unusual light source

As I’ve written into my second chapbook, I’ve been thinking back on the writing and editing I did around my first chapbook unusual light source (still available at White Stag - along with several other excellent titles (I recommend Good River and Millennial, but the whole catalog is solid!))

From unusual light source, 2018 – man, I love my little dashes!!

Chapbooks are often born in community, with a DIY spirit. I’m still grateful that editors at White Stag Publishing took a chance on my work early on. The poems in that felt like a cap on my graduate school experience - it wasn’t everything from my thesis, but a select group of poems that fell together, almost a warm up to my first full length attempt. Chapbooks are such an important part of poetry and whenever I find them in the wild, I’m immediately drawn to them. The rules for chapbooks seem slightly different, making them grounds for experimentation, or just enough space to cover a specific subject or form.

For me, writing into my new chapbook has opened the door for what is hopefully a new full length. There’s always a strange period of time where I have to let the poems settle and breathe. From there, as I read and re-read and edit and un-edit and spiral - the thing either closes in on its final form, or tells me I’m not quite done yet. That’s what’s happening now. I thought I had a chapbook, titled “Fourth Trimester” (take a wild guess as to the subject matter ) – but ultimately that’s a little too neat. There remain several enormous, swallowing questions that may take me another decade to address. Poetry is an iceberg.