Two poems from Candice Reffe’s God Flattery

followed by a note on the author

from God Flattery

Under the veil, two strips of white first-aid tape cross her lips. Under the tape, her lips are bound by
stiff thread lest any words fall out, but Ruth was not a gossip.

God’s bride, Ruth would not indict her soul’s passage.

Ruth’s ten-year old daughter sprinkles sand on her face, her heart, the vee between her thighs. Her
six-year-old son is home watching cartoons. The daughter is wearing PJ bottoms printed with polar
bears and her mother’s moth-eaten sweater, a torn ribbon pinned to her heart. Tomorrow, she’ll
move the ribbon to a black dress, but today she doesn’t have to dress like death.

Candice Reffe

from God Flattery

Certified by a rabbi, the sand’s extracted from Mount Olivet, a three-thousand-year-old necropolis
where a Biblical who’s who is interred, the departure point for resurrection when the world ends.
From the diaspora, Ruth does not have a direct flight: The sand is her transportation.

No one sees me snatch the empty Olivet packet from the waste basket, divine grit camped on its
lips. Memento, dead-friend souvenir. I flatten the wrapper and file it in a folder labeled Ruth.

Ruth flattened. Ruth reduced.

Candice Reffe

Candice Reffe’s book of poems Live from the Mood Board, an insider’s view of the fashion world and corporate power, won Elixir Press’s Antivenom Poetry Award and was published in 2019. Twice a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Mass Cultural Council Artist fellow, Candice’s poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Hotel Amerika, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Witness and elsewhere. She lives in Northampton, MA.

Two poems from Julia Shipley’s An Animal Inside an Animal

followed by a note on the author

The Glass Eye Factory

lies near the sea in a small town
overlooking an inlet—
blink and you’ll miss it.
The place reeks of sweet acetone.
Fuming stink eyes. Better not surmise,
Isn’t it carcinogenic? as the manager
benignly opens drawers so you
can ogle his droplet-sized prizes.
Try to look the other way.
He shows you hawk and doll eyes, roly poly deer eyes—
and if they weren’t so astonishing, you’d have half a mind
to pop one in your mouth like hard candy—
eye candy. Snake eyes. Lion eyes—
a thousand eyes for you to buy,
but no supply to glamorize the hurricane’s
Cyclops, its socket seething your way, need blind.
No remedy for the weeping bull’s eye
you’ll soon be; nothing
for anything you might wish to unsee.

Julia Shipley

The Annunciations

In Connecticut in 1807: the sky booms.
New stones are strewn throughout town,

meteorites, weighing the same
as what a woman gains, carrying a child.

One fells a cow in Brazil, one bludgeons
a horse in Ohio. In Wisconsin in 1911,

heaven’s messenger punches the roof
and continues through floorboards into clay.

Some sprinkle the Philippines,
scarcely the size of rice grains.

By 1938, separate falling rocks
smash: a Pontiac, motel room, mailbox.

Then, in 1954, one pummels the left hip of voluptuous
Ms. Hodges as she reclines on a couch in Alabama.

Doctor Moody Jacobs pulls up her nighty
(discreetly) to reveal what’s been delivered.

Pictured here: They stare at the fetus-
sized bruise as if to deduce: what kind of Messiah?

Julia Shipley

The Glass Eye Factory first appeared in 32 Poems; The Annunciations first appeared in Cogzine

Julia Shipley is an arts & culture journalist and investigative reporter whose reporting has been featured in Mother Jones, NPR and Rolling Stone. Her creative work has appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, Gettysburg Review, Plume, Orion, and Poetry. Her debut collection, The Academy of Hay (Bona Fide Books, 2014) won the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Award and was a finalist for the Vermont Book Award. Her second collection, An Animal Inside an Animal was a finalist for the Mura Award and the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Tinderbox Press.

