Sebastian Merrill will read from GHOST :: SEEDS with Jen Funk, author of Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy (Bull City Press, 2023) at Estragon Tapas Bar in Boston, MA.

Jennifer Funk’s debut collection, Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy, is a sensuous investigation of the failings and thrills of trying to sate the insatiable. With stark emotive dynamism, Funk examines how domestication contends with wildness and what it costs the savage self to be cared for. There is no ironic posturing, no shy equivocating: these poems are bold, and they know it—claim it, reveling in sonic density and confessional bravado. In this collection, ambivalence, in all its uneasy glory, is king. Funk gnaws down on a question not for its answer, no, but for the pleasure of the effort of trying to get at something like the truth about what it might cost to share your body, your love, or your life with another person. Connection does not come easy or free here.

Sebastian Merrill’s debut, GHOST :: SEEDS, incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a transmasculine speaker and a figure that he conceptualizes as his ghost, the girl-ghost of the self that he left behind to become the person he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from an underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave.