Winner of the 2019 Frost Place Chapbook Competition
selected by Eduardo C. Corral

An ode for (un)intentionally-hunted, antlered doe. Elegies voiced by a woman with eight eyes and web glands. The last confessions of a bound witch, waiting for the torch to drop. In Cassandra J. Bruner’s The Wishbone Dress, these personas and others careen into, and cycle around, another larger narrative: a young femme’s transition and her splintered path through wildernesses, both exterior and interior. Bruner’s debut chapbook navigates the slippery terrain of gender, faith, illness, law, and loss, serving both an invitation and a declaration that, when reimagined, “the body learns its shape.”

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Cassandra J. Bruner earned her MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University where she served as Managing Editor of Willow Springs Books. Finalist for Black Warrior Review‘s 2018 Nonfiction Contest, their poems and essays have appeared, or are upcoming in The Adroit JournalBlack Warrior ReviewCrazyhorseMuzzleNew England ReviewNinth Letter, and Pleiades among others.


UPCOMING EVENTS for Cassandra J. Bruner and The Wishbone Dress

09 February 2020: Bloomington, The Bishop Bar, 8pm, details: 
https://www.facebook.com/events/476746299678088/

13 February 2020: Madison, A Room Of One’s Own Bookstore, 6pm, details: https://www.facebook.com/events/508269240122630/

22 February 2020: Raleigh, North Carolina Book Festival, Neptunes Parlour, 12pm, details: https://ncbookfestival.com/2020/01/14/2020-nc-book-festival-day-by-day/

22 February 2020: Hillsborough, House Party Reading Series, 8pm, details: 
https://bullcitypress.com/reading-series/upcoming-readings/