Flourish is my fourth book of poetry, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2020.

In Flourish, multiple meanings catch light—as the leaves of growing things might, or the facets of cut gemstones, or a signal mirror flashing in distress. These poems explore themes of thriving, growth, innovation, and survival, while immersing the reader in the pleasures of language itself—the “flourish” of linguistic gesture, play, form, turn, and adornment. Here, the lens zooms in and out to micro and macro levels, asking us to see the familiar with new eyes. The collection engages with the materials of the worlds we inhabit—natural worlds and those of our own making—and a full spectrum of poetry’s own materials, building worlds of words and illuminating the shadowed terrain of our interior landscapes as well.

Poems from Flourish are featured on the Academy of American Poets website and have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2015 (Scribner, 2015), Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion (ABRAMS, 2015), The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Rescue Press, 2013), and Still Life with Poem: 100 Natures Mortes in Verse (Literary House Press, 2016).

Poems from Flourish have also appeared in publications that include: Birmingham Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Diode, The Hopkins Review, The Iowa Review, Lana Turner, Memorious, The Morning News, New England Review, The New Yorker, OmniVerse, Pinwheel, The Rumpus, Thermos, Versal, and Whiskey Island.

Stet is my third book of poetry, published by Princeton University Press in 2018. Stet takes constraint as catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make (or break) a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body’s own bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Through the processes of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram’s dismantling and binding, Stet’s procedural methods and serious play insist upon the intimacies and connections to be found within the multivalent materials of language written and language sounded.
 
Stet translates roughly as “let it stand,” a proofreading annotation used to retain or return. This sense of uncertainty (changes made and then reconsidered), haunts the collection as its poems explore what is left unsaid through erasures, redaction, and orthographic limitation. How does one “go back on one’s word” or “stand by” one’s decisions? Can a life ever actually be “remade” or “revised,” or are past elements ever-present as palimpsest? The uncertainty of both actions and representations of those actions is the truth of the matter. Embodying the physicality and potential for “re-production” inherent in the collection’s forms and figures, the collection ends figuratively and literally expectant, not searching for closure, but awaiting the messy, living possibilities of what-comes-next.
 
The book as a whole attempts to both trouble and console a reader who, like the speaker-author, longs for a fresh start and new language and must “make do” with building a life out of the materials (linguistic and autobiographical) at hand.