visual work. How do you hope readers move through it, slowly, disruptively, intuitively, or otherwise?

Shabnam: I hope it’s a mirror for the reader. May they feel how expansive and varied they are. May they know that time is not linear. May they remember that everything is connected to everything else. May they nestle in the inquiry. May they bring their inner child to witness their current selves, and may there be reciprocity between them.

Are there particular readings, performances, or conversations around all children. that have surprised you or helped you see the book differently since publication?

I think this is the first time I haven’t shrouded my work in an energy to keep it small after it’s complete. I used to have a tendency to stay hidden to protect myself. But this time, I really let the work lead the way. In other words, it’s not about me or my fears. So I’ve been doing far more readings than I ever have in order to share this book. And, as all children. continues to show me how it wants to be received, it’s helping me embrace, and enjoy, being seen.

DIODE: Looking ahead, what are you working on now, and how does that work converse with or depart from all children.? Are there upcoming events, readings, or projects you would like readers to know about?

The things I’ve written about aren’t “done.” I wrote a poem in 2006 called Beit Hanoun, which is a town in Gaza, and it was published in my first book. And the poem was prompted by the image of a tiny pink upturned shoe in a puddle of blood after Israel had bombed a neighborhood there. In all children., I have a poem called Mad Libs: Sightseeing Iran in Summer. In that piece, I’m describing a scene where men are being executed in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I’m continuing to write about and create art that considers violence, including state violence.

Right now, I’m working on a collection of personal essays which I am so very excited about. The first essay called The Victory Belongs to Love was published in Hunger Mountain, and the second called my dad has dementia is forthcoming in Blackbird. I also recently finished a documentary film about asylum seekers across the US/Mexico border called No Separate Survival, and we’ve been doing screenings and panel discussions for the film.

I’ll be doing two poetry readings at the San Francisco Public Library in March and April to keep sharing all children. a book which I love so, so much. And I’ve just finished a manuscript based on my PhD dissertation that looks at state violence in the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iranian films as a site of discourse and resistance.

And as always, I’m writing poetry, which will culminate in my next book of poems.

People can learn more about what I do at my personal website.

Everything I’m doing is an aspiration to continue integrating together all aspects of who I am, and to help people feel their own power and remember who they are.

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When we launched our first issue in 2007, the idea of a literary journal that existed solely online felt risky. Many questioned whether poetry belonged on a screen and if pixels could carry the same weight as paper. Yet within that uncertainty was a sense of freedom. We could publish work that was immediate, experimental, and far-reaching, and we could connect poets who might never have crossed paths in print.

Revisiting Volume 1, Number 1, I am struck by how fully it embodies the promise that continues to guide Diode. The poems in that issue shimmered with risk and tenderness, with electricity and ache, and you can still read the first issue HERE.

Jake Adam York’s presence in the debut issue was an anchor. I first reached out to Jake over a shared love of Lomography, an analog photography practice in which light, chance, and imperfection conspire to create the unexpected. When I shared the idea of Diode, Jake immediately responded with characteristic generosity and sent work without hesitation, helping immeasurably to shape the tone and intent of that first issue. His poems, then and always, were acts of witness and elegies, luminous with compassion and precision. Jake died in 2012, far too young, but his presence remains woven through contemporary poetry. His death was a devastating loss, but his presence endures in so many of us who were changed by his work and by his kindness.

As I re-read issue one, I was deeply struck by Joshua Ware’s “How the West Disintegrated into Soundlessness.” Although published in 2007, it feels remarkably relevant in its depiction of cultural decay, environmental collapse, and the quiet unease of modern life. Its imagery of industrial ruin, digital mediation, and domestic anxiety reflects the world of 2025, where technological saturation and ecological crises have intensified the sense of disconnection the poem predicted. Yet within its ruins, there is also a glimmer of hope. By revealing the emptiness of simulation, Ware encourages readers to see clearly and to envision renewal beyond the wreckage. The poem’s final blaze, while destructive, also serves as a purgative force, clearing space for transformation. By naming what has been lost and confronting it without flinching, the poem points toward the possibility of rediscovering what it means to live genuinely in a damaged world.

As we move toward our twentieth year, I feel deep gratitude. Diode began as a small act of faith and has become something enduring because so many people shared that faith. Thank you to the poets who took a chance on us, to the readers who return again and again, and to those who have sustained this project with care and conviction.

— Patty Paine
Editor, Diode Poetry Journal

The first issue of Diode

Early Diode swag

The poets in Diode 18.3 turn toward what hurts and what endures, finding beauty in the careful act of creating. M. Cynthia Cheung calls across centuries, writing, “Come back, Temujin,” and asking a long-departed ancestor to “conjure again for us the geography/ you made.” The poem reaches through time to imagine a world that refuses to forget. Sheila Black’s “Aubade for Pain” begins with an admission: “It’s old the sadness/ that you don’t know how to make anything.” Yet even in a room of invisible light, hands try “to turn themselves into birds.” Luiza Flynn-Goodlett tends a quieter beauty, cradling “the flower in my hand like a child’s head, grown heavy as they nod off to sleep.” These poems are not acts of escape but of endurance, each one a testament to care.

Across continents and generations, the poets trace the fragile map of belonging. In “Turtle Ship”, Arah Ko writes, “We buried our names at sea,” yet hope still sails beside the speaker:

Hope, 
another kind of meal 
we drank day after day, 
aubade of bitter iron 
& brine. Hope: the life 
jackets lost to storms, 
hope, the ship vomiting 
us into a foreign state. Hope 
the iron shoes we built 
out of its body, and hope, 
our home, old 
& new, the land 
that devoured us.

Kathleen Winter’s “Crosby Theatre” opens a door to July’s baked wind and asks, “Is there forgiveness enough in the world/ to power an eight-inch taper? A firefly?” And Susan L. Leary’s luminous review of Daniel Lassell’s Frame Inside a Frame reminds us that seeing itself is a sacred act. “Each frame refracts another. Each viewpoint deepens rather than narrows.” Like a glassmaker, the poet learns that “the hardened object is a fragile object,” and continues shaping, refining, and seeking until “we become our true outliving.” The lesson is clear: to look again and again is its own form of devotion.

These poets insist that tenderness should not vanish in the face of ruin but instead rise from it. Attuned to history, kinship, the body’s memory, and the voices of the departed, their work resists looking away. Poetry here is not retreat but reckoning, a deliberate act of seeing, naming, and persisting.

READ DIODE 18.3

Here are some photos of our hardworking interns taking a break after the launch of 18.3.

Thank you to Diode contributors and readers! We’re now reading for our 19th anniversary issue. It’s hard to believe we’re heading into our 19th year.

