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:
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
Many thanks to Regal House Publishing for longlisting my manuscript for the 2021 Terry J. Cox Poetry Award! And congratulations to the winner, Sunu P. Chandy, for her collection “My Dear Comrades”! Please check out more regarding Ms. Chandy’s upcoming book and Regal House Publishing by clicking the following:
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
In honor of National Poetry Month, the Hoboken Public Library is hosting the “Positively Poetry Reading Series” through its Facebook page. Hoboken’s reference librarian, Ethan Galvin, reached out to me and 8 other New Jerseyans who live and breathe poetry (and several cancer-causing chemicals), and he will be uploading our videos every Tuesday and Thursday of this month.
If you love backdrops featuring the I-78 extension, you’ll love my reading, which will be viewable anytime after 7pm on Tuesday April 20th. It’s got cows, daffodils, and definitely no Holocaust poems. Welcome to Spring!
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:
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”:
https://www.theadriaticmag.co/copy-of-issue-two-home
And thank you again to The Adriatic‘s fantastic team of editors 🙂
Many thanks to Codhill Press for selecting my manuscript as a finalist for the 2020 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award! And congratulations to the winner, Barry Sternlieb, for his collection “Sole Impression”! Please check out more regarding Mr. Sternlieb’s upcoming book and Codhill Press’s other publications by clicking the following:
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.
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!
An enormous thank you to The Black Spring Eyewear Press Group and to judge Terese Svoboda for shortlisting my manuscript for the 2020 Sexton Prize for Poetry! And congratulations to the winner, Denise Miller, for their work “A Ligature For Black Bodies”! More information on their book can be found here:
https://store.eyewearpublishing.com/blogs/news/the-2020-sexton-prize-for-poetry-winner
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.
Phillippa Slinger’s introduction (12:03-13:05)
“The fire escape, no longer weighed down” (13:05-14:45)
Fiona Sampson’s remarks (14:45-15:22)