Two poems from Sandy Solomon’s Catch

followed by a note on the author

Blush

“Two people, two baths,” the boy behind the counter
said, as he checked us out of our budget room.
The hotel, which overlooked Notre Dame,
was cheap, but charged, it seemed, for everything,
including a key to the bath. I corrected, “Two people,

one bath.” Less to pay. The boy,
maybe eighteen, blushed to the tips of his ears,
smirked, then looked away. Hired for the summer,
I guessed. We paused. I couldn’t not recall
me and you at either end of the large,

claw-footed, cast-iron tub
down the hall from our room. We’d sat, cramped,
but laughing; between us, the drowned pockets of our night’s
pleasure and the dripping, hard-edged tap.
That blush remains—more vivid than our night,

more vivid, even, than the view across the Seine
for which we paid another, extra charge.
Opening the clanking shutters, we’d found
the scene: our own Western façade, the towers
then uncleaned, so black with soot, so fine.

Sandy Solomon

Pack

“Packs well,” she says, forming in ungloved hands
snowballs, lopsided, roughly made, and calls
her big-boned shepherd and my scruffy mutt
to catch each high, underhanded toss.

They make us laugh as they leap to mouth midair
those cold nothings. A chew, swallow, or spit
and, ready for the next gift, they sit to watch
her dig and palm. Sometimes she rises from her crouch
and throws long to make them run to the spot

where snow meets snow again and disappears
into itself. They circle, nosing, tonguing
winter’s traces—no smell, no taste, no sound.
Only feel and see the world, chill
and simplified now, except on the rise

where that blue round of sled the children guy
to the top, that disc on which they crowd (blur
of proximate color and sound) starts down,
turning as it glides. And falls again apart.

Sandy Solomon

Blush first appeared in The New Yorker; Pack first appeared in Ploughshares.

Sandy Solomon teaches at Vanderbilt University, where she is Writer in Residence in Vanderbilt’s Creative Writing Program. Her book, Pears, Lake, Sun, which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, was published simultaneously in the UK by Peterloo Poets. She’s published poems in magazines in both the US and the UK—most recently, in the New Yorker, Plume, Scientific American, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and Hopkins Review. Her poems have also appeared in such anthologies as Women’s Work; Orpheus and Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology; and A Breathless Hush, The MCC Anthology of Cricket Verse (her favorite credit since it seems so improbable that an American would ever meet English approval on this subject). Born in Baltimore, she’s now lives in Nashville, TN, and part of the year, in London.

Two poems from Julia Thacker’s The Winter Comb

followed by a note on the author

Curriculum Vitae

White dots on my mother’s wrist.

Julia Thacker

Bigfoot Walks Among Us

We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plums
when he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.
He stripped me and I flew up, a wood moth on birch eyeing the girl below,
her limbs spread five point star. After, he offered jackrabbit on a spit, tinctures.
I covered myself with fir branches. Mostly I was alone.
I gave up counting the days, hair wilding on my legs, arm pits forested.
Gagged on my own sour smell. While he sloshed through creeks
and villages, I crawled along the thick moss floor, picked snow-capped mushrooms,
pigweed, prickly lettuce. Tongue furry, teeth velveted, I learned to suck spearmint.
In snow, he hollowed a deer, laid me inside the carcass.
My dreams tasted of iron; antlers, a crown I wore lit with fire.
Sometimes he took me along miles of hemlock and sequoia.
Evenings, we crouched at wood’s edge, spied the far lights.

Later I was offered a heart-shaped swimming pool for my story.
Did he make you do things? My throat clogged with birdsong. My mind, with leaves.

Julia Thacker

Curriculum Vitae first appeared in Bennington Review; Big foot Walks Among Us first appeared in Pleiades

The granddaughter of a Harlan County, Kentucky coal miner, Julia Thacker first came to Massachusetts as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast Online, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic and others. Her honors include fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, The Corporation of Yaddo and The National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught writing in the Radcliffe Seminars and at Tufts University and acted as Poet-in-Residence in public schools throughout Massachusetts.

Two poems from Susan Parr’s Devera

followed by a note on the author

The Billions

O, a gulf,
a good gulf,
a laugh-pile gibbous
of ocean, a turn again,
turn again
to land. Cuddled,
a shoving, a glug-glug
gulf lives in an Earth-bucket
foamful of fish to come running.
O, a gulf,
a good gulf,
a goof: some girls
in a hammock; one holds
the center,
the other ones wave,
the other ones have
petroleum in their hair;
the other ones have
crude in their hair.
Whip them for insulting the profit.

