The glose is a form that takes four lines from an existing poem and uses them as the final lines of four ten-line stanzas. I fell in love with this form about a year ago, drawn to the way it allows me to pay homage to other poets and develop my own ideas and language in concert with theirs. Additionally, I find the formal constraints an effective way to create tension in poems that have a strong emotional charge; working within the confines of form forces me to use the analytical part of my brain and helps me avoid falling into sentimentality. 

I hope to write enough gloses for a chapbook, ideally with the poems that provide the epitaphs printed on the facing pages.

Over the last year, I have continued to work on my third collection of poems, Better a Serpent (working title). The poems explore family and the complications that come with a second marriage. Many of the more recent poems also examine the challenges of raising a teenager in this complex and often indifferent world. One of the underlying questions that connects many of the poems is, "How do I convince my son to persevere and embrace the world, when I myself struggle to find meaning?" Ultimately, it is through the act of creation -- poems, music, art -- that we find redemption, and that is the message I hope the collection will convey.

Some of my ideas and experiences are better suited to prose than poetry, and I have recently been experimenting more with creative nonfiction. The process of writing an essay is similar to that of crafting a poem, but I do enjoy the differences, as well. I love the freedom that comes with more space, and I love figuring out the arc of an essay. There is room in an essay to tell a story as well as to reflect on the significance of the experiences, and I find that I use a slightly different voice in my prose writing that has been exciting to develop.