During the flurry of chapbook releases, I finished the first draft of my second book and sent it off to my publisher be read. Most of the poems have found individual homes and I thought I'd gather a few that have been published so far here to offer a taste of where I'm headed.
+ "if you could see where I learned to cook" is simmering in issue IV of The Blueshift alongside a review of my pressmate Fatimah Asghar's fierce, delicate, sold-out chapbook After.
+ "queen's share," titled after a special bottling of rum and written a little after Thanksgiving in a food-inspired delirium, is living over in Swarm Literary's new issue. Editor Chase Berggrun had this kind explication for her:
In “queen’s share,” there’s power in the speaker’s sloppiness: through drink and dance and dream, the poet pours herself out, into the present moment. And there’s a recognition of change: how lovers and traumas reinvent us. The moment where the speaker’s therapist sees the speaker in a dress for the first time hits me particularly hard, and says a lot about the ways in which our changes are often invisible to us at first. The dress is a marker of a kind of reclamation; to me, it seems, a stating of one’s right to move toward happiness, to selfhood, especially after experiencing great pain. The demand for a “queen’s share” is a loving one, but pointedly unequivocal. This speaker wants to be loved, adored: wants the kind of private, intimate moments that last a lifetime (“parts of night belong held to your chest”). Despite the suffering beneath the surface, there still exists an optimistic glint.
+ "the brain is a hungry organ" is included in Drunk in a Midnight Choir's 30/30, taken from my own poem-a-day attempts for this year's National Poetry Month.
+ "it matters less what I said than how you read it" appears in the latest issue of Palaver.
+ Public Pool was kind enough to give a home to a pair of food poems: "the rope is just for decoration" and "catalog of loves gone undevoured." Dig through the archived features and be prepared to stumble upon stunners by Olivia Gatwood, Sophie Klahr, Lynn Melnick, Angel Nafis, Niina Pollari, and Jane Wong.
More from the manuscript to come in Cloud Rodeo, Dreginald, Heavy Feather Review, Jellyfish, SAND, Sidekick Lit and Vinyl!