New Chapbook Forthcoming / New Work Online

I just found out my new chapbook, Hospitalogy, is due out from Andrew Lundwall's Scantily Clad Press in August. As is often the case, I forgot to adjust for color in uploading the cover image, and so what you see to the right is a very ugly (inverted) version of what I think you'll see upon publication.

One of the poems, along with other poetry of mine from another book project (Prefab Eulogies) can be found in the amazing new issue of Eklesographia (Ahadada Books), guest edited by Amy King. The issue features wonderful poetry all around, a diverse cadre--startling work from Linh Dinh, Annie Finch, Adam Fieled, Tomaz Salamun, and many others (hell, just read it...).

The book, Hospitalogy, as may be evident somewhat from the poem in Eklesographia (having another poem in the issue doing similar, but more overt work), is in part a meditation on, and in some ways is in conversation with, Rob Halpern's poetics as I read them in Disaster Suites. Not to suggest that my end of the conversation is as generative as Rob's has been, and will be. But Hospitalogy began three or four years ago, shortly after falling ill, as a way for me to think about, really to try to rethink, a poetics of disablement viz. the problematic of the confessional poem. I have almost no energy at the moment, so I'll hold off writing here on the confessional poem as I see its western historical valences, its extraordinarily well-tread (and well-taken) negative critique from (at least) Stein onward. I'll only say here that as the poems came in the wake of my first adulthood sustained interactions with the American healthcare-less system, tropes of confession, the confessional poem, kept coming to mind when thinking about the doctor-patient discourse; the question-answer-question conversation between doctor and patient is not dialogic, nor is it particularly diagnostic - it's confessional. The ways in which language is internalized, and the patient's mythos of personhood inflated through a cycle of confession, expectation of (expert) epiphany through logos, back into confession again, I found both sensorially miserable and perceptibly interesting. A year or two later I encountered Rob Halpern's work, then Rob himself and The Nonsite Collective, then Disaster Suites, and Rob's interest in a poetics of patiency, which, for Rob, I believe, hooks up intimately with rethinking the use (value) of the lyric, a new lyricism, which is as much a critique of lyrical poetry generally understood as it is an exploration and expansion of "it." So, Hospitalogy quickly became a conversation with both Halpern/lyricism and patiency/disaster, how this complex poetics informs, unhouses, sometimes backspaces the logos of rethinking confession/medical discourses. The books coming out so closely together should make for more interesting conversations between us when we meet up again at Bard College this summer for a semester of teaching.

Thanks very much to Scantily Clad for publishing the work--do visit them, as many of their titles are online in pdf form to read now for free, and since opening their press a couple years ago (at most), they have published some wonderful books.

Meantime, new work of mine can be found in the lovely new issue of The BluePrint Review, care of kind and patient poet-editor, Dorothee Lang. Click here to check it out. And work of mine is soon forthcoming from:

No Tell Motel
Eklesographia: An Imprint of Ahadada Books
Dusie

So, do look out for these subtle works of genius. Seriously, thanks to the editors--Reb Livingston, Amy King, and Susana Gardner--for including my poetry in their pages.