In a generous and thoughtful review, Sara Abou Rashed at Matter News called it “a stunning debut collection of poems” in which Shunnarah “does not merely settle to humanize, blame, or victimize. They confront colonizers and forced conditions; trace their Palestinian family lineage generations back; play with archive; and weave a colorful tapestry that stretches from Ramallah to Appalachia, queerness to Jesus, singularity to the collective, family to marriage, beginnings to fallouts, and so much more.” Read the full review here.

Crab Creek Review, featuring Shunnarah in their contributor spotlight, highlighted the book’s documentary poetics: “In the spirit of documentary poetics, We Had Mansions is a luminous and unflinching debut. Blending archival research with lived experience, Shunnarah composes poems that bear witness to the fractured geographies of diaspora … With fierce clarity and lyrical precision, Shunnarah interrogates how Palestinians are depicted in Western media and asserts a counter-narrative rooted in truth, emotion, and unshakeable love for the homeland.” Read the feature here.

What unites these responses is the recognition of the clarity, rigor, and lyric precision with which Shunnarah writes. The book has already been described as evidence and elegy, a collection that confronts erasure and insists on survival.

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Two poems from We Had Mansions

ars poetica of partridges & palestine

Sedo told me once our last name means partridge—
that sweet little bird in the pear tree every Christmas.
I’m looking for metaphors on Wikipedia again. It’s easy
to write poems about birds with so many species of partridges.
National Geographic says 43 of those species are decreasing
in population; something Palestinians know all too well.
People like poems about birds more than they like poems
about Palestine, & actual Palestine & her endangered people.
We just won’t go extinct quickly enough. But I digress.
That’s not the metaphor I’m looking for just yet.
An avian ecologist said partridges
are ground-dwellers, unlikely to roost in pear trees.
Those first day of Christmas birds of the family Phasianidae,
presents from one’s true love, were put in pear trees
against their will—branches like an open-air prison
the world ignores because at least they can still see sky.
Some might say I’m reaching, but that’s what metaphors do.
But inside them, there’s always a feather of truth.
This I know: when it comes to partridges & Palestine,
the pervasive popular messaging around us both is false.
The difference is, everyone knows senselessly killing birds is wrong.

the american dream

My grandfather didn’t want to leave the old country—
not for four years in the army & not for more beyond.
He didn’t want to wear Uncle Sam’s uniform in Korea,
but this was the price for the promise of America. Maybe
his neighbors called him a sellout, said he was abandoning
the homeland, giving up on the promise of Palestine. Maybe
they appealed to his ethics because it’s pretty fucked up
when you think about it. The Koreans were defending
their own homeland & his citizenship wasn’t their problem
to solve. To escape exile, he had to exile himself.
To escape one war, he had to fight in someone else’s.
Somewhere, god is laughing while we the people scream.
This is the irony of imperialism. This is the American Dream.

This is what it means for a book to begin its journey well: readers are moved, critics are compelled, and conversations are sparked. It is a rare joy for a publisher to watch such a response take shape, and we could not be prouder.

For more Mandy check out these illuminating interviews at Porter House and proVerse

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All Is The Telling, Rosa Castellano’s debut collection, does more than speak; it sings, mourns, remembers, and insists on being heard. It is a book woven from memory, history, and lived experience, layered with imagery that is both intimate and universal. To step into these poems is to step into a landscape where family, place, and time converge and where survival and beauty hold equal weight.

What makes this book even more extraordinary is the cover. The face of All is the Telling was created by Rosa’s brother, Eric Hornsby, an accomplished artist whose murals and paintings reach into community and memory alike. To have a sibling create the visual doorway into such a profound work is rare. Eric approached the poems with reverence, allowing their rhythm and imagery to guide his hand, drawing on shared childhood memories of Florida nights, orange groves, and star-filled skies. The result is not just a cover, but an extension of Rosa’s poetry; a companion piece born of love, trust, and the unshakable connection of family. This interview brings us inside that collaboration, showing what happens when words and paint, sister and brother, merge to create something larger than either could alone.

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Eric’s artistry goes far beyond the cover of All is the Telling. His work carries the same depth, resonance, and sense of place that Rosa’s poetry embodies, whether through murals transforming public spaces or canvases holding private meditations. Below you will find a glimpse of his works, each alive with color and movement, each carrying his unmistakable style. To see more of Eric’s work and follow his creative journey, visit him on Instagram

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Interview transcript:

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Many of these poems carry a sense of memory looping back on itself, blending humor and grief. How did you balance levity and pain in your writing process?

I don’t know how I balance, as each piece is an intuitive juggling act to get through to an expression. I think when the jokes come, it’s because the primordial goop of the poem has transmogrified into something that might be art, i.e., a funny bit, because I survived x amount of emotional processing and suffering and am ready to serve up something more to myself and a reader. As I read/edit my work, it’s super instinctive; I gauge how many quirky non-sequiturs I can insert without losing impact, but I have to say, I rarely scale it back. But I have been told I was undermining my message by someone… But, for me, more humor everywhere, all the time. Open the door to big comic relief. Prop it wide open. The humor is part of the message, and I believe, conveys a small bit of hope through its movement through things.

Place seems deeply embedded in this collection, from small towns to highways to parking lots. How important is the physical setting in shaping your poetic voice?

It’s very important. I’m visual, and I am often seeing as I’m writing, and I feel like I’m really there, whether it’s a real memory or something fabricated or surreal. It’s like I have to float out of language (into a scenic realm) to come back to it. But images, places, spaces, are part of what inform my consciousness and how I self-locate, and, for me, are what anchors a poem and adds to the resonance. Also, they sometimes provide some kind of metaphor even if I’m not conscious of it while I’m writing.

The Fall of Toby and Lady and Flint Girl Handcuffed Along Dort Highway present startling images rooted in rural and working-class landscapes. Do you think of these as social commentary, personal history, or both?

They are personal history with an awareness of social context. While my circumstances were unique, there are plenty of Flint kids who were also really poor and/or neglected, but many, also, who were middle working-class auto workers. Flint was thriving, even though we mostly were not. Later, I would live in the country with my grandparents, who were also from auto. This experience was more stable in every way.

Auto is a big part of Michigan’s history, and growing up, most of the people near me, including the farmers, also worked in auto. And, sadly, the middle-class working class here has been devastated since… through union busting, NAFTA, corporate greed, and decades of Republicans in office. Having working-class roots is very much a part of who I am today, my politics, how I use language, even how my brain organizes information. But I also feel discomfort in representing or speaking for others, so I try to let my stories open up a space for the reader to make their own analogies, judgements, etc. while conveying my own weird, individual experience. This could change up the road, as I do sometimes want to clobber people with my viewpoint and criticisms, and there are some people who need heavy-handed messages, but I know also, if you alienate the audience, it’s over with. I think part of the success of this book has to do with how I held back. Also, most readers like it when you invite them to be the assessors and the empaths (and make them feel smart)…

The chapbook moves fluidly between surreal moments and stark realism. Are those shifts intentional from the start, or do they emerge organically as you write?

