Category Archives: philosophy

“You Once Felt Gigantic”, New Ohio Review, Fall 2019, recent audio recording

You Once Felt Gigantic

“Babu Bangladesh!” by Numair Atif Choudhury

You should order this novel RIGHT NOW. It is BRILLIANT.

“Outside Greater L.A.”, highly-commended for the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, from The Poetry School

Boundless buckets of gratefulness to judges Simon Armitage and Jade Cuttle for selecting my poem “Outside Greater L.A.” as one of the highly-commended poems to be published in The Poetry School’s Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry! And congratulations to Jane Lovell for her prize-winning “Ming” 🙂

And you can download and peruse at your leisure the entire 2020 anthology here:

“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

“Exit the Town Drunk”, finalist for The New Guard’s Knightville Poetry Contest

Many thanks to Shanna McNair and Scott Wolven for selecting my poem “Exit the Town Drunk” as a finalist in The New Guard Knightville Poetry Contest 🙂 And special congratulations to the winner, Amy Tibbetts, for her poem “Smooth Rock Tripe”. You can read Amy’s poem and mine in the print edition of Volume X , which will be published early next year; here’s a link to the contest announcements page and information on how to pre-order Volume X:

https://www.newguardreview.com/tng-contests

“Combustible”, appearing online at “The Adriatic”

Check out my poem “Combustible” in the newest issue of The Adriatic, a wonderful poetry quarterly established last year in Great Britain. The following link will take you to Issue 3, themed “Mind & Body”:

And thank you again to The Adriatic‘s fantastic team of editors 🙂

“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!

“Not for Sale,” shortlisted for the Times Literary Supplement’s 2019 Mick Imlah Poetry Prize

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/mick-imlah-poetry-prize-2019-shortlist/

Not for Sale

The minimum-wage worker drags the cart
full of children, all of them
so cute, put together
so perfectly. Along the cracks of the sidewalk,
the wheels twist, popping, the ride
far from smooth. Occasionally,
couples stop him, ask how much
for the little girl with pigtails, for the boy
with the black eye. The worker
doesn’t speak much English,
tells the passersby the kids aren’t for sale
until tomorrow, & only
at the store, not illegally
like this, smack in the middle of the street.