COVER ART

SUMMER 2022

Artist Kiki Smith has approved use of two of her pieces for the covers of my forthcoming chapbook, The Needles Road, and full-length collection, In the Hall of North American Mammals. Several poems in each take inspiration from Smith’s work. And as a longtime admirer of this formidable maker, I couldn’t be more thrilled and grateful. Below is her lithograph “Born” (2002, Kiki Smith) which will grace the cover of the Seven Kitchens chapbook.

Poetry Moment

Spring 2022

Poetry Moment highlights the wealth of poets and poetry in Pennsylvania. The series is a collaboration between WPSU (Penn State’s PBS and NPR Member station) and a central Pennsylvania poet, who hosts the show. Currently, my dear friend and colleague, Todd Davis hosts Poetry Moment. But last year, another friend and colleague, Shara McCallum selected my poem “Things That Go” for an episode. Listen here.

McCallum writes:

“‘Things That Go’ is a spare yet resonant lyric poem, where each detail and description constructs two worlds at once. The literal one is a domestic interior, a mother and young daughter at bathtime and bedtime in a cloistered scene. The figurative realm is the world the mother know lies outside. The mother-speaker-poet of the poem is the conduit who allows us to see into both at once. The toys capsizing in the tube signal the larger world’s catastrophes. They toy train’s ‘charging engine’ prompts the mother’s reflections on their aginin and loss, neiyhter or which she has the power to stop. But she desires to keep them at bay. Her desire is enclosed in the poem’s final image of snow as a ‘white silence.” that silence, like the mother’s protective love, is a talisman and momentary balm.”

Publication News

FALL 2021/WiNTER 2022

As the days grew shorter and darker this season, I learned that a collection of poems I’ve been working on since 2008 are finally coming into the light, in not one but two forms. In November, Ron Mohring selected the chapbook manuscript The Needles Road for publication in his Editor’s Series. Many thanks to him and Seven Kitchens’ Press, home to several series and many poets I admire. Ron has a heart (and hand) of gold, designing, printing, and binding each limited run chapbook by hand.

Then in January I learned the full collection of this same group of poems, In the Hall of North American Mammals, was selected by Devon Miller-Dugan for the 2021 Cider Press Review Book Award. The collection circled many prizes and presses over the years, but Cider Press Review kept calling and what good fortune to have answered the call. It can be difficult to describe one’s own work. So I’ll leave it to Miller-Duggan, from the announcement.

Judge Devon Miller-Duggan writes:

“While moving through both the terrors of parenting and the even more frightening recognition that children have to be let go, this book still finds ways to acknowledge the delicacy and tension of childrearing with grace and whimsy. While managing that nerve-inducing balance, it also finds the ways in which, like nearly every 17th century Dutch still life painting, being a parent paints everything in life with an eye to inevitable mortality. Turning the Red Riding Hood narrative into a leitmotif that meditates on the fragility of both those who let go and those who are let go turns the book into an exquisite and ferocious intersection between language and discomfort.”

PUBLICATION NEWS

WINTER/SPRING 2019 - 2020

A number of my poems entered the larger world in the midst of the pandemic. "Fugue" honors a life at its end, “Matins Volta” a life at its beginning. The first is for my late grandmother, Dorothy Wilson Peterson, born April 30th, 1916 in Weiser, Idaho. The second, for my daughter, Esmée, born in Roaring Spring, PA. She was twelve in May. Thank you Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art for publishing both.

Thank you also to Transom (for “Small Bodies” and “Motif”), Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters (“Mirrette on the High Wire” and “Exercises”) and Fourteen Hills (for “I Begin to Forget the World Without Her”) and for your universally loving treatment of these tender pieces.

I’m also so thrilled that my poem “The Language of Water” (first published in Palette Poetry) will soon appear as part of Roxana Cazan and Domnica Radulescsu’s Voices on the Move: An Anthology by and About Refugees. Congratulations to the editors and to all involved! And, of course, deepest thanks to Solis Press.

