Koss Works
Writing | Poetry | Art
I’m honored to have a strange, mystical synesthetic poem, “Hue Sung,” in the latest issue of Red Ogre Review. There’s an eclectic mix of work in this issue, including art, prose poems, and poems. This piece will also be in their fall anthology. The acceptance came fast and the piece was up quickly. I love editors who are so professional and efficient. Looking forward to what Red Ogre does in the future.
Happy to be included in this release of Anvil Tongue, a website and book publisher run by Daniel Ryan. An Emily Dickinson erasure on hope, a written poem, and some visual word art based on Wuthering Heights are included. The work is in my manuscript about the suicide of a person dear to me. Some of it is erasure, some of it Art Brut. It defies categorization. See the page here and be sure to check out the whole issues. Also see more images/erasures from this series in Up the Staircase Quarterly (also published this year).
I am happy to get two poems in Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian poetry journal that has existed for decades. This issue was mostly dedicated to disabled writers and curated, but two of my poems were picked up by the editor. One is about my great-great-grandmother who died in Eloise, an asylum in Wayne County. Her life was a mystery, and I didn’t have a lot to piece together. I have a photo of her with a four-digit number which I believe is the number on her gravestone. Around 7000 residents were buried there with simple markers (only numbers). Some of the poem is historical, and some of it’s conjecture. I will post the text soon.
The other poem was written in a Statue of Liberty writing workshop held by The Jewish Historical Society in NY and taught by Lynn Melnick. Lynn read a poem Emma Lazarus’s (writer of inscription on the Statue of LIberty), which was clearly a love poem to a woman. I imagined an “outing” with Emma which appears below.
Many more publications coming this summer, so stay tuned.
I’m so honored to have another poem published on Bending Genres. This one is about the Brady Bunch, and, oh, how the grass can be greener. I wrote this when I was 25. It was rejected plenty, but I recently sent it out and got lucky. Also, see my page about Toby and Lady, a Zuihitsu piece, and “Not on the Railroad Tracks.” They published another poem last year about grief and clothes. I’m so fortunate to have had my work embraced by the wonderful Bending Genres community. Writing, submitting, and getting rejected continually can be wearing and even demoralizing, so I am so very grateful for the handful of journals (including Bending Genres) who have supported my work, and, at times, me during COVID and all of the other difficult circumstances I have survived in recent years.
Dinner at the Brady’s, a poem by Koss in Bending Genres
Very happy to have two experimental pieces in scissors & spackle, a sort of experimental/punk literary journal. “Love Song for a Friend” is a grief list poem and “gratitudes” is also lists that became something readworthy (hopefully). The friend in “Love Song” is Kim who left the world too soon. I also wrote about her in the piece, “Kim,” published in Cincinnati Review, which eventually made it to The Best Small Fictions 2020 anthology. I’m glad to have immortalized her a bit on this plane. The circumstances of her death were never made clear. It may have been suicide. No funeral. No ritual. But writing.
