#IndieLitMagGala 2025 Spotlight: ALOCASIA Journal
Alan Parry
October 13, 2025
There’s something rare and steady about a journal that knows exactly what it is—and makes no apologies for it. ALOCASIA is one
Eli Horan is a poet, mother, and small press publisher living in the wilds of Vermont. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks and collections, and the former Editor-In-Chief of Animal Heart Press. Elisabeth is passionate about discovering new voices and mentoring emerging poets. She is also a fierce advocate for those impacted by mental illness.
The Mask is an intimate, fearless conversation between two women across time, Elisabeth Horan and Frida Kahlo, united in pain, defiance, and raw artistic power. These poems don’t just reference Kahlo’s paintings, they bleed with them, fight with them, fuck with them. Horan inhabits Frida’s voice while laying bare her own: her body, her losses, her fury, her hunger for love and justice. This is no polite homage. It’s a radical, erotic, and emotional reckoning, one that makes space for queer desire, maternal grief, and revolutionary tenderness. For readers drawn to feminist fire, ekphrastic poetry, or the sacred profane, this is essential reading.
“Each time we dance; / intertwine; chalice to chalice / once touching; we are divine.”
— Para Dolores
‘In The Mask, Horan doesn’t just write Kahlo, she wears her many faces, sings through her lips. The tensions of this extraordinary life; dualities of place, culture, identity, desire, sex, death, and selfhood, zing elastic on the page. Horan uses language like a dancer uses muscle – from the belly-flutter of a lover, to the vicious stamp of a heel in bright red shoes. There are two women alive, alive in these pages, and both offer the reader their hand, snatch it away, then offer it again. To agree to this dance is to step into the blistering, conflicting, baffling, beautiful fire of living inside one’s art, and heart, beyond any boundaries imposed by society or self. ‘Explode, destroy, take me when you will’. Oh, do, even if it may just burn you to ashes. “He did not follow the rules — / Neither have I / And for this – we succumb.”‘
– Ankh Spice, IceFloe Press, Barren Magazine
There’s something rare and steady about a journal that knows exactly what it is—and makes no apologies for it. ALOCASIA is one
Founded in 2015 and still standing strong a decade later, Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine isn’t trying to be edgy, obscure,
In a lit world still groaning under the weight of gatekeepers, binary boxes, and pay-to-play submission models, new words {press} is a
The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.