My tiny whiny dictating children and I would like to thank Kathy Miles for selecting this poem for 10th place — obviously in honor of the greatest soccer player in the world, Lionel Messi — in the Welsh Poetry Competition. Congrats to the winner Estelle Price for her wonderful
ekphrastic poem “iii”.
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“Eviction”, appearing online at New York Quarterly, 2021
“Babu Bangladesh!” by Numair Atif Choudhury
You should order this novel RIGHT NOW. It is BRILLIANT.

“Unwrapped”, from Fourteen Hills’ Zoom reading on May 28th, 2021
A huge thank you to Rachel Huefner and the rest of the editing team at Fourteen Hills (especially the poetry editors, Sen Ruiz and Trianne Harabedian) for a wonderful virtual reading last Friday for Issue 27, Summer 2021! The following is a link to my reading of “Unwrapped”, which can be heard from 33:22 to 35:30, and be sure to catch Olive Maurstad’s fantastic story “Last One” right after it 🙂
https://www.14hills.net/c131280e-3990-4a3f-8e83-a4b69f855beb
My “Positively Poetry Reading Series” performance for the Hoboken Public Library’s National Library Week!
Yes, here are those promised cows, daffodils, and the absence of Holocaust poems:
You can almost smell that I-78 highway extension through the thin gloss of YouTube.
And here’s a friendly guide to jump straight to your favorite poems:
00:00 Introduction
01:02 The origin of life
02:28 A small dot appears. A genesis. A thing out of nothing
05:45 Thanks a lot, Shakespeare, for the Starling
07.46 Departing from Sengen Jinja
10:00 Naming Things
11:46 Why My Kid Sobs at the Ice Cream Parlor
14:18 Not a Holocaust Poem
15:53 Cows & Daffodils
17:58 Lakawa a Stat on
20:05 A Single Swallow Doesn’t Signal Spring
20:39 Animal House
22:09 A poem written in my past life as a 15th century Georgian monk
23:32 From Out of the Darkness
26:47 Beacons of Light
28:02 Post 11
29:17 Epilogue
“Dear Mom”, from Paterson Literary Review’s Zoom reading on March 6th, 2021
Thank you, Ms. Mazziotti Gillan and Ms. Desai, for organizing such a wonderful reading today for Issue #48! The following is a link to my reading of “Dear Mom”, which can be heard from 1:06:10 to 1:08:00, right after “Emptyness”, by the Ghanaian poet Geosi Gyasi, and right before “Second Hand Clothes”, by fellow New Jersey poet, Fred Iucci.
“Thanks a Lot, Shakespeare, for the Starling” (which first appeared in “America”) wins the Telluride Institute’s 2020 Fischer Poetry Prize
It’s an extraordinary honor to have “Thanks a Lot, Shakespeare, for the Starling” selected as the winner of the 2020 Fischer Poetry Prize! A special thank you to judge Claire Blotter and the Talking Gourds crew for making my 2020 a little less horrible, and congrats to all the other finalists!