“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“Postrock” is the concluding and last unpublished poem from an unpublished manuscript (also titled Postrock and seeking a publisher!)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.

End of the Semester Links, Fall 2018

Nuclear and Environmental

Fourth National Climate Assessment.

Deconstructed, “Will the US Ever Give Up Its Nukes?”

“Trump Says US Will Withdraw from Nuclear Deal with Russia.”

Wilfred Wan, “The Nuclear Threat Is Rising: Europe Cannot Just Stand and Watch.”

Will Steffen, et al, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.”

Kate Aronoff, “‘Hothouse Earth’ Co-Author: The Problem Is Neoliberal Economics” and “With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation.”

Kim Stanley Robinson, “To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need to Take On Capitalism.”

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June 2018 Links

Nuclear and Environmental

Joshua Miller, “Ed Markey’s Career-Long Fight against Nuclear Weapons.”

Donald J. Trump’s letter to Kim Jong-un.

Avery Anapol, “Lindsey Graham: War with North Korea Would Be ‘Worth It’ in the Long Run.”

Anton Troianovski, “Putin Claims Russia Is Developing Nuclear Arms Capable of Avoiding Missile Defenses.”

Kim Stanley Robinson, “Empty Half the Earth of Its Humans. It’s the Only Way to Save the Planet.”

Ursula K. Heise, “Climate Stories” and Kate Marshall, “The Readers of the Future Have Become Shitty Literary Critics,” reviews of The Great Derangement, by Amitav Ghosh.

Kate Aronoff, “Denial by a Different Name.”

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February 2018 Links

Nuclear and Environmental

Tim Fernholz, “US Nuclear Tests Killed Far More Civilians than We Knew.”

Democracy Now, “Daniel Ellsberg Reveals He Was a Nuclear War Planner, Warns of Nuclear Winter and Global Starvation.”

Daniel Bessner, “On the Brink.”

Alastair Tancred, “A Nuclear First Strike of North Korea Is ‘Tempting’, Says Legendary US Diplomat Henry Kissinger as Kim Jong-un Warns Trump Is Pushing Toward War.”

“Senator Markey Blasts Trump Administration’s Reckless Nuclear Posture Review.”

Helena Feder, “The Realism of Our Time: Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.”

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End of the Semester Links, Fall 2017

It’s been a fun, eventful, interesting, and, of course, busy first semester at Hartwick College. Everything else, however, is quite dark. Some links.

Nuclear and Environmental

US Global Change Research Program, “Climate Science Special Report.”

Tim Collins, “The Chance of ‘Catastrophic’ Climate Change Completely Wiping Out Humanity by 2100 Is Now 1-in-20.”

Damian Carrington, “Warning of ‘Ecological Armageddon’ after Dramatic Plunge in Insect Numbers.”

Ariel Norfman, “Nuclear Apocalypse Now?”

Elizabeth Kolbert, “Going Negative: Can Carbon-Dioxide Removal Save the World?”

Mike Davis, “Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence.”

Neena Satija,  Kiah Collier, Al Shaw, and Jeff Larson, “Hell or High Water.”

Democracy Now, “As Catastrophic Flooding Hits Houston, Fears Grow of Pollution from Oil Refineries & Superfund Sites.”

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Summer 2017 Links

Nuclear and Environmental

Nearing midnight: “Military solutions are now fully in place,locked and loaded,should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!”

Mehdi Hasan, “The Madman with Nuclear Weapons Is Donald Trump, Not Kim Jong-un.”

David Wallace-Wells, “The Uninhabitable Earth.”

NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein, and “Global Hiroshima: Notes from a Bullet Train.”

Elizabeth Kolbert, “Au Revoir: Trump Exits the Paris Climate Agreement.”

Fiona Harvey, “World Has Three Years Left to Stop Dangerous Climate Change, Warn Experts.”

Damian Carrington, “Arctic Stronghold of World’s Seeds Floods after Permafrost Melts.”

Benjamin Powers, “An Abandoned US Nuclear Base in Greenland Could Start Leaking Toxic Waste Because of Global Warming.”

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Mid-Summer Links 2016

Nuclear and Environment

Naomi Klein, “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World.”

Aamna Mohdin, “Fearing a Nuclear Terror Attack, Belgium Is Giving Iodine Pills to Its Entire Population.”

Annabell Shark, “MoMA, The Bomb and the Abstract Expressionists.”

Alex Wellerstein, “The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin.”

Lake Chad disappearing over the past fifty years.

Continent 5.2.

And RDS-37 Soviet hydrogen bomb test (1955).

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