It’s no secret that one of the reasons I started a journal dedicated to exploring liminal space is that my own overarching poetic project consists in large part of exploring this space, a project that comes to the fore in my first collection of poems, Magdalene & the Mermaids, which is now available for purchase from Paper Kite Press. I conceived these poems at a time when liminality had come to the fore in my own life, as I was in the early stages of recovery from sexual assault.

They are, however, only obliquely confessional (indeed, pressed for a succinct description of my poetic style, I have called it experimental confessional). I imagined and interwove similar themes and stories among mermaids and the Biblical figure of the title. The liminality of mermaids is obvious: half-fish, half-woman, dwelling in the surfaces of the ocean because of their mammalian need to breathe. With Magdalene, it was less clear; popularizations of notions about her carrying the Holy bloodline have served to obscure rather than to illuminate her complexity and potential as a mythic figure, making her once again merely the handmaiden of men, even if it is done with a kinder edge than that used by the early Church fathers. I wanted to examine and construct her as herself, though the story I discovered-built was not as any would have wished it.