Are You Willing?, by Amy Marques & Sumitra Singam

Poetry, prose, chapbook, illustrated, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Amy and Sumitra both have professional experience working with clients or patients going through or working through traumatic experiences. In a small group, Amy shared an open invitation to collaborate with a writer who was interested in sharing unedited words as a source for an erasure/visual poem project. Sumitra responded to the invitation with courageous vulnerability. This collection is a response to our emailed conversation. Each image accompanies words that are reflections on the story told, creative modifications of the source email/text, and micro essays and poems in reflection on the theme. We invite you to eavesdrop on our exchange. Amy Marques has been known to call books friends and is on a first name basis with many fictional characters. She’s widely published with visual art, poetry, and prose published in many lovely journals and is the editor and visual artist for the Duets anthologies and author and artist of the found poetry book PARTS. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected for Best Microfictions 2024. She works as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist and runs workshops on how to write trauma safely. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). You can find her and her other publication credits on Bluesky: @pleomorphic2 and at sumitrasingam.squarespace.com