“Postrock” in Always Crashing

I am beyond delighted to announce that my long poem, “Postrock,” which I composed between June 2021 and July 2022 and which was supported by the Cora A. Babcock Chair in English and a number of Faculty Research Grants, has (finally!) been published in Always Crashing. This is probably the piece of writing that I am the most proud of among everything I have ever published, and so I am just utterly thrilled to be able to bring it into the world. I am forever indebted to James Tadd Adcox and the other editors of Always Crashing for their ongoing support of my work.

“Postrock” is the concluding and last unpublished poem from an unpublished manuscript (also titled Postrock and seeking a publisher!) in which I endeavor to perform what I’m calling a weird phenomenology: seeing everyday objects anew by mediating their perception through lenses of poetic, environmental, and cultural influence. In particular, “Postrock” draws explicit inspiration from John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972), is a sustained meditation on space, and, like all the poems from the manuscript, was composed while listening to postrock music. The poem is also in conversation with a large number of other texts, including books about space by Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Blanchot, Henri Lefebvre, and others, and it was composed using a variety of formal constraints, including being composed as an unbroken, nearly twenty-thousand-word paragraph.

Significant Others x Always Crashing: A Shadow Text Reading Series

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.

“2020.01,” “2020.02,” “2020.03,” “2020.04,” “2020.05,” and “2020.06” in Always Crashing

I didn’t get a lot of writing done this year, but some of the little I did is out today near its close. I am thrilled and honored to have the first of my pandemic sonnets—“2020.01,” “2020.02,” “2020.03,” “2020.04,” “2020.05,” and “2020.06”—in the online arm of Always Crashing. I also had important poems from the sonnet project, including the “long sonnet” “2016.36: Preface,” out in issue three of Always Crashing earlier this year. Thanks so much to the editors’ ongoing support of my work and this project.

“2016.31,” “2016.33,” “2016.36: Preface,” and “2017.01: Afterword” in Always Crashing

More poems from my ongoing sonnet sequence, “2016.31,” “2016.33,” “2016.36: Preface” (a long prefatory poem), and “2017.01: Afterword,” are in the third issue of Always Crashing. I’m delighted to share the pages with Louis Armand, Jill Khoury, Joe Sacksteder, Claire Marie Stancek, John Trefry, and many others.

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There will also be a two night reading celebrating the issues release at 7:00 p.m. on May 28 and 29, 2020, via Zoom. RSVP at https://bit.ly/2WGDD7d. I’ll be reading for a few minutes on the 29th.