They are organic and a kind of tripping without drugs. Sometimes I slip into a state, maybe between alpha and theta where grasping language becomes tenuous… I wish I had more control over it, but it is very dreamlike and probably where visual art is also realized. It’s a “barely language” place… It feels more real than surreal, and it isn’t very sustainable due to the need for language when writing (ha). So I’m comfortable flitting in and out between realities. However, none of it is predetermined/intentional.

What does Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect mean to you, and why did you feel it captured the essence of the collection?

Well, the title is ironic as there is really no idyllic past to return to, but there are moments of joy, love, and wonder. Also, I like how “pluperfect” has its own layer of meanings and references time. I think, while spare, it embodies the humor of the book, along with suggesting the inescapability of certain things.

A thread of survival and self-definition runs through the book, sometimes quiet, sometimes defiant. What do you hope readers take away about resilience?

I hope they might find inspiration and strength in it and know they are not alone in their own recoveries from trauma and loss. The human spirit is really resilient, and I know how much comfort I have gotten reading the words of others in the worst times of my life, and it wasn’t “inspirational” writing, it was just the beauty of people baring their stories, experiences, and feelings. We are not alone in our journeys when we speak our truths and can make it available to others.

If you could speak directly to your younger self—the one appearing in many of these poems—what would you want them to know after completing this book?

It gets easier. Listen to your instincts (they’re always right) and don’t let people derail you from your life goals. Being alone is not so bad. And everything is seasonal.

What’s the wildest or most unexpected image in the book that came to you fully formed?

Perhaps the succession of images with variants in the anaphoric “Kim” piece. The false “remembering” of details never revealed, used in obsessive sequence, was already part of my consciousness when I did the Brainard-like “I Remember” exercise. It was just a matter of committing them to paper. Simple, but powerful. It always amazes me how powerful those two words can be in culling images (or even fabricating ones, as in this case). All I actually knew was she fell through a skylight. No one would reveal more.

You often pair humor with grief. Do you see laughter as a survival tactic?

Yes, and it is something I inherited from the women in my family, many of whom have/had dark and quirky senses of humor.

If you had to describe the emotional weather of this collection in three words, what would they be?

Tornado. Run. Hide.

Which poem here scared you the most to write, and why?

None of them scared me, but publishing was another story. It was and still feels really vulnerable, but I’ve also, strangely, found myself being more open and public about things since publishing, as my stuff is now out there to read… The list poem about abuse is really loaded, but also, it was not really specific. Probably it is more vulnerable because of that. I don’t like to be an enigma through missing details, and part of me just wants to directly document experience. I write more for finding a container and expression than for revealing things to myself. I’m pretty self-aware and have few internal defenses. There are exceptions to this, and I know I’m different than a lot of people in this way. Poetry is wonderful in how it can elucidate and/or parallel complex dynamics and feelings in a small space.

If someone could only read one poem from the collection, which would you hand them first?

Probably “My Therapist Sez” as it contains so much and refers to so much outside of those conversations. I don’t know if it’s my best poem, but it probably does the most labor, and it is one of my favorites.

After finishing the book, what do you hope lingers in the reader’s mind the longest?

I think I just want them to have their own experience of the book, but as a fellow human, I wish for them to find a bit of hope, however small, in the darkness. Perseverance and hope is everything…

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Samaa Abdurraqib’s Towards a Retreat is a masterful work of poetic craft and emotional depth, crafted with an ear attuned to the interior and a gaze firmly fixed on the world’s ruptures and refusals. Towards a Retreat resists easy categorization and instead creates its own emotional and poetic landscape. With each poem, Abdurraqib invites the reader into a space of clarity, reckoning, and deep listening. This collection honors complexity. It is both a meditation and a call to attention.

Her language is precise yet expansive, rooted in the sensory world but always reaching toward something larger. She writes from the woods of Maine, from the remembered streets of the Midwest, from cabins that do not belong to her, and from the interior spaces of the self where identity, memory, and resistance take shape. Her work confronts whiteness, grief, and belonging with clarity and refusal, holding space for Blackness in expansive and embodied ways. The Midwest and Maine become contested landscapes, reentered and re-seen through memory, rage, longing, and love.

The power of this collection lies equally in its formal restraint and lyrical courage. These poems refuse spectacle. Instead, they rely on precision, rhythm, and breath. Echoes gather and return across the pages, turning landscape into chorus, solitude into sanctuary. You hear the poet’s voice and the accumulation of time, place, inheritance, and survival. The poems unfold like conversations with the land, ancestors, former selves, and the reader. They carry the weight of generational history and personal loss, yet they never collapse under that weight. Instead, they rise. Abdurraqib is a poet who can observe, listen, and shape insight into lines that land with quiet force.

Towards a Retreat isn't just a book you just read. You engage with it, revisit it. It becomes a companion, a mirror, a reminder. It’s for those seeking truth that’s not polished but lived, for anyone trying to understand the spaces they occupy and the histories they carry.

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Samaa Abdurraqib, PhD, lives, writes, and loves in Wabanaki Territory. She is the editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast (2023). Her poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, Obsidian, Big Wing Review, and the edited collection Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (2022). Samaa is a certified Maine Master Naturalist. She is always listening for birdsong.

Thank you to Samaa for sharing some photos with us, including of her distinguished “furst” readers Stashiell Hammett and Sherlock Applebottom!

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In the spirit of documentary poetics, We Had Mansions is a luminous and unflinching debut by queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist Mandy Shunnarah. This remarkable collection expands the possibilities of what poetry can hold and how it can bear witness. Shunnarah writes with a voice that is both fierce and intimate, blending documentary poetics with lived experience to create a work deeply rooted in history, memory, and the body. The poems navigate the dislocations of diaspora, the enduring trauma of the Nakba, and the sharp contradictions of growing up Palestinian and Appalachian in the American South. Through layered imagery, archival fragments, and lyric precision, Shunnarah resists the flattening of identity, offering a chorus of voices and experiences that pulse with complexity and care.

Blending archival research with lived experience, Shunnarah bears witness to the fractured geographies of diaspora, the disinformation campaigns that erase Palestinian humanity, and the personal and collective grief that has been carried across generations. Hanif Abdurraqib describes We Had Mansions as “a stunning collection that operates against erasure, against mis-naming and misrepresentation of a land, a people, or history. Each poem is its own beautiful reclamation, teeming with touchable imagery and the rich interior of memory, of lives that were full, and remain full.”

Shunnarah traces a complex web of inheritance: the displacement of the Nakba and its echoes in Alabama’s Bible Belt, religious trauma rooted in fundamentalist Christianity, the contradictions of assimilation, and the weight of addiction, exile, and loss. Shunnarah writes with fierce clarity and lyrical precision, examining how Palestinians are portrayed in Western media and asserting a counter-narrative grounded in truth, emotion, and an unyielding love for the homeland, or as Susan Muaddi Darraj observes, “Mandy Shunnarah writes about and from the Palestinian heart—in all its brokenness, expansiveness, its glory, its love for the world.”

