Surreal Confessional Anthology

The Surreal Confessional Anthology is a blending of the century-old surrealist and mid-century confessional form. The former was created and predominantly inhabited by white, males of privilege who sought to embody the language and rules of dreams and/or childhood. This means that their poems often had a playful quality and that the consequences and stakes of the poem were a bit more topsy than those of realism. The latter movement, the confessional, was chiefly inhabited by women often referred to as hysterical, melodramatic, and/or quaint by men resembling the founding members of surrealism. The blend of the two is an emerging literary movement, a space for marginalized bodies who inhabit the intersections to escape their own forms and embody the intersections of metaphor to better articulate their admissions—confessions, if you will—exasperations, and boundless joy. The surreal confessional is an often playful yet dark rumination on humanity by employing the inhuman, the animal, and the inanimate.