SWALLOW WHOLE (digital)

Dani Putney (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Their debut collection, “Salamat sa Intersectionality” (Okay Donkey Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. They’re also the author of the poetry chapbook “Dela Torre” (Sundress Publications, 2022). Their poetry appears in outlets such as Bennington Review, FOLIO, Grist, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Quarter After Eight, while their personal essays can be found in journals like Cold Mountain Review, Crab Creek Review, and Quarterly West. They received their MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women and live in the middle of the Nevada desert. More at @DaniPutney on Twitter and @daniputney1 on Instagram, or at www.daniputney.com.

"In a collection that reads simultaneously like apologia and manifesto, Dani Putney’s 'Swallow Whole' excavates the persona’s race, biculturalism, non-binary status, sex life, and so much more. The persona describes their tongue as multilingual and snake-like, their body a ‘mess,’ and through it all, we are exploring, not judging. Abuse lurks in each corner, but imagination snakes around until the persona inherits their mother and takes after Walt Whitman. Abuse lurks whether we’re at home or elsewhere: a bar named the Princess Theater, the Manila Hong Kong grocery store, the shower. But the love stories are imagined and reimagined until we are filled with wonder and pain, until the persona can see their own grave. As a bicultural child myself, I recognize home and these ghosts, such beauty as they are, yet sit agape at the liminal-made-empyrean. The writing in this collection undulates with the rhythm of sublime appetite, and Putney’s collection has mastered that space of 'destruction' and 'remaking.' If you are hungry or halved, Putney’s 'Swallow Whole' is vital reading. And even if you are just fine, the book welcomes you, beckons even, asking 'What language do you need me to be in?'”

— Nahal Suzanne Jamir, author of “In the Middle of Many Mountains”

"In these gorgeously structured essays, Putney takes an unflinching look at their lustful, fearful, courageous, angry, traumatized, joyful self, taking readers to the limits of what it means to love. Through a nearly magical turn of voice, Putney both restrains outsider readers, keeping them at a respectful distance, and invites all readers into a lived experience of the varied identities—queer, nonbinary, Filipinx, mixed-race, Western American cowboyesque—that combine into this dynamic, specific human portrait."

— Sarah Beth Childers, author of “Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family”