This collection refuses to reduce Palestinians to symbols of suffering. Alongside poems of rage and resistance are odes to domestic life, queer love, and the body as both burden and sanctuary. Shunnarah’s poems explore longing and return, unlearning shame, and watching the sky for warplanes while holding out hope for tenderness. Ruth Awad praises the collection as “written with the urgency our present moment demands... These poems carry the truth like a torch. Let us not look away.” With formal dexterity and searing vision, We Had Mansions resists the flattening gaze of empire. Sahar Mustafah describes the collection as “a powerful quest for truth and understanding,” one that explores how we reconcile our inherited privilege with our complicity in systems of dispossession and how we endure in the aftermath of losing land, language, and lineage. Lisa Low adds, “Shunnarah’s expansive docupoetics navigates through and around expectations of what writing diaspora, especially Palestinian diaspora, should look like. We Had Mansions is a wise, irreverent, and groundbreaking poetry debut.”

Shunnarah does not shy away from the brutal realities of colonial violence or the personal costs of exile, but the work does not crumble under their weight either. Moments of joy, sensuality, humor, and domestic tenderness are interwoven with grief and rage. The collection never displays pain merely for recognition. Instead, it emphasizes the richness of Palestinian life, accommodating contradiction, dreaming, and fierce love. We Had Mansions is not only a brilliant literary achievement—it is a profoundly human book that will linger with readers long after the last page. This is not just a poetry collection; it is testimony. It is resistance. It is a love letter to a stolen homeland and to those who remain, endure, and remember.

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All proceeds from the sale of We Had Mansions will be donated to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund

Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer based in Columbus, Ohio. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. They won the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in 2024 from Belt Publishing. Read more at Mandy's website and follow them on Instagram at @offthebeatenshelf.

Meet Mandy’s “first readers” Tiny, Captain, Sassy, Page, and Pepita:

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All is the Telling is a remarkable collection of poems that navigates the space between historical reflection and present realities. It offers an insightful exploration of the complexities of selfhood, particularly within the context of systemic oppression and generational trauma. The collection weaves together the personal and the political, revealing the profound ways that identity is shaped and reshaped by history and lived experience.

The poet’s voice oscillates between tenderness and ferocity, creating a space where pain is articulated and resisted through naming and storytelling. This tension between vulnerability and resistance contains much of the collection’s emotional power. The title, All is the Telling, serves as both a mantra and a method—these poems are telling in every sense: recounting, revealing, and reclaiming.

One of the collection’s most compelling features is its use of vivid imagery to ground emotional and political truths. The poems transport readers to the swamps of Georgia, the trailers of Florida, and the shadowed halls of schools and homes. These settings are not mere backdrops but extensions of the body and identity, echoing the speaker’s history and the broader socio-political landscape. The recurring motif of survival as "plural" in poems like Survival is Plural and No Black People in the Trailer Park Except My Dad underscores a collective endurance, where personal memory and generational trauma are intertwined, suggesting that survival is inherited and shared.

All Is The Telling explores the intersections of race and gender, particularly how these identities shape experiences of family, love, and loss. The collection challenges readers to consider how identity and survival are articulated in a world that continuously undermines both. The poems are deeply personal yet profoundly political, never veering into didacticism. The poet skillfully navigates the intimate lyric and the sweeping historical narrative, ensuring readers feel the weight of each moment, each memory, and each body the poems encounter. This book stands as a testament to how poetry can serve as a site of healing, resistance, and survival, leaving readers with a renewed understanding of the power of storytelling.

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Two poems from All Is The Telling:

NO BLACK PEOPLE IN THE TRAILER PARK EXCEPT MY DAD OR YOU CAN’T RECOGNIZE WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

Everything
about the kinked-up
linked up
coil of girls
banging around
my insides—
that string
of black/brown
yellow/white
paper dolls
hot combed
braided
and sharp
as the fugitive
tack lost
between tracks
of torn carpet
doubled down
on the floor
of the trailer
I grew up in—
everything
about those girls
gone, till Ceily
and Sula
and Sethe
carved a path
to the inside place
past blood
past heart
past past
to the place
of planting
where all
my past selves
rise, lick wet
their palms
wipe the ash
from their knees
and speak.


STORMS, AN INHERITANCE


the sun/needs someone/to watch it
set/the waves/something to pummel
so/we stand/in the shallows/abide
the smeared sky/the way/our father
maple skinned and boiling/endured
the white maw/of his office
till he could/bear down/on his own
dear hearts/buffet us/and be
soothed/and the children/those
hammered hearts/we raced
the white sandtracks/of the
grove/plucked oranges
the size/of artificial hearts
watched for snake/and boar
growing taut/searching out
the too-much-to-take/it’s pull
locomotive/the call
of a hurricane/that echoing
roar/familiar/as the wrinkled/skin
of our storm-soaked/fingers
now/somewhere
between childhood/and old age
I am the gale/that sets
the moss-covered branches/to skittering
I have belonged/and been
free/and like the first/branch
broken/against my back/it is
still only/wince or dance

Praise:

All is the Telling is relentless in its pursuit of beauty amid “what’s bone-deep and brutal.” Rosa Castellano writes with just the right balance of tenderness and precision as she carves her way through memories shaped by this nation’s founding violences. A luminous debut collection, abundant with quiet possibility.

Frannie Choi, author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

In the opening poem of Rosa Castellano’s debut collection, All is the Telling, we hear, “& a person you know will say: / children are resilient / and that’s true. I survived / what I survived.” Resilience is separate from survival, yet they are braided into the hair of “A Girl the Color of Sunshine on Water, the Color of a House on Fire, the Color of Drowning,” as she lays bare the messy truths of Black existence in liminal spaces. Castellano writes of the sweetness within the struggle, “the slow art / of a bee bending into a blossom.” True resilience is the result of healing. Castellano’s poems remind us of the possibility and power within.

Rage Hezekiah, author of Yearn

Rosa Castellano’s All Is the Telling is a raw song of ache. Evoking childhood and collective memory with a razor-sharp pen, Castellano creates a music on the page that gestures towards the act of empathy for the self as an act of empathy for the world: a largeness of heart that wants to take in our shared histories and simultaneously be forgiven its too-fierce embrace. We can’t escape the past, but—with an ear tuned expertly toward forgiveness and kinship—Castellano’s poems can teach us to live in the unfolding promise of the present.

Keetje Kuipers, author of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

The unsparing poems in Rosa Castellano’s All Is the Telling move like “the whisper of wings/ as they widen/ and wear/ imperceptibly down/ to the sea,” which is to say they manifest true presence. These poems abide, never leaving our side, in spite of the inhumanity they invite us to bear witness to. And to bear. For all our sake.

Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete

Rosa Castellano’s All is the Telling is a collection in which both historical and contemporary understandings of Black female subjectivity are two waves colliding. As a result, we see a portrait of Black girlhood that acknowledges the deep, historical knowing that young Black girls often carry, their early realizations about the world’s true nature, and how love and violence are inseparable. These astute Black girls become Black women who tell this world’s story as they truly are, who come bearing all of the news, good or bad. Only in their hands, and in Castellano’s, do I trust that the mirror held up to me will be spotless—I see America and its history, which means that I see myself and all of my ancestors before me.

Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

GET ALL IS THE TELLING

Rosa Castellano, originally from Tampa, FL, is a poet and teacher living in Richmond, VA. A finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and co-founder of the RVA Poetry Fest. Her work can be found or is forthcoming from RHINO Poetry, Diode, Passages North, Nimrod, The Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest among others. All Is The Telling is her first collection of poetry.

If you’re at AWP you can hear Rosa and other amazing Diode authors read here:

And if you’re in Richmond, VA, you can join the launch party for All Is The Telling:

Eighteen years later, we have kept those promises, and it feels important now more than ever to mark this milestone.

Editing a journal for nearly two decades is a particular kind of devotion. It is a labor of love, yes, but also an act of persistence and faith. The work of curation often comes at the expense of one’s writing. Still, this trade, words for words, solitude for community, is one that editors make willingly and joyfully because editing is also writing in another way. The reward of helping a poem find its audience, knowing it has reached those who need it, who feel its current in their bones, is the reward that sustains.

The world in which diode began is not the world we find ourselves in now. What is the role of poetry when everything is burning? When so much of the world is unmade by genocide, by colonialism, by environmental catastrophe, by deepening and vicious inequalities? Maybe poetry is not about resolution. Perhaps it is not about fixing or mending. Maybe it is simply about presence, bearing witness, making space for grief, rage, hope, and joy to exist side by side. Audre Lorde reminds us that “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” This is the work of poetry, to articulate what is otherwise left unsaid, to bring into focus the injustices and the joys, the rage and the tenderness, that shape our existence. Poetry is both the question and the answer, exposing wounds and offering balms. It gives us a way to grieve, resist, become. Perhaps the most powerful thing poets and poetry can do now is not look away.

Looking back on eighteen years of diode, I am grateful to the poets who entrusted us with their work and the readers who return to these pages. Thank you. A million times. Thank you. As we step into our next chapter, we remain committed to the principle that has shaped us from the beginning: the unwavering belief that poetry is absolutely and utterly necessary.

DIODE 18.1

Diode Poetry Journal's Issue 18.1 continues the tradition of showcasing innovative and compelling poetry. This issue exemplifies the journal's commitment to amplifying diverse voices that challenge and inspire. The selection of poets and their works highlights the depth and range of contemporary poetry, offering readers fresh perspectives and profound insights. Issue 18.1 is a testament to the enduring power of poetry in today's world.

As we mark the milestone of Issue 18.1, we reflect on our first issue, a time capsule of our beginning. Here is diode 1.1

DIODE 1.1

All the poems in diode 1.1 are powerful, each charged with urgency, lyricism, and depth. But two in particular call to me for their ability to inhabit both the intimate and the expansive, rendering loss, desire, and survival in profoundly personal and universally resonant ways. These poems unfold like maps of revelation and transformation, where every line hums with an electricity that has not faded with time.

ALLISON TITUS & ROB SCHLEGEL

“Orphanage keeper, handmade, suitcase bearing part of the sea”

Orphanage keeper, handmade, suitcase bearing part of the sea,
in which mirror are you least reflected; whose boots
have you tossed away? Take this shovel
to the far shore, and forge a campsite
in the darkened harbor, low tide
restless with fog, and the horse you borrowed
might steal the black fruit from your bags
as you bend to warm your hands over the fire.
Can’t blame him. Poor guest
to your desolate margin. When night arranges
its small breathing distance,
what is left on the bones
you boil to broth. Posy:
a fistful of salt. You’ve left
the animal to carry its own damp sleep
from the kindling and still she catches fire,
but no one is there to say
spectre come; no one is there to put the fire out.

This haunting, evocative poem is layered with loss, survival, and the weight of absence. It moves through a dreamlike, almost mythic landscape, a shore, a fog-laden harbor, the presence of a horse, fire, and the spectral quiet of a world that feels abandoned or untethered. The orphanage keeper seems to be both a traveler and a ghost, tending to a desolate space, making sustenance from bones and salt, a meal that speaks of scarcity and endurance.

This poem creates an entire universe with just a few striking images. It is rich with allegory about exile, displacement, and the quiet persistence of survival in a world that offers little refuge. The language is precise yet mysterious, allowing the reader to enter and feel the damp air, the restless tide, and the quiet hunger of humans and beasts. It lingers, unfolding new meanings with every read, like a memory surfacing from the depths of the sea.

CHRIS ABANI

There Are No Names for Red
Based on paintings by Percival Everett

I
The way desire is a body eroding
into a pile of salt marked by a crown of birds:
and black. This fall is not rain, grain too subtle
for that dissolution. A constellation wrapped
in a stitch spreading like sand charting
thread across time a tender weave
and hope. This is resurrection.

II
And the sky is red
And the moon
And light is this rain.

This is all the terror we can bear:

the moment between flame
and where shadow begins
but only so much as can be cupped
in a child’s palm

and yet to say: the loved one
has slipped to ghost.

III
What attempts survival here has no words
but hunger. A white backcloth that devours
the blackening. Then red cut in lines thick
as paste and obscuring the once figurative.
This desire wears cerements of yellow and sun.
And at the edge of this world, a box of wood
and canvas; light and light and light.

IV
Everything here can so easily turn to mud
and the recalcitrance of dead leaves and bugs.
There is hair here too. Not so much brown and animal
as rough; I speak now of sorrow, of weight
beyond measure. There is a drowned woman
in the dark swirl. This paint, buoyant and light, eddies.

V
Whatever guilt drives this brush is nocturnal and heavy
with the smell of the cramped darkness under the stairs.
But night will not be blamed. What good are words
when the green light over the ocean is all we need?

VI
What passes for night here has more to do with the place
where the body is flayed open to sorrow and wonder.
The boy on the bridge drops a feather into a lost river.
A rusting lawn dreams of grass rude and fescue.
A match held down to tobacco still burns with an upward flame.
There is no truth here.
Dutifully the mist comes down the mountain. What else can I tell you?

“ There Are No Names for Red, “ is a stunning meditation on desire, loss, survival, and the shifting nature of perception. Deeply entwined with Percival Everett’s paintings, it stands powerfully as its layered, painterly exploration of language and meaning, moving like a series of brushstrokes. Each section adds texture and depth, creating an emotional crescendo that resists resolution.

