Larks, forthcoming Spring 2025 (Ohio University Press)

news, blurb preview, opening poem and description

If you'd like a review copy (digital or print) of my forthcoming poetry collection Larks when available, send me your name and address(es), and I'll add you to my list! I'm also available for readings (in person/zoom), class visits, interviews, podcasts. Just give me a holler.

Larks description: The core of Larks is rural and mythic and true, circling genealogies of silence and harm in a Southern family, focusing on the relationship and memories of three sisters and Ovid’s telling of Philomel. The landscape of Larks is Southern and country, inhabited by cows, goats, chickens, and barn kittens as much as by the speaker and their sisters, the brother, and the mother. In the book, the lyric poem becomes a vehicle for parsing and articulating history and the self, from the experience of a sister’s home birth to the traumatic erasure (and recovery) of the speaker’s memory. The book’s setting is existential and domestic, tender while also full of sharp grief and documentation. A work of poetic-memoir, Larks asks if poetry can hold the heaviest truths we carry, and the answer is a resounding yes.

Opening poem sneak preview (unpublished), because who doesn’t love an invocation to the muse/to the birds:

Invocation


I do not know whether it is morning      or mourning,
the name of the doves calling      in the hems of day

sometimes, I do not know      the spelling of a single word
or why the couple gesture in their car      making a left turn

tonight the clouds settle on the mountains:       pale pink
and then mist, and then      no mountain

almost every day I say to someone:       “it is not important”
but the wing of it      the beak      the onyx eye 

is that I do not know this      either