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I am pleased to announce that Jerry Jazz Musician's Winter 2024 collection, in which two of my poems are included, is now online. The poems are "Black Saint," and "For Eddie Palmieri," which you can find by searching the page, but feel free to read the rest of the collection as well! The collection can be found here. For Eddie Palmieri Eddie saved my life last night, with his bandmates on the bandstand; what a bastard was I to turn my back on loving rhythms...

Welcome 2024! I'd like to kick off the new year with some updates regarding my writing and plans for the website in the coming year. For starters, I have a handful of publications to look forward to in the near term. As I mentioned here I will have two pieces coming out in the Jerry Jazz Musician Fall/Winter collection later this month. The expected publication date is January 19th. "When Lovely Words Will Not Appear" will be coming out in Uppagus in May. Additionally, my poem, "Triptych: Squashed Bird on Driveway" has been accepted for publication in Ripple, the inaugural volume of the Quibble Quarterly! The poem should be posted on Quibble online sometime this month, while the quarterly will be available for purchase in print starting March 22nd. This poem is something of a spiritual successor to "There Are Thin Green Shoots," which appeared in Untenured last month. Finally, I'd like to begin posting here regarding my novel-in-progress, Pastícheo Incógnito. What is Pastícheo Incógnito? Who is Pastícheo Incógnito? How do I pronounce Pastícheo Incógnito? These are all great questions! Stick around to learn more, I plan on posting updates on my progress here as well as some small excerpts of the writing. Best wishes to all in the new year!

As I mentioned in my post regarding my poem, "For Sides Live," Jerry Jazz Musician will be releasing its Fall/Winter Jazz Poetry Collection in January of this coming year. I am happy to say that two of my poems, "For Eddie Palmieri," and "Black Saint" will be featured in the collection! In the meantime, you can check out the Summer 2023 collection here.

My poem, "There Are Thin Green Shoots" is now online with the publication of Untenured Issue 2.3. The poem appears on page 44 of the issue but as always I hope you will spend some time with all of the included pieces, as well as the excellent art. Many thanks to the editors of Untenured for including me and curating such a great collection. You can read the issue here. This poem was inspired by an experience I had this past summer living in Pittsburgh's east end which, as any of its residents can tell you, is chock-full of deer. Here is a taste of the first few lines: There Are Thin Green Shoots emerging where the deer reposed, poking past the grasses she had matted, her four limbs tucked between her torso and the earth...

Today's poem is "Imagining Synge," a brief lyric piece inspired by John Millington Synge's (1871-1909) travel memoir The Aran Islands as well as my own travels in Ireland, including a visit to Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands. Best known as a playwright, Synge was also a prolific collector of folklore, a popular vocation among members of the Irish Literary Revival, including Lady Augusta Gregory, whom Synge partnered with, alongside W.B. Yeats, in founding the Abbey Theatre. In Synge's day, the Aran Islands were a bastion of the oral story telling traditions of Ireland, and his travels allowed him to document many tales of the Seanchaithe (oral storytellers) living there. Synge's best known play, The Playboy of the Western World, was inspired by one such tale. If anyone is interested in Synge's The Aran Islands, I would highly recommend the audiobook read by Donal Donnelly, as hearing Synge's lovely prose and especially his accounts of the stories he encountered read aloud brings one closer to the oral tradition the book documents and celebrates. During my freshman year of college, I took part in a year long "Focus Seminar" on Irish Literature and Culture, which included a trip to Ireland over the summer. This class, perhaps more than anything else, has left its mark on my literary tastes and ambitions, and I hope "Imagining Synge" can capture some of the wonder the Irish literary tradition has inspired in me. "Imaging Synge" was first published in the Fall, 2023 (volume 17, issue 3) edition of The Road Not Taken, a Journal of Formal Poetry, "formal" meaning poetry that follows a set metrical or rhyme scheme, not that one must put on a suit and tie to read it. My poem appears on page nineteen, but I would invite you to read through the whole of the issue (or at least the subsection my poem appears in, "Evoking the Past") as much care been taken by the editors in thematically organizing the collection. You can read "Imaging Synge" along with the rest of the Fall, 2023 edition here. A few notes on phrases I use in the poem: "Inis Mór" - the largest of the Aran Islands. "Curragh" - a wooden boat with hide or tar-coated canvas bottom used on the Aran Islands. "Dún" - an ancient or medieval hill-fort.

