Poetry chapbook by Carmen Cornue & Donna Morton
Spleen is a poetry collective of desire founded by two queer women.
Carmen Cornue (she/her) resides in San Francisco and her work is deeply indebted to French poetry, international arthouse films and classic American cinema. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Apricity Press and other publications. She holds positions as a poetry reader with the Los Angeles Review and judge with NYC Midnight.
Donna Morton (she/they) writes poetry inspired by filmic landscapes, morbid literary cues, and the lifestyles of meandering flâneur and cloistered nun. Morton’s poetry has been published in The Shoutflower and Fauxmoir Lit Mag, among others. Donna writes under several pen names and also wrote a Mad Lib horror story based on experiences in spooky, swampy Pennsylvania.
Both poets have been featured in Southword: New International Writing, Mad Gleam Press and on the podcast Beyond the Screams. Forbidden Flowers was a finalist in Munster Literature Centre’s Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition in 2021 and Host Publications 2022 Chapbook Prize.
Find Carmen and Donna reading their poetry on Instagram, @spleen1857.
Find out more about Carmen at carmencornue.com.
check out our first print chapbook!
Poetry e-chapbook by Robby Auld
“I thought if I wanted to write I needed to risk,” says the speaker in the opening poem of Robby Auld’s chapbook, Belly. The poems that follow document the risks of coming and living out as queer and non-binary. The risks and the gifts. Community. Intimacy. These poems dive into “the belly the body” of memory, remembering, reflecting, remaking. Love, queer love, self-love, ever- evolving. Self-image and the poems as a space in which to embrace and reimagine gender and sex(uality). History, family, all we inherit and enact. The speakers of these poems reckon with the pasts in their presents, not forgetting but facing. The poems as paths forward. “I’m glad you survived,” the speakers say to their queer elders and, through these poems, themselves. And the reader. Reclaiming resilience as a radical act of queer surviving, or better: thriving.
ROBBY AULD currently lives and writes in Waltham, MA. Their poems have appeared in Corporeal, Ghost City R eview, and the lickety~split, among others. Find them on Instagram @robbyauld.