Susan Parr

Comforter

In the voice of Darlene, who is opening a second can of Schlitz

If you can’t be happy,
well, you can be.
I know your socks are still on
your neighbor’s feet.
Torpor and old shorts
don’t matter much. Yes, you
might have to take yourself
to court. Hair?
Hair’s for horses.
If you need a clock, there’s the one
out in your Rabbit—look, it’s not about
the pocketbook; it’s the Pocket
Books and stuff. Come peer!
says your mirror, but not
now, it’s full of itself. So’s
your cupboard—food’s just what
you’re always out of.
Now, a nap? It can be
like love.

Susan Parr

The Billions and Comforter first appeared in PageBoy (VIII).

Susan Parr grew up in several states, including West Virginia, Florida, and New Mexico. She earned her B.A. in Russian Studies from Barnard College and her M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Washington, where she was a 2011 Strange Coupling Fellow and a recipient of the MacLeod-Grobe Prize. Her first book of poems, Pacific Shooter (2009), was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize and published by Pleiades Press. She’s also been a recent finalist for Burnside Review’s Press Prize and Poetic Justice Institute’s two POL awards. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Alaska Quarterly Review, Margie, Poetry, Diagram, and the Best American Poetry series. She currently lives in Seattle.

Two poems from Heather Treseler’s Petrichor

followed by a note on the author

Wildlife

All strut and gibbering, wattles and caruncles,
tom turkeys parade at dusk, panoply
of feathers fanned, snoods

engorged and dangling over their sharpened
beaks while their heads turn from red
to white to blue in tricolor

blush, pulsing placards above their sexual taxis.
Hens, loitering in shade, graze acorns
and the occasional grub, an eye

cocked, nonplussed. They’ve seen this all before.
Ben Franklin thought the fowl “vain
& silly” but respectable, more

American than the thieving eagle. Hens sense
that courtship, like government, rarely
is as dainty as ballet of bowerbirds.

And of the preening toms? Who hasn’t felt
the need to wear a brighter face for love
or war? At dusk, they flock

to the wooded edge of town. (And mate, quietly,
on ground.) Then, one-by-one, take running
starts, wings pumping,

and like battered 747s ascend to perch on spiky
feet, nestling along limbs longer than
their own. Small miracle, how

they vault their twenty pounds of poult in air
as after a day of too many hours:
uphill, the last set of stairs.

Galliformes, sharp-sighted by day, are night blind
prey. My predator is my dark. After love,
I, too, sleep on a second story.

Heather Treseler

Anne Sexton

Suburbs, like brassieres, shape and contain
their contents, wire under lace, seemliness

and seams along the wildness of woods except

for the renegade deer or tom turkey who struts
straight down the thoroughfare. Suburbs, like

musical theater, lend everyone role and song

in sitcoms between commercials. The point
is repetition. The point is novelty, delimited

to the height of a privet hedge, a hidden affair.

How stark, the coordinate machines of the city,
its concrete floors and carapaces of new money.

Whereas suburbs are seersucker and silk hose,

demitasse or highballs on the shaded porch.
In the bedroom, late afternoons, I watch

crenellations of light mount the ceiling, take

its white blankness, hungrily. Cotton sheets
accept the skin of a woman surviving her

despair who broils a Sunday roast, prattles

behind a pram, fusses about collar starch
and geraniums while she writes of her

madness, masturbation, men, menstruation.

The point of the living room is stilled life.
The point of the kitchen is producing for

the reproducing. But I am the feral creature

who wanders the street, peering in windows
wide-eyed, alert, not a stitch under her skirt.

Heather Treseler

Wildlife first appeared in the W. B. Yeats Society Bulletin; Anne Sexton first appeared in Harvard Review.