The poem evokes something primal and unspeakable. It acknowledges the limits of articulation while insisting on expression through juxtaposing light and shadow, matter and meaning. Its final question—What more can I tell you?—leaves the reader suspended, as if gazing at an elusive canvas. It is a masterful exploration of the charged space between presence and absence.

Thank you again, dear reader. Your love for poetry, your engagement with the voices we publish, and your presence in the diode community mean everything. Each poem we share is a spark, a pulse, a way of reaching across time and space. You, as readers, complete that connection. Your support, careful attention, and time keep diode alive.

DIODE 18.1

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We’re immensely excited to present Hindsight, the debut chapbook by Mack Rogers. Hindsight stuns with raw lyricism, fearless introspection, and a deft blend of personal and cultural history. At its core, the collection interrogates Blackness, queerness, memory, and inheritance through an intimate yet expansive lens. Rogers writes with a poet’s precision and a storyteller’s rhythm, crafting work that oscillates between moments of tenderness, rage, humor, and revelation. Rogers grew up with Visual Snow Syndrome, a neurological disorder that makes them perceive a constant static-like field of black dots. This literal distortion of sight became a metaphor for their experiences of race, identity, and historical erasure. From the haunting presence of Visual Snow Syndrome to the layered complexities of familial love, identity, and belonging, Hindsight is as unflinching as it is profoundly human. Rogers creates a world where the glow of a computer screen, sifting through a mother’s scrapbook, or remembering a slur scrawled on a dorm door becomes infused with poetic weight and historical resonance. These poems exist between memory and myth, and between what is seen and felt. Rogers’ work merges formal innovation with sonic play, wielding language as both a weapon and a balm.

GET HINDSIGHT!

Interview:

We had the opportunity to interview Mack, which deepened our admiration for this collection. Please enjoy our interview, in which we dive deeper into Mack’s process, inspirations, and the Spotify playlist that shaped the book. And we meet Mack’s cats!

Diode: The title Hindsight suggests reflection, clarity, and the weight of looking back. How did you settle on this title, and in what ways do you see hindsight as both a gift and a complication in your work?

Mack: Well, it’s a collection of poems mostly concerning my past but also, more indirectly, about my literal vision. So the title was right there, so to speak! But I think mostly of hindsight as a gift in my work. The past doesn’t define us but learning from it helps us to grow. In writing about traumas and major events from my past, I can slowly feel wounds start to close. One poem in particular, “I hope this message finds you well,” really helped me close the door on a dark chapter of my life. Conversely, hindsight is a complicated practice because it often feels like I’m picking at the wound rather than allowing it to heal on its own.

Diode: Your collection combines personal experiences, historical narratives, and cultural commentary. How did you balance the intimate with the universal, and was there a particular balance you were aiming for?

Mack: Writing, to me, is about being in conversation with readers and other writers. People who maybe are total strangers to me. Just like in any conversation, if you’re only talking about yourself—things people may not be able to relate to—how can you expect them to listen? Or to want to share any part of themselves? I want to share parts of myself, but I also want to keep the conversation equal parts me and equal parts reader. Where my experiences fall within the broader experience of people like me is always on my mind so that I can form that connection and have a lil’ chat.

Diode: The poems in Hindsight often experiment with form through fragmented structures, cascading lines, or rhythmic repetition. How do you approach form as a poet, and how do you see it serving the themes of your work?

Mack: Experimental form, to me, is essentially the same as shifting perspectives. I’d maybe go as far to say that it’s a display of empathy or a way of injecting more emotion into the poem. As an empath, I use poetry, both reading and writing, as a way of communicating. When I’m reading a poetry book and stumble upon a poem with an interesting form, I know the writer is trying to get my attention and I am listening. They could simply write it out in a more traditional way, but they very intentionally chose to deliver this information to me in this particular way. But, of course, form also affords us the ability to control how the poem is read. The first poem of the book is a great example of both these ideas. When people refer to a work as being in conversation with a larger body of ideas, I think of it more literally as a conversation. So I suppose the form serves this book specifically to help the reader see things the way I do.

Diode: Was there a particular poem in Hindsight that came to you fully formed or one that resisted you the most during the writing process? What did that struggle or ease teach you?

Mack: “On an early morning flight, I saw a shadow that reached into space” came to me fully formed while I was flying back home from a trip to New Orleans. It taught me to always be ready to receive inspiration—and to be patient. I think I tried to write that poem a few times during the trip, and it just wasn’t happening. But then I got on the plane and looked out the window and found my poem.

Diode: Your use of language is precise and layered and often carries multiple meanings at once. How do you refine your drafts? Do you edit as you write or allow the rawness to sit before shaping it into its final form?

Mack: It’s typically a sit-it-and-forget-it situation. Come back in however many days or weeks with fresh eyes and polish it. But I’m also very fortunate to have a group of writer friends—we meet periodically to give feedback on each other’s work. That’s usually where I get a lot of my direction in the editing process. But really, a lot of my poems begin in the shower, in my waterproof notepad. I write them there, literally forget about them, and then fix ‘em up. I’d love to say that happens every single time, but a lot of those poems never really go anywhere. I’ve tried the edit-as-I-write approach before and it just isn’t for me.

Diode: Your poem "Visual Snow Syndrome" weaves a powerful connection between the neurological disorder and historical, racial, and personal visibility. How did you arrive at this metaphor, and did writing about it shape your understanding of either your identity or the condition itself?

Mack: “Visual Snow Syndrome” is the one that really got me back into writing poetry. When I was a kid, before there was even language to describe the weird visual phenomenon I had going on, I thought I was eventually going to become blind. I was always playing video games so I got in my head that the pixels were getting stuck in my eyes. And when I’d look at the sky, I’d think of them as stars. Plus, the dots I see in my field of vision have always been black. So the metaphor was just right there, honestly. Writing the poem brought me to a sort of acceptance. When it’s dark, the static sometimes manifests into hallucinations, and connecting that idea to my identity absolutely gave me a new perspective on the disorder and myself.

Diode: Throughout Hindsight, there is a beautiful tension between memory and the act of looking forward—whether in the context of identity, lineage, or even the physics of sight. If hindsight is both a gift and a burden, what do you hope readers will take away from your engagement with the past?

Mack: While I think of hindsight as more of a gift, I certainly see ruminating on the past, perhaps too much, as a burden as well. I have a habit of dwelling on my mistakes and that often makes me feel as though I’m unable to move forward. The feeling I hope readers take away from the collection is a simple, albeit cliché, one: learn from the past but keep moving forward.

Check out the Hindsight playlist!

And as promised! Mack’s Cats!

Get Hindsight!

