I am teaching a poetry workshop right here in my home neighborhood, Jamaica Plain. We’ll be at the JP library for 6 Saturdays, from 2-3:30pm. The first class is on September 7, 2019! Continue reading “Free Workshop”
Split Map is here
I can see forsythia bushes — bright yellow branches waving to me in the wind — and tulips and so many squirrels. They are trying to tell me that a real spring is imminent and sunshine will follow and oh they want me to mention… Continue reading “Split Map is here”
Take it to 43
this reindeer has a complex backstory and loves you.
Hello hello,
I have been out of the loop or rather too much in it to think about communicating via my lovely little letters. Here’s the thing, I’m 43 now. Usually I do birthday resolutions and I haven’t in a long while but I thought maybe today I would just word vomit some out. But then, sitting here, I came to realize that for the first time I am not really aching and not really wanting to make profound announcements of what I should do.
A burden of sleeplessness
In which I can’t stop dreaming
Dear Dears,
I asked Patrick last night when I would stop dreaming of moving and packing. Maybe when we buy our first home? And he said, Most likely not. Which while disappointing, I realized was most likely the truth. My feelings of rootlessness and abandonment have nothing to do with where I am currently living. It’s a constant theme of my life: trying to make a presence for my body and for my beliefs.
It is fitting that my poems right now are about place and dreams and not leaving places when I was totally uncomfortable because I wanted to be nice. Continue reading “A burden of sleeplessness”
Beat the heat, heat the beat
I hope that this August heat is finding you well. Patrick turned to me the other night when I was complaining about the heat and said, “You know, it’s only going to get hotter.” And it’s true. In that moment, I thought about our kids struggling to find water and felt so helpless.
In the new issue of Dialogist
Thanks to the editors for publishing my poem, Out of the Chamber, in the newest issue of Dialogist. In this post, I wanted to write about why this poem came to be.
Bullets in your soup, cracking teeth. Bullets littered
along interstates, swimming pools, shoulders.
July is Nigh!
It has been too long. I don’t know if it feels like that or not to you, but for me, there has been a little nag in the back of my head saying, write a letter, write a letter, write a letter.
Things are really dark now, as we knew they would be. And then they got darker. I am finding the light through family & friends, poetry and volunteering for good causes.
All the good things
I have been trying to write this email for a long time. I’m usually not this stuck. I think it’s that I have so many different things to say. Some are deep/dark and others are happy and they don’t want to exist in the same email with each other.
So because it is National Poetry Month, I am going to talk poetry news.
Tinderbox is Lit
So excited to have two poems in this issue of Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Split Map and George & Davis’ Coffee, Oxford, 1996 are poems about isolation in relationships and isolation in geography. There are so many stellar poets in this issue — I am so grateful to the editor Jenn Givhan for including me.
New work
I am grateful to the editors of Ink & Nebula for publishing my poem, Fletching, in their inaugural issue.
They also made this stellar image to share on social.