For Girls Forged by Lightning

At the Intersection of Poetry and Prose I chose the subtitle for this book, Prose & Other Poems, because I wanted to immediately inform readers that these pieces are both prose poems and flash fictions/micro fictions. I first came across this phrase when I was introduced to Campbell McGrath s 1999 collection Road Atlas: Prose & Other Poems. It felt important to me that I suggest that these might not just be prose poems, that they could be something else, such as a piece that is simultaneously prose and poem. I was encouraged to explore the effects of fluidity and interchangeability from my inclusion in the 2016 anthology Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (The Marie Alexander Poetry Series /White Pine Press) in which the other contributors and I seamlessly and sequentially breach the boundaries between prose poetry,brief fictions, and hybrids. I want readers to be engaged in weighing their own preconceptions about what they believe a work of poetry or prose is; in this way they may discover literary forms, as Campbell McGrath says, possessed of a beauty all [their] own, ramshackle and unexpected.