Now Available—A Hybrid Double Feature Of Poetry And Creative Non-Fiction Prose by Shanta Lee

In this double feature of a hybrid work of poetry and creative non-fiction prose, readers experience a relentless contemplation through a woven tapestry of human connections, estrangements, and the complex, often painful dynamics that bind us. What is the exchange rate for human closeness? Within one part of the collection, Close Is... holds a direct and unflinching mirror to humanity, forcing the question: Is human connection worth the emotional, psychical, and spiritual exchange rate? Who and what should be considered our own if our own, the human species, causes inevitable beauty and pain within our attempts to create, breach, sever, and explore the range of human relationships. And does the answer lie in expanding our horizon beyond what we consider as...human. Hopscotch Between the Living and the Dead descends into the depths of a family narrative through vivid imagery and scenes that encapsulate us within linguistic hopscotch as it unzips. A childhood game that instructs players to move forwards and backward within a chalk-drawn board on concrete, Hopscotch takes readers through a labyrinthian path of family secrets, the living and the dead, and a reckoning with surfacing the unseen of memory through vivid fragments across time.

This double volume adventures through the liminal spaces of being human while containing an abyss of yearning to close the gap between ourselves and others. At any cost.

ORDER

Bibliographic Information

32pp. (Close Is…), 36pp. (Hopscotch), tête-bêche hybrid collection, paperback

Publication Date: November 12, 2024

Author: Shanta Lee

Location: Doha, Qatar & Richmond, VA

Distribution: Distributed by Diode Editions

Themes: Human Relationships, Kinship, Affinity, Bonds, Family, Human Bonding, Relationship With Places, Hard And Uncomfortable Truths

From the Tête-bêche Hybrid Collection

...(the what if)¹⁰⁰⁰ / No

No I said, not brazen, not bold, not pride-just No speaking the bar stool’s steel through spine.
The stranger in shock at my answer as I asked my own question,

What if...

                What if getting too close to those like you is a liability?

HOPSCOTCH BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Our best moment was the prank call to the PBS phone-a-thon. We thought it would
be cool to watch their reaction as we made a phone call to tell them that we were
witnessing a house on fire across the street.

There was a fire, but the wrong house.
There was a fire. However, it’s the kind no one can put out.

PREORDER

About the Author

Shanta Lee is a writer across genres, a visual artist and a public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that is widely featured. Winner of the National Arts Strategies - New England Creative Community Fellowship and the Abel Meeropol Social Justice award, she was the creator and producer of Vermont Public’s “Seeing...the Unseen and In-Between within Vermont’s Landscape.” Shanta Lee is a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine and Art New England. Shanta Lee is also the author of the poetry collection GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Within this illustrated poetry collection, Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023) is a work that Shanta Lee describes as a 2,000+ year-old phone line opened to Ovid as well as an interrogation of the Greek mythos while creating her own new language in this work. Illustrated by Alan Blackwell, Black Metamorphoses has been named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson Prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and longlisted for the 2021 Idaho Poetry Prize. Her study guide, “Metamorphoses: “Erysichthon” by Ovid and “Erysichthon’s Seed”: Race, Class, Gender, and the Imperial Body”, explores her work in comparison with Ovid and Ted Hughes’s interpretation of Ovid. Shanta Lee’s latest work, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It...The Slaughter: A Field Guide for the Hunted & the Hunter, The Dead-Alive, The Live-Dead Ones, The... (Harbor Editions, 2024) is in direct communication with the ancient mythology of the wild hunt — Wilde Jagd , Wild Hunt or Chase in German — in which supernatural/ghost riders are pursuing a target. With poetic and prosaic elements infused with some parts field guide, some parts instruction and notes of the cautionary, this work poses big questions that erode the boundary between ourselves within our human skin suits and the natural world. This Is How They Teach You How to Want It…The Slaughter also raises questions about what constitutes prey and predator. How does identity — as animal or as human, within skin inheritance, within human intimacy, as gendered bodies, as predator or as prey — determine how and why we participate in the wild hunt? What happens when the hunter and the hunted change places? And is the most dangerous and lethal kind of slaughter in fact bloodless? 

Shanta Lee is the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts and 2020 gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Humanities Council’s board of directors. As a visual artist, Shanta Lee’s multimedia exhibitions have included Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine – a work that includes her short film, interviews, and photography, and items from the museum's permanent collection – has been on view at the Bennington Museum, the Fleming Museum of Art, and the Southern Vermont Arts Center. Shanta Lee has an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford, and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. To learn more about her work, visit: Shantalee.com.

We are thrilled to introduce you to the incredible voices joining our press as winners of the Diode Editions 2024 Book and Chapbook Contests! We look forward to sharing new poetry from five new Diode authors in 2025: Rosa Castellano, Hind Shoufani, Mandy Shunnarah, Samaa Abdurraqib and Mack Rogers. Thank you for being a vital part of our literary community and sharing the joy of reading and creating together.

Best regards,

The Diode Team

Rosa Castellano

All Is The Telling (2025)

Originally from Tampa, Fl, Rosa Castellano is a poet and teacher living in Richmond, VA. A finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and co-founder of the RVA Poetry Fest, her work can be found or is forth coming from RHINO Poetry, Diode, Passages North, Nimrod, The Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest among others.

Hind Shoufani

Dark Star Requiem In The Key Of Nova (2025)

Hind Shoufani is an Oscar-nominated/BAFTA-winning Palestinian American filmmaker, writer, & poet who grew up all over the Arab world, & now calls Brooklyn home. She's a New York University filmmaking MFA, Fulbright scholarship awardee, & the recipient of an International Writing Program residency with the University of Iowa. Hind is the editor of two anthologies of literary essays, poetry, & photography, Nowhere Near A Damn Rainbow (xanadu*, 2012, Lebanon) & Uncommon Dubai (Uncommon, ltd., 2014). Her writing is published or forthcoming in the anthologies Heaven Looks Like Us (Haymarket Books, 2025), We Call to the Eye & the Night (Persea Books, 2023), Arab Women Voice New Realities (Turning Point Press, 2017) & the Michigan Quarterly Review, Cordite, among others. She's the contributing editor of the political journal Discontent & has published creative essays, prose & poetry in international journals, magazines & anthologies. Hind worked as a director, producer & editor of documentaries for over 25 years globally. She's also curated & hosted poetry/spoken word communal events for over 15 years & is currently attempting a Coming-Of-Middle-Age hybrid-genre lust & politics memoir, her second feature film, & some semblance of purpose & meaning in the zeitgeist.

Mandy Shunnarah

We Had Mansions: Poems (2025)

Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer who calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. They are the winner of the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in July 2024 from Belt Publishing, and their second book, a poetry collection titled We Had Mansions, is forthcoming from Diode Editions in 2025. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.

Samaa Abdurraqib

Towards A Retreat (2025)

Samaa Abdurraqib, PhD, lives, writes, and loves in Wabanaki Territory. She is the editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast (2023). Her poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, Obsidian, Big Wing Review, and in the edited collection Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (2022). Samaa is a certified Maine Master Naturalist. She is always listening for birdsong.

