Angel T. Dionne is a surrealist writer and professor at the University of Moncton’s Edmundston Campus. She obtained her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Pretoria in 2021. She is the author of Garden-Body (Radiant Press, forthcoming) and Bird Ornaments (Broken Tribe Press, 2025). She takes her coffee black and her fish tinned. Her website is here.
About Garden-Body, by Angel T. Dionne
Lev’s Body grows only tangled weeds. His mother is part flora, part fauna; and his father is a bowl of ash. Through surrealist fragments of prose poetry, Garden-Body traces the invasive rhizomes of Lev’s life.
Below, you can read two excerpts from the book.
From Garden-Body
Birth
Lev is born without lips; a canvas of flesh stretches from cheek to cheek. A clean slate, his mother calls it, bird-pecking the place where his mouth should be. The doctors cut a thin line using a utility knife and expose rows of teeth already grown in, shimmering, adularescent moonstones.
They slash him a bloodied smile and saddle-stitch the corners into an upturned crescent, so that even his cries look like laughter.
A Collection of Eights
It’s worth mentioning now that Lev’s brother never really grew older than the age of eight. Benny slowly became his younger brother, then. He must have hatched from an eggplant, their mother says, whenever Benny spills his drink, or gets off his leash and bites a pedestrian, or births a small animal in the bathroom. She spikes her stinging-nettle tongue against him but always scoops the stillbirth from the toilet with her hands, pickles it, and writes Benny’s age on the jar in red marker. The naked deadborn rest in their salted brine, curling into themselves; swollen and decayed.
Every shelf in the house is crowded with dead things, all of them labeled with the number eight.
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