MAW APPEARS IN THE FOLLOWING FORMS explores matrilineal inheritance and loss in the context of the Filipinx-American diaspora. Its linked vignettes imagine multiple monstrous personas and histories for the narrator's mother, in language that is formally inventive and lush. The mother appears in forms including three quarreling sisters, a murderous karaoke singer, a cult supplicant, a holy Catholic relic, and more, inhabiting bodies and lives touched by legacies of colonialism, gender-based violence and racism along the imperial circuit connecting the United States and the Philippines. By turns mournful and mischievous, MAW APPEARS IN THE FOLLOWING FORMS experiments with speculative storytelling, queer myth-making, and decolonial horror to ask what it means to inhabit a body and lineage fractured by multiple intersecting histories of violence.

Kiley McLaughlin is a poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Heavy Feather Review, DIAGRAM, and in chapbooks from Patient Presses and horse less press. She has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop as well as UC Santa Cruz.