Heather Treseler earned her BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and her PhD in English from the University of Notre Dame. A professor of English at Worcester State University, she is also a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Her chapbook, Parturition (2020), received the international chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Ireland and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and her poems appear in The American Scholar, The Iowa Review, and PN Review, among other journals; her essays appear in eight books and in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and Boston Review. Her poem Wildlife was chosen for the W. B. Yeats Prize (2021) by Spencer Reece, and her poem Chase Street was selected by Warsan Shire as a finalist for The Moth Poetry Prize (2022). Her sequence The Lucie Odes won The Missouri Review‘s Editors’ Prize in Poetry (2019). She lives along the Charles River outside of Boston.

Two Poems from D. H. Tracy’s The New New Normal

followed by a note on the author

The New New Normal

It is desirable that as little happen as possible.
An aristocrat said this, knowing (I hope) it was hopeless.
Inevitably,
sporadically (like clockwork,
unlike clockwork), something
goes thlunk into the pond of you,
and the normal expires.
Your contract/lease/tour/term was up. You moved across town.
The guests departed, or you got a diagnosis.
The new normal feels like fresh linen, a little,
even when bad. The new normal monkeys finically
with the sublives where you dream and mate and work; the new normal tweaks
the way you think about the future, light jazz, incarceration, and vegetable cream cheese;
about the toupee of dust on the top of the fridge (care, don’t care),
about fixing things or tossing them,
about the relative merits of an enchanted forest and Rantoul in broad daylight.
Striving and coasting, hating and forgiving.
The new normal has backdoor access to all of this,
for now. And you fall in with the rhythm of where you have to show up when.
We say life is normal when it resembles itself.
We say numbers are normal when the appearance of outliers
follows a certain formula, as though freak occurrences were normal.
We say a line is normal when it sits square to another line,
as though it were normal to be at cross-purposes.
We say a town is Normal if it has a Dairy Queen and a little zoo
and an insurance company where normal people go to work, maybe you.
I say you because the way normals come and go must be the same
for other people, even
if the normals themselves are so peculiar that there is no normal normal.
My latest normal tastes like hard-to-say-what, the way
the blue raspberry slushy sweating in a cupholder
when the lights come halfway on after a movie
tastes like something.
It sits there as though blue raspberry slushies
were the most normal thing in the world.
As though the normal were not churning
and sick of itself and determined to depart from its own pattern
and fade, like a firework, to be replaced by another,
like a firework. Replaced and replaced again.
I want to say there is still a cadence to this,
a normalcy of normals. But what if they ask, someday, What were things like?
We say normalize when we want to compare apples to apples
but in the new new normal normals
just were what they were, the best you can do
is stack the generations of them and hold them up to the light and see the flecks
of everything they varied and interchanged:

in some you are a dog person,
in some you are shallow and buy things,
in some you crave a pallet in a monastery,
in some you think the best of people,
in some the secret lies in a book,
in some you do Jell-O shots,
in some precipitation is welcome,
in some you live in hope,
in some you watch a lot of TV,
in some you gesticulate with chopsticks,
in some they smell your desperation,
in some the dress shoes pinch,
in some you screw the pooch,
in some machines are fascinating,
in some you are civic-minded,
in some you feel belittled by the staff,
in some you wander by the lamp of reason,
in some there is time for niceties,
in some it seems strange that once you just sat there watching a willow in a storm, but it must have
been a normal thing to do, because until the next new normal there was no other thing for it to be

