Parts and Other Pieces is the title of my next book. Mark Young's Otoliths press is slated to publish it in a couple of months. It's an 80 page book made up of 4 long poems. It's getting some interesting prepublication feedback. I'm cautiously optimistic that the thing is going to be read.

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It's a beautiful day in Northeastern Ohio. Something I haven't been able to say too often over the course of the last 6 months. Between April and May we had 13 inches of rain. And don't get me started on how much snow I moved over the course of the winter.

It's good to feel the sun and smell the flowers, hear birds and children playing outside.

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Inside and outside: the theme recurs over and over again in my thought.

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Am reading many things and working on a new long poem. Among the reading:

Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics by Timothy Morton (Harvard, 2007) is a treasure. Morton systematically thinks through the ways in which ideas of nature impede our ability to come to terms with the environment.

Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell (Doubleday, 2011) is a timely and much needed new biography of the man who, in the late part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, probably was unique in the degree to which he fought for social justice in these United States. He helped make labor law, he helped the racially oppressed, he created the lawyer advocate, he defended my hero Eugene Debs! Much of his work is being threatened now or being undone. Read this book. Think about this history. Because it is returning with a vengeance. The rich are rising and trampling much of value beneath their feet. Anti-trust laws and union rights are being swept away. The ever reverberating consequences of insatiable greed...


There Is No Year by Blake Butler (Harper Perennial, 2011) is a beautifully realized novel of suffocating surreality wherein a father, mother, son, various doppelgangers, houses, boxes and others evolve toward a telescoping, uhh, resolution.

As to my long poem in progress, I'm as uncertain as ever. Stay tuned.