On July 12, 2022 at 8:00 p.m. (EDT), as part of the Significant Others Reading Series—a “series dedicated to new books and the shadow texts that inspired them”—I’ll be giving an online reading of some of my sestinas from the latest issue of Always Crashing along with some of the poems in their background radiation. Mary Biddinger and Day Heisinger-Nixon will also be reading. Get the link to the reading here and order the issue here.
Some new poems are in the fifth issue of Always Crashing: “Sestina I,” “Sestina II,” “Sestina III,” and “Aubade and After,” all part of a project I’m in the process of finishing up this summer. I’m absolutely delighted and honored to again appear in the pages of this excellent journal.
The most recent sonnets in my ongoing sequence–“2020.12,” “2021.01,” “2021.02,” “2021.03,” and “2021.04”–are in the third issue of Version (9) Magazine.
Politics and Economics
Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward, “Supreme Court has Voted to Overturn Abortion Rights, Draft Opinion Shows.”
Roxane Gay, “It’s Time to Rage.”
Matt Gertz, “With Attack on Twitter, the Right Shows It Has Institutionalized Trump’s Corrupt Use of Government Power.”
Anthony Cuthbertson, “NFT Sales Plummet 92% as Market ‘Collapses.'”
David Yaffe-Bellany, Erin Griffith, and Ephrat Livni, “Cryptocurrencies Melt Down in a ‘Perfect Storm’ of Fear and Panic.”
Eric Budish, “The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and Blockchain.”
Nuclear and Environmental
Chris Cameron, “Climate Activist Dies after Setting Himself on Fire at Supreme Court.”
Abrahm Lustgartn, “The Great Climate Migration.”
Nuclear and Environmental
Max Fisher, “As Russia Digs In, What’s the Risk of Nuclear War? ‘It’s Not Zero.’”
William J. Broad, “How America Watches for a Nuclear Strike.”
Rod Buntzen, “This Is What It’s Like to Witness a Nuclear Explosion.”
Cara Buckley, “‘OK Doomer’ and the Climate Advocates Who Say It’s Not Too Late.”
Brad Plumer and Raymond Zhong, “Stopping Climate Change Is Doable, but Time Is Short, UN Panel Warns.”
Henry Fountain, “In a First, an Ice Shelf Collapses in East Antarctica.”
Ukraine
Jane Burbank, “The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War.”
Malachy Browne, David Botti, and Haley Willis, “Satellite Images Show Bodies Lay in Bucha for Weeks, Despite Russian Claims.”
“‘At Night I Dream of Mariupol’: Nine Accounts of Surviving a Russian Siege.” Continue reading
Ukraine (Ordered by Date of Appearance)
Alexander Gabuev, “On Why Vladimir Putin and His Entourage Want War.”
Edward Wong, Julian E. Barnes, and Anton Troianovski, “US Says Russia Has a List of Ukrainians to Kill or Detain after an Invasion.”
Anton Troianovski, “Moscow Orders Troops to Ukraine’s Separatist Regions after Putin Recognizes Their Independence.”
“Ukrainian Officials Report Missile Attacks in Kyiv.”
Mike McIntire and Michael Forsythe, “Putin Faces Sanctions, but His Assets Remain an Enigma.”
Peter Baker, “Biden and Putin, Children of the Cold War, Face Off in New Conflict.”
Emma Ashford, “It’s Official: The Post-Cold War Era Is Over.”
Manveen Rana, “Volodymyr Zelensky Survives Three Assassination Attempts in Days.”
Michael Schwirtz, Andrew E. Kramer and Michael Levenson, “Russian Forces Pound Civilians, as Putin Likens Sanctions to a ‘Declaration of War.'”
Michael D. Shear, “Biden Bans Oil Imports from Russia, Calling It a ‘Blow to Putin’s War Machine.'”
Nuclear and Environmental
James M. Acton, “The Most Immediate Nuclear Danger in Ukraine Isn’t Chernobyl.”
David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “Putin Declares a Nuclear Alert, and Biden Seeks De-Escalation.”
Nuclear and Environmental
Henry Fountain, “An Extraordinary Iceberg Is Gone, but Not Forgotten.”
Jacob Blumenfeld, “Climate Barbarism: Adapting to a Wrong World.”
Joshua Rothman, “Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality?”
Ukraine
The New York Times, “Moscow Is Pessimistic about Reaching Accord with US on Ukraine, but Talk Continues.”
Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper, “US Battles Putin by Disclosing His Next Possible Moves.”
And Max Fisher, “On Ukraine, US, and Russia Wage Signaling War to Avert Actual War.”
Coronavirus
Apoorva Mandavilli, “Yes, Omicron Is Loosening Its Hold. But the Pandemic Has Not Ended.”
Steven Kurutz, “Too Young to Feel So Old.”
Alexander Provan, “The Great Equalizer” (from June 2020).
Given my ongoing interest in megatexts and other emerging hybrid and transmedia forms, I am organizing a second panel on emergent literary forms of the twenty-first-century for the 2023 Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco, California (the first was at the 2021 MLA Convention). Please consider submitting an abstract to festb[at]hartwick[dot]edu by March 24, 2022. Here’s the CFP:
Twenty-First-Century Forms
If the novel and lyric poem might be considered residual forms, what literary forms are emerging in the twenty-first century? Panel on emergent literary forms: transmedia, digital, hybrid, remediated, megatexts, other. 250-word abstract, brief bio.
This spring semester at Hartwick College, I’m teaching two classes, ENGL 213 Introduction to Creative Writing, as usual, and a brand new course, ENGL 352 Critical Game Studies. I’m especially excited about the latter, as this was a course I developed at the University of Pittsburgh in AY 2015-16 with the aid of a course development grant but that I have not had a chance to teach until now.
The syllabi:
Nuclear and Environmental
Elizabeth Weil, “California’s Forever Fire.”
Bill McKibben, “The Year in Climate.”
Jeff Goodell, “‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All.”
John Levi Barnard, Stephanie Foote, Jessica Hurley, and Jeffrey Insko, eds. “Infrastructures of Emergency,” special issue, part 2, Resilience 8, no. 3 (Fall 2021).
Rebecca Evans, “Is Geoengineering the Only Solution?: Exploring Climate Crisis in Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock.”
Jack Healy and Mike Baker, “As Miners Chase Clean-Energy Minerals, Tribes Fear a Repeat of the Past.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 