Blooming Beyond the MFA: Emily J. Mundy’s What Blooms in the Dark

Seattle-based poet, teacher, and literary series curator Emily J. Mundy has recently published her debut book of poems, What Blooms in the Dark, with Moon Tide Press (October 2024). Mundy is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics program at UW Bothell.

Tracing the poet’s journey of release, return, and rebirth, this debut collection dives into the dark necessarily, as a precursive measure for arching back up toward the light. Poems that recount generational violence and addiction converse with others that conjure healing and illumination in the cycles of nature. What Blooms in the Dark, ultimately, is a work of spiritual transformation and the power of love.

Here’s what local authors are saying:

Emily Mundy’s debut collection of poems is every flower of a girl shedding petals into womanhood, every child hefting the inheritance of addiction, and every love that offers distraction, joy, or grace from the call a knife makes to the flesh. Mundy says, “Let me feed you all the years I’ve been gnawing on” and our mouths are full—language so delicious that we are happy to swallow the gristle of bitterness. An absented body described from inside the skin with honey-thick words weaves so sweetly together themes of abuse and abandonment, grief and death, addiction and dysphoria, that they become blood-chorus, bones singing.

– Amber Flame, author of Ordinary Cruelty and apocrifa

Emily Mundy’s book is sensual and singed, a spell of smoke and ocean. The body finds and loses track of itself, in the mother’s hand-me-downs, in a skeleton in the closet, in a “lace of organs.” “Estranged ecstasy” takes cover in the cleaved and split but through the attention of myriad eyes—eyes as moths, as gnarled hands, glassy eyes and an eye on a solo journey, an eye deemed insignificant, eyes full throttle, and flying eyes—ecstasy returns, “an electrical conduit unable to un-feel.”

– Melanie Noel, author of The Monarchs

Hers is redemptive work.

– Rebecca Brown, author of Not Heaven, Somewhere Else

For more information about Emily’s offerings—the Poetry Séance, upcoming events & classes, and to subscribe to her monthly newsletter—visit emilyjmundy.com.