Mack Rogers

Hindsight (2025)

Mack Rogers is a queer Black writer whose work appears in Foglifter, Glass, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Mack is a poetry reader for Split Lip Magazine, staff critic for Pencilhouse, and poetry editor for Zero Readers Magazine. He has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. He lives with his partner and their three cats in Raleigh, NC.

A Hybrid Double Feature by Shanta Lee Forthcoming November 2024

In this double feature of a hybrid work of poetry and creative non-fiction prose, readers experience a relentless contemplation through a woven tapestry of human connections, estrangements, and the complex, often painful dynamics that bind us. What is the exchange rate for human closeness? Within one part of the collection, Close Is... holds a direct and unflinching mirror to humanity, forcing the question: Is human connection worth the emotional, psychical, and spiritual exchange rate? Who and what should be considered our own if our own, the human species, causes inevitable beauty and pain within our attempts to create, breach, sever, and explore the range of human relationships. And does the answer lie in expanding our horizon beyond what we consider as...human. Hopscotch Between the Living and the Dead descends into the depths of a family narrative through vivid imagery and scenes that encapsulate us within linguistic hopscotch as it unzips. A childhood game that instructs players to move forwards and backward within a chalk-drawn board on concrete, Hopscotch takes readers through a labyrinthian path of family secrets, the living and the dead, and a reckoning with surfacing the unseen of memory through vivid fragments across time.

This double volume adventures through the liminal spaces of being human while containing an abyss of yearning to close the gap between ourselves and others. At any cost.

PREORDER

Bibliographic Information

32pp. (Close Is…), 36pp. (Hopscotch), tête-bêche hybrid collection, paperback

Publication Date: November 2024

Author: Shanta Lee

Location: Doha, Qatar & Richmond, VA

Distribution: Distributed by Diode Editions

Themes: Human Relationships, Kinship, Affinity, Bonds, Family, Human Bonding, Relationship With Places, Hard And Uncomfortable Truths

From the Tête-bêche Hybrid Collection

...(the what if)¹⁰⁰⁰ / No

No I said, not brazen, not bold, not pride-just No speaking the bar stool’s steel through spine.
The stranger in shock at my answer as I asked my own question,

What if...

                What if getting too close to those like you is liability?

HOPSCOTCH BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Our best moment was the prank call to the PBS phone-a-thon. We thought it would
be cool to watch their reaction as we made a phone call to tell them that we were
witnessing a house on fire across the street.

There was a fire, but the wrong house.
There was a fire. However, it’s the kind no one can put out.

PREORDER

About the Author

Shanta Lee is a writer across genres, a visual artist and a public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that is widely featured. Winner of the National Arts Strategies - New England Creative Community Fellowship and the Abel Meeropol Social Justice award, she was the creator and producer of Vermont Public’s “Seeing...the Unseen and In-Between within Vermont’s Landscape.” Shanta Lee is a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine and Art New England. Shanta Lee is also the author of the poetry collection GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Within this illustrated poetry collection, Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023) is a work that Shanta Lee describes as a 2,000+ year-old phone line opened to Ovid as well as an interrogation of the Greek mythos while creating her own new language in this work. Illustrated by Alan Blackwell, Black Metamorphoses has been named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson Prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and longlisted for the 2021 Idaho Poetry Prize. Her study guide, “Metamorphoses: “Erysichthon” by Ovid and “Erysichthon’s Seed”: Race, Class, Gender, and the Imperial Body”, explores her work in comparison with Ovid and Ted Hughes’s interpretation of Ovid. Shanta Lee’s latest work, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It...The Slaughter: A Field Guide for the Hunted & the Hunter, The Dead-Alive, The Live-Dead Ones, The... (Harbor Editions, 2024) is in direct communication with the ancient mythology of the wild hunt — Wilde Jagd , Wild Hunt or Chase in German — in which supernatural/ghost riders are pursuing a target. With poetic and prosaic elements infused with some parts field guide, some parts instruction and notes of the cautionary, this work poses big questions that erode the boundary between ourselves within our human skin suits and the natural world. This Is How They Teach You How to Want It…The Slaughter also raises questions about what constitutes prey and predator. How does identity — as animal or as human, within skin inheritance, within human intimacy, as gendered bodies, as predator or as prey — determine how and why we participate in the wild hunt? What happens when the hunter and the hunted change places? And is the most dangerous and lethal kind of slaughter in fact bloodless? 

Shanta Lee is the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts and 2020 gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Humanities Council’s board of directors. As a visual artist, Shanta Lee’s multimedia exhibitions have included Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine – a work that includes her short film, interviews, and photography, and items from the museum's permanent collection – has been on view at the Bennington Museum, the Fleming Museum of Art, and the Southern Vermont Arts Center. Shanta Lee has an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford, and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. To learn more about her work, visit: Shantalee.com.

We are grateful for your readership and for submitting your remarkable work to our annual publishing contests. The exceptional caliber of work submitted has led us to select multiple titles for publication in 2025. We’re pleased and proud to announce our book and chapbook contest winners and finalists.

Thank you for being a vital part of our literary community and sharing the joy of reading and creating together.

Best regards,

The Diode Team

2024 Book & Chapbook Contest Winners

Full-length Book Prize

All Is The Telling, Rosa Castellano

Tidying Up The House, Hind Shoufani

We Had Mansions: Poems, Mandy Shunnarah

Chapbook Prize

Towards A Retreat, Samaa Abdurraqib   

Hindsight, Mack Rogers

2024 Book & Chapbook Contest Finalists

Full-length Book Prize Finalists

Some Americans, Carolyn Guinzio 

PERISH / ABOLISH, Mia Kang   

Grappling, Eddie Kim

Bone Symphony, Michelle Phương Hồ

Direct and Unavoidable Consequences, Isaac Pickell

Artifacts, Heidi Seaborn 

Chrome Pig, Glenn Shaheen

Chapbook Prize Finalists

Redapples falling still, Sneha Subramanian Kanta     

John Wilkes Booth's Dream, David Kirby

Derecho Diary, Becca Klaver

Lessons on How to Become a Bee, Patrick Lawler  

Ceasefire Haiku, Faisal Mohyuddin

If I Call This Cave a Garden, Caroline New

What We've Become, darlene anita scott  

Catalog of Shadows, Jaz Sufi

New! From 2023 Book & Chapbook Contest Winners

The Diode 2024 Catalog

It is with great respect and admiration that we share new poetry from Trace DePass, Rewa Zeinati, Koss, Jason Koo and Shabnam Piryaei!

BOOTless → by Trace DePass

BOOTless →

Difficult by Rewa Zeinati

Difficult

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by KOSS

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect

No Rest by Jason Koo

No Rest

all children. by Shabnam Piryaei

all children.