D. H. Tracy

Ode to the World Cup

Iceland (population: Anaheim’s),
whitest place in the world,
actually takes on Nigeria, biggest country in Africa:
you couldn’t make this up.
The allegories write themselves.
You get the classic beefs, Turkey vs. Greece, England vs. Scotland,
ex-colonies out to stick it to their former masters,
whose teams are mostly made up of them.
The global stars defect, temporarily,
from megaeuro contracts at their international clubs
to play for blood and soil, or,
like the brown guy on the Polish team,
kind of.
I like to see the world make an ass of itself without American help.
I like to see enthusiasm tipping over into mania,
some yob from Assholia blowing six months’ salary
to paint himself orange and yellow in a purple and gold country,
or red and blue in a green and black country,
or maroon and eggshell in a beige and lilac country.
I like how football brings us all together
so we can establish a hierarchy of world domination.
From a certain, villainous perspective, there is nothing else.
So it attracts, like law enforcement or the military,
a mix of leading men and thugs. Stupid-handsome princes
sally forth among the bruisers assigned to take them down.
‘A gentleman’s game played by hooligans,’ as Churchill didn’t say.
I like that there is no Olympic gentility.
A clotheslines B, or knees him in the kidney,
or balls a fist up in his shirt and yanks,
and B Fred-Astaires around it all, or rolls around in agony
with just enough histrionics to confuse the matter of sympathy.
The whistle blows like it’s quitting time
and the card comes out like the dealer has sixteen.
I like the way opposing players touch each other’s faces
in the slack moments—tenderly,
tenderness being more likely to provoke a violent movement
and get the caressee thrown out of the game.
I like the kinematics of it, the ball falling through
the finely tuned human pinball machine,
bumper to bumper to flipper to bumper until,
a flow emerging from a string of lunges,
the ball appears to be playing the players.
The black and white sphere that bounced across the lyrics to my youth,
smartly tiled with hex- and pentagons,
is gone! The shapes are different now,
interlocking rhombozoids FIFA-proven to induce more intense orgasms
when smacking the back of the net—
which, at agonizing intervals, they do—
O trembling of the veil!
It appears to be something actually happening,
like the loss of virginity or a knife in the back,
but is actually pure meaning,
like a middle finger, or ‘I now pronounce you.’
Like drinking from a consecrated cup.
The announcer is holding the note,
gol,
because, sustained forever by someone pure of heart,
it might come to be transmuted,
it might turn into something real.

D. H. Tracy

D. H. Tracy is the author of Janet’s Cottage (St. Augustine Press). He lives in Illinois.

Two poems from Anele Rubin’s These Trinkets I Return to You

followed by a note on the author

Like Job

Is it April when the spring peepers
start their chants
that seem to come from
every inch of the valley flooded
by melted snow?
How green suddenly spreads over
what was frozen,
then thawed, muddy,
the fresh graves.

My heart has not sewn itself,
not mended,
and old scars are still
thick and ropey
under new wounds.
I feel them when I breathe,
feel them hardest
when I start to laugh
yet now the green spreads
over the mountains and the valleys
and the raspberry bushes have white blossoms
and purple and blue flowers interrupt the vast green

and the sun is warm on my small head
and the slight breeze touches my face and shoulders and
I want to brace my heart
as against a dangerous lover,
but I give in:
as I allowed the unexpected hurt
I allow the inexplicable balm

and on and on whenever death comes
and finishes things off
and you almost can’t stand it
but you know you have to if you want to live
and you know you want to live
so when the sun shines on the trees
with their new green leaves
you let it sway you though you
never liked Job.

Anele Rubin

These People

These people strolling through the park
with baby carriages and frisbees
have no idea
my sister choked to death
on a sausage
after being released
from a mental hospital down south
but they may know I’ve been crying
and wonder what I’m writing
in my little yellow book
sitting in the grass next to the only dandelion
left in the park
with my big black dog
whose fur is shaven on one side
and they may notice
I’m wearing yesterday’s clothes
and my grey hair hasn’t been combed lately,
but maybe not,
because a young woman with a child
stops before me,
asks where the duck pond is
and waits, smiling,
as I explain the best route
and her little girl
looks right in my face,
asks if she can pet my dog
and what his name is, says
he’s pretty.

Anele Rubin

Like Job appeared in december; These People appeared in New Ohio Review.

Anele Margaret Rubin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1951, and grew up in Maryland, Nevada, and Louisiana. She has degrees in English from Louisiana State University and New York University’s Graduate Writing Program, as well as a Certificate in Advanced Religious Studies from NYU. She taught at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus for over thirty years, and currently lives in Upstate New York. Her book Trying to Speak, which won the Wick Poetry Prize, was published by Kent State University Press in 2005. She has had poems in Cutthroat, Poet Lore, New Ohio Review, Rattle, The Café Review, Miramar, Atlanta Review, Paterson Literary Review, december, and elsewhere.

