So, I wrote this personal essay about Brett Fletcher Lauer’s book Fake Missed Connections and it was published today on Entropy. I feel pretty happy about this essay, despite its personal nature.  It felt like something that I needed to write.

Also, amazingly, my chapbook Office Work was re-printed!

So many and forever thanks to Greying Ghost Press. It’s really a lovely surprise to re-encounter these poems.  My poem-ing lately has felt sort of strange and disjointed so I am grateful for this reminder of a different time.

What else? It’s Friday and I am working for the weekend, trying to set up some Boog City stuff, and am off to do some letterpress work at Wendy’s Subway in a little bit. Not a bad way to end the week I guess.

Some updates, old and new.

This summer me and a few others will be working with Wendy’s Subway, a non-profit library and writing space in Bushwick, to print a mini-manuscript (less than 300 words) on letterpress.  We held an open call for submissions in June and got a bunch of really interesting stuff but decided to go with Stacey Tran‘s Fake Haiku. We also decided to make a broadside featuring an excerpt from Bridget Talone’s manuscript, The Soft Palate, in 2017. I am really excited about learning to work with the letterpress and to have a group poetry project to be working on again.  Reading all of the submissions and subsequently talking about them made me realized how much I miss being an editor for a literary magazine.

Also, I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to share this, but I wrote a little blurb for Alex Crowley’s chapbook Improper Maps. I was incredibly humbled to be ask to write this blurb. The chapbook is great! Congrats to Alex!

Oh, and I am taking over as Small Press Editor for Boog City, a community art/poetry newspaper based in the East Village.  I’ve had some of my writing appear in Boog City in the past, and I’ve read for Boog City many times, so it’s cool that I will be able to contribute to the paper in a different way. I am already working on my first interview with the Portland-based press Dikembe. I really enjoy doing this sort of stuff.  I need to figure out how to incorporate it more into my life!

And as for the future, well who knows. But it’s there and ever changing and I’m excited about it.

I found out last week that my manuscript “Everything is Always Wonderful if it is Almost Over” was a finalist with honorable mention for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book competition.  I feel really happy about this! It’s just as good as winning and couldn’t have come at a better time.  I have been feeling a little disconnected from (my) poetry so it’s lovely to have my manuscript be acknowledged. Onward it is.

I am happy to be reading next Wednesday, May 11 at 7.30pm at the Brooklyn Public Library for Brooklyn Arts Press.  I will be reading with many of my BAP peers.  It should be a good time.  Here is the link to the Facebook event.

Also, last month I participated in a DIY Chapbook Challenge.

This is my little guy, titled 9-5.  You can read it here if you are so inclined.  It isn’t very long at all.

It’s been a weird week this week. Aside from the grey looming over NYC there is a general pervasive sense of doubt, wondering if anything that we do or plan to do is right.  I have no answer for this, obviously. But this song soothes me, so I guess I’ll have to take what I can get.

LOL, but seriously.

Happy to have learned about Elinor Nauen and Koff Magazine from The Poetry Project Newsletter. Check it out here.

While it is still February, I should tell you that friend and poet J. Hope Stein put together a three volume issue of Poetry Crush in honor of Valentine’s Day.  A poem of mine appears in Volume 3 but check out Volume 1 and Volume 2 also! Thanks Jen!

In other news, Some Rain Must Fall: My Struggle Book 5 comes out in March. Even though the end of book four made me feel uncomfortable, I am still a devotee. How could I not be?

“That’s how I experience life, as an ocean of quotidian existence in which meaning is diffuse and difficult to grasp, and then comes death with its unprecedented concentration of meaning, or else love or birth.”

–Karl Ove Knausgarrd

Burden of Proof

Rain makes events
When you travel
Situationally you are further
or are Occam’s Razor
The assumption that makes the most sense
at the time
Accounting for a variation of time
When what suits you changes

Avoidance a poor technique
For something to continue living
The consequences of decision
It isn’t me or you
It is an impatient personification
of the letters before us

Just a simple orange scarf
or passive aggressive emails
Gifts you have no memory of receiving
A song the man can’t help but sing
outside the train
Or French women who stand unknowingly
too close
The cliche spectacle
of the rain

I’m reading this Friday at the Issyra Gallery in Hoboken at 7pm with Russell Dillon and Matthew David Campbell. It’s always great to read Jersey side. Facebook link here.   Come say hi.

Otherwise, here we are. 2016.

via rumblr.