Nicole Rollender Absence of Stars $7.00 dancing girl press In the 13 poems within Nicole Rollender's chapbook Absence of Stars (dancing girl press, 2015),“A hummingbird’s skeleton opens my hands / like a flower.” This chapbook is filled with flowers and bones, flight toward the light and falling down onto the ground, tiny and helpless. The beginning of the collection is inspired by the early birth of a tiny baby, a living life form that emerged from the womb too soon, a new

Sarah Marcus: To me, you embody a life of Literary Activism. In your blog post for The Poetry Foundation you wrote: "I realized it would be helpful for me to connect the dots in my own evolution in order to crystallize a personal concept of literary activism, but as importantly, to recognize my own limitations and inability to set the industry standard, so to speak, on what literary activism is. So I reached out to a number of activist writers and asked them to weigh in on wh