Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

I currently have three poems online at Counterexample Poetics. The first, “Chant for the Whole” is a clear formal departure from my usual poetics, and it’s my third or fourth attempt to write a poem out of my sheer irritation with the life-coachy advice that if people want to succeed they shouldn’t “think like a victim”. To achieve the slant repetition, I had to bring in briefly stated examples of the less-subtle sorts of victim-blaming it resembles; the repetition imitates and intimates just how often we hear such rhetoric. Whether the content led to repetition or the repetition led to content would be impossible for me to say: I owe the tangle to intuition or poetry martians.

The third poem, “Zales/Jared/Kay” also began in irritation. This time it was with a jewelry commercial. Any guesses which one? Apparently, irritation makes me want to repeat myself.

Between these two poems, “Titanoboa cerrejonensis” started out as a more light-hearted piece about the recently discovered fossilized remains of a giant snake. Unfortunately, that light-heartedness got lost in a slaughterhouse.

This is apparently the sort of thing I write when I’m extremely happy.

Related posts:

1. Progress, Change, Poetics
2. Thursday Read Write Poem

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