BERLIN TEMPELHOF

JULY 2019

Travel funding from Penn State Altoona’s Division of Arts & Humanities supported a trip to Berlin this summer where I spent many hours on the runways of Tempelhof Field. Berlin Tempelhof Airport (now Tempelhof Field) was, among other things, the site of the Berlin Airlift and is now a protected pathway for migratory birds. The metaphors of flight, of arrival, return, and departure are obvious and alive in this vast space. Full of odd angles and ripe contradictions, Tempelhof was notably, and until very recently, the site of an extensive and controversial refugee camp. Yet next to the fenced off area of the now empty container village are circus tents, coffee carts, and acres and acres of open public space.

Berlin is a city littered with memorials and monuments, as anyone who’s been there knows. I spent an afternoon at the Gartenstraße Berlin Wall Memorial under a blazing and unusually hot sun, stepping in and out of the deep shadows of rows of stark rusted iron beams. I was moved by the memorial’s wise design, by its simplicity, by the very fact of it—living proof of societies’ and people’s ability to transform great divisions over time into something meaningful, or so we hope.

PUBLICATION NEWS

SPRING 2019

I was so pleased to see three of my poems from The Needles Road manuscript make their way into the wider world this spring. Thank you, Arts & Letters, for publishing “Trick Rider” and “Election Day” in your Spring 2019 issue. And thank you, Poetry East, for taking “The Crook and the Vine.”

It was also a great pleasure to be invited to contribute to Voices on the Move: An Anthology of Literature and Art by and about Refugees from its editors, writers and scholars Roxana Cazan and Domnica Radulescu.

FACING DISPLACEMENT - STUDeNT PRESENTATION

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

Today my students presented their thoughts and poems on the topic of displacement in the global sphere to a rapt and often teary audience. They blew me and everyone in that room away. One community member said it was the first time she felt hope in two years. These young writers were so present, so generous, so alert to a range of issues relating to refugees, migrants, and detention, not to mention vulnerability in all its politically/economically/environmentally/socially imposed forms.

In their willingness to stand up in front of a crowd, read their powerful work and speak the truth for five minutes a piece, these students braved their own vulnerability. And in doing so, in presenting what they did, they made a case for recognizing vulnerability as strength (not weakness, not something to reject), both in ourselves and in the most vulnerable members of society. Mary Oliver’s lines come to mind, from her poem “Sunrise”—

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

Thank you, Penn State Altoona English 297: “Facing Displacement” students, for entering fire today and for taking us with you.

And many thanks to my colleague and co-pilot in this endeavor, the indomitable Dr. Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen, Associate Professor of German, English and Comparative Literature; to Penn State Altoons’s Division of Arts and Humanities and its English Program; and to Penn State University’s Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence for the funding that allowed us to travel as a group to Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

PA CENTER FOR THE BOOK’s POEMS fROM LIFE READING

SPRING 2018

What a pleasure it was to be invited to take part in this lovely community program, sponsored by The Pennsylvania Center for the Book. They describe it best (from their website):

“Poems from Life with Juniper Village is a project developed in partnership between the Pennsylvania Center for the Book and Juniper Village Senior Living at Brookline to share and celebrate the lives of Juniper residents with original, individualized poems presented by local poets.”

I met with Miriam Myers, a Juniper Village resident, who, like me, was born in Ithaca, New York. Miriam lived most of her adult life in the State College area, raising many children (and dogs) here and assisting her husband at the family’s veterinary clinic. It was something to try to condense a full and long life into a maximum of forty lines. Still, poetry’s ability to capture vast territories of time and experience in small textual spaces was on proud display this night, as one poet after the next paid tribute to the resident they had been paired with.

Thank you, Pennsylvania Center for the Book and Juniper Village for this ongoing collaboration and for including me in it this year!

VISITing PENN STATE’S BA/MA PROGRAM IN CREATIVE WRITING

FALL 2017

I loved my students and my time as a visiting faculty member at Penn State University’s BA/MA Program in Creative Writing. I came on board, temporarily, the same semester poet Shara McCallum joined full time (see announcement). It was such a gift to be a part of this wonderful program in such esteemed company and to meet the writers and poets who visited while I was there, most notably U.S. Poet Laureate and Director of Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing, poet Tracy K.Smith, and Penn State MFA alumnus and Associate Professor of English at Cornell University, Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon, whose Q&A I had the pleasure of moderating.