Two poems from Laura Newbern’s A Night in the Country

followed by a note on the author

Madonna of the Meadow

Giovanni is very old and yet he is the best painter of all.
– Albrecht Durer, 1506

The painter Bellini spent half his life
painting portraits of the Madonna.
Among other things.
In an early version she and the child
glow in a box of dark.
A little bit later, the painter admits
to clouds in the world, floating on either side
of the mother and child’s world.
Later still, the Madonna lifts an apple with one hand
and cups the child in her lap with the other;
more importantly they are turned
to the right, just slightly, to where there is light
and, in the distance, a simple hill.
Until at last, in 1500, he brings the girl
and her burden outside, onto a field: bleak trees
on the left, a ragged chorus of clouds stealing
behind them, more hills, and a far
tower, looking like where they used to live.
He calls it a meadow, but there are hardly flowers,
and the clouds look like smoke belched
from the smokestacks—
but those are the trees. She wears
no halo. Holds the child there. Or rather
balances him, in her blue lap, where he seems
to sleep the sleep of an old man lost
at sea, and not in a meadow, not in a field at all.

Laura Newbern

The Burning West

Every fire has a name.
Today, the Detweiler fire, which sounds
like someone tentative but intent, someone
at the door. Hello?
It’s the Detweiler fire.

Herr Detweiler—that was the name
of the Von Trapps’ eager promoter
in The Sound of Music. In which
the baroness used to be bad—I mean, I used to think
she was awful; now I understand
and even admire her veils, her perfected hair.
She wanted a husband, a beautiful home;
she wanted those stony urns on either side
of the view of the blue river,
the handsome captain standing there with her.

But no one’s so safe. Out west
the mountains are veiled in smoke, the cool
mountains, the blue Pacific and all its mists
too far away. Not near enough.
Von Schraeder—

so was the baroness named: Elsa Von Schraeder.
Maria, you might remember, had no name
besides Maria; a simple name, and a simple blue dress
that made a blue light in the night—

You could see it through all the trees.

Laura Newbern

Laura Newbern grew up in Washington, D.C.. She currently lives in Georgia, where she teaches at Georgia College and edits the journal Arts & Letters. She is the author of Love and the Eye, selected by Claudia Rankine for Kore Press, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Writer’s Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, she holds degrees from Barnard College, New York University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Madonna of the Meadow and The Burning West first appeared in Barrow Street (Spring 2020).

Two poems from Kevin McFadden’s Wicked Bible

followed by a note on the author

If

If only I didn’t have this staircase wit,
comebacks fumbled and not even funny outside,
I’d be able to spare us the agony, right here,
this fiddle. If only the mot juste were juicier
first time through, the primer a sealer—
who’d need such boohoo?—the art or the craft
to keep telling us, Next year…. If only I’d get
one zing and be king; if when our clever host
shot out, The South will rise again, if then
I’d have quipped, Check your sea level.
If only that redhead had heard! (If only I’d
thought of it then—if then, what then?)
If Kennedy on the Wall hadn’t called himself
a German donut! If only we hadn’t botched
the moonlanding line! If I had it together,
I’d be good enough to be self-deprecating,
perhaps they’d have to make me
an adjective. If I had a Spartan brevity, the ephors’
effortlessness, their timing like choreography
with Philip of Macedon at the borders boasting:
If I enter Laconia, I level it. If I could return
laconic, in a word, as they did: If.

Kevin McFadden

D O A

Shorthand of the toe-tag, poor S-O-B’s
so S-O-L that even 9-1-1 can’t help. Compact,
in-house, smash-mouth and idiomatic,
a tongue’s tough enough to understand alive—
long dead, what will it all mean? The coroner’s in

to make certain nothing’s uncertain, identity
and estimated time, no death, no taxes
pass without name and number anymore.
Uncle Sam’s 10-40. You understand?
That’s Roger and 10-4.

Kevin McFadden

Kevin McFadden is the author of Hardscrabble and the chapbook collaboration with illustrator Jeff Pike, City of Dante. He is the recipient the George Garrett Award for poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Great Lakes College Association’s New Writers Award. His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Fence, Kenyon Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, and in other publications.