Flourish
Flourish is my fourth book of poetry, forthcoming from 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 or are forthcoming 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.