A few weekends ago, I had the pleasure of sitting for photographer Brad Taylor of Caprock Studio, who took my new headshots. Now, like a lot of people, I don’t love having my picture taken. I’m very hard on myself and have knack of picking out every one of my flaws in every photograph. But, […]
»MoreI first met Peter Molin when he was still active-duty and teaching literature at the United States Military Academy at West Point. I’m not sure who introduced me to Molin (perhaps it was Brian Turner or maybe Siobhan Fallon?), but it became immediately clear to me that he was a fierce advocate for contemporary war […]
»MoreRecently, I had the opportunity to talk with Jessica Murray (an excellent poet and PhD candidate at the University of North Texas) about Dots & Dashes. The interview is now featured in Memorious, a literary journal that is edited by the very wonderful Rebecca Morgan Frank. You can read the interview here. And here’s my poem, “Scheherazade,” […]
»MoreI’m so very happy to have another poem from my current manuscript-in-progress, Wild Kingdom, in the latest issue of Pleiades. The poem, “Portrait of an Administrator with Strategic Plan and Office Supplies,” came out of my study of Larry Levis: his handling of narrative, his excellent ear. I wrote the first draft in late November 2016, when […]
»MoreWhen I moved to Texas, I fell in love with the strange, shimmering birds that I saw in every parking lot, their funny, crooked bodies hopping between the cars, how they bent to snag pieces of trash, bits of food dropped by passersby, their croaking, creaky voices. I was completely enchanted with what I understood […]
»MoreA few weeks ago, when I was giving readings in Chicago and at Illinois Wesleyan University, I received a very unexpected and welcome email from New Orleans Review, accepting three poems from my manuscript-in-progress, Wild Kingdom. Interestingly, the poems are quite grim; they explore issues of bullying, misogyny, and antisemitism in academia. But if you don’t […]
»MoreI’m thrilled and grateful that a new review of Dots & Dashes is now up at The Rumpus. Here’s the final paragraph of Heidi Czerwiec’s extremely attentive, nuanced, and thoughtful review: Before I go crawl back in bed with my snorer, grateful for his body beside me, his scent I can smell skin-to-skin, I need to say, […]
»MoreIt’s Veteran’s Day, which also happens to be my birthday! Although many of the poems in Dots & Dashes would be appropriate to honor Veteran’s Day, there’s one in particular that is particularly suitable. It’s a poem about all the things that happened on this day in history, weaving together disparate moments as well as language […]
»MoreI am very excited that the most recent issue of Diode includes two poems from my in-progress manuscript, Wild Kingdom: “Field Notes on Mobbing” and “Field Notes on the Muted Brilliance of the Female.” While no one who knows me would ever call me outdoorsy, in these poems I use the language of a scientist to observe the fierce […]
»MoreOne of my favorite publications, The Southern Review, is now collaborating with The Academy of America Poets to bring poems from the journal to a larger readership. And, I’m thrilled to have my poem, “Sun Salutations with Betrayal and Departure,” which appeared in the summer issue of The Southern Review as part of a “sampler” featured on […]
»MoreToday, a friend emailed me to tell me that one of my poems is up at Verse Daily. What a nice surprise! “Runaway Military Surveillance Blimp Drifts from Maryland to Pennsylvania” comes from the middle section of Dots & Dashes and takes its title from a New York Times article dated October 28, 2015. I remember being fascinated with this particular […]
»MoreIt’s always exciting to see former students publishing, finding their ways beyond the classroom, into the larger literary community. Recently, I was honored to learn that one of my former students, a young writer named Cat Righter, wrote a review of Dots & Dashes for The Summerset Review. Here’s how the piece opens: To communicate in Morse […]
»MoreI’m so pleased to have a poem in the current issue of Copper Nickel, one of my all-time favorite journals. “Self-Portrait with Cable News, Graffiti, Weather” is another piece from my manuscript-in-progress, Wild Kingdom. It is also a product of my recent immersion in all things Larry Levis, who died in 1996 but whose influence continues to be […]
»MoreI met novelist Andria Williams a number of years ago, when we spoke together on a panel women writing war at the annual AWP Conference; Andria and I were the two “milspouses” on the panel, both of us Navy wives. In addition to being a terrific fiction writer, Andria also runs the cool and necessary […]
»MoreGrace Cavalieri is one of the kindest and most generous people working in American poetry today; a poet herself, she’s also dedicated to writing reviews of new books for The Washington Independent Review of Books and to interviewing poets for her long-running podcast series, “The Poet & the Poem,” which is housed at the Library of […]
»MoreToday, in my poetry workshop, we took a look at Carolyn Forche’s iconic prose poem, “The Colonel,” which famously begins, “What you have heard is true.” I love to show young poets this text because it uses simple, clear, unadorned language to, well, punch the reader in the face. We trace the poem’s movements, as […]
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