With this post, I am getting closer to being caught up on collecting my currently published pieces here. Today's poem is "Four Sides Live," a kind of ode to jazz I wrote a couple months ago. Anyone who knows me knows how important music, and jazz in particular, is to me. I began listening to jazz purposefully in the latter half of my highschool years, beginning, as many do, with albums like Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme. This poem references two giants of the piano, Bill Evans and Chick Corea, as well as the drummer Jack DeJohnette, who joined Evans' trio in 1968. I hoped to capture the timelessness of their music, timelessness being a remarkable achievement given the particularity and inimitability of these musicians' signature sounds. "Four Sides Live" originally appeared in Jerry Jazz Musician, a one of a kind outlet for lovers of jazz and literature. Jerry Jazz Musican will be featuring its fall/winter poetry collection sometime in January and its jazz haiku collection in February or March of the coming year, so be on the lookout for those as well. "Four Sides Live" can be read here. Here is a sample of the first few lines: It tickles my fancy the way francophone announcers ornately say the names of jazzmen in those live recordings put to reel in Montreux...

I am happy to announce that my poem, "There Are Thin Green Shoots" will be appearing in the next issue of Untenured. This is a poem for which I'd been searching for a suitable outlet for quite some time and I consider it among the best of my current output, so I am particularly proud to have it published. Untenured describes itself as a home of "public scholarship for the 21st century," and seeks to "provide access to information while imagining a future without barriers to intellectual growth, opportunity, and freedom." The issue should be out soon, so check back in a week or so to see the poem. In the meantime, you can read the current issue of Untenured here.

Next up in my series of posts documenting previously published writing, I am featuring a set of shorter poems originally published in the 2nd Edition of the Ulu Review. The Ulu Review is a relatively new publication based in Hawaii which features writing with "a mythological flair, or the type of everyday magic found in coincidences and happenstance." As a lover of mythology as well as the subtler manifestations of the magical in literature, I think this is a great focus for a literary journal to take up. I have three poems featured in the 2nd Edition, namely: "Magical Realism," "Synecdoche," and "On Chaos Theory, 'Canon Events,' and the Contingency of Being." You can read them here.

I am pleased to announce that my poem "When Lovely Words Will Not Appear," has been selected for publication in the upcoming May 2024 issue of Uppagus. As the title implies, this is a piece I wrote while dealing with a bout of writer's block. Uppagus is home to some stellar poetry, and holds a sentimental status for me as it is the first publication to accept my work. I am thrilled to be appearing there once more in the upcoming May issue. In the meantime, check out their latest, Issue 59.

For the past year or so I've been recording in my notes app any potential title that comes to mind. Now, the common wisdom dictates that titling a work should be the final step in its production, but I think working backwards from a title and imagining what such a work would be like makes for an interesting exercise. Here are a few that you may find intriguing: "My Sadness Speaks a Tongue I Never Learned" A touch of melodrama here, no doubt - fitting perhaps for a song by The Smiths. Regardless, I like the idea of self-alienation this title captures. I recently finished watching Scenes from a Marriage (both the HBO version and the cinematic cut of Bergman's original) and was struck by the episode title, "The Illiterates." The idea is that however the couple tries to "unpack" what went wrong for them, their analysis is ultimately nothing but empty noise; they have no language by which to decipher what has happened in their shared life. Although poetry generally seeks to find words for the inexpressible aspects of our inner worlds, I think it is important to recognize that it can also give voice to that very inexpressibility, as ironic as that may seem. "The Basking Rock" This puts me in mind of a coming of age tale set somewhere in the American south. Two friends share a secret hideaway, a large flat rock by a stream or creak where they can be away from their families and communities, alone together in the sun as the water burbles by. "Housekeeping in the Bardo" Full disclosure, I was thinking of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo when I came up with this one. I have yet to read it, but hope to soon as it looks to be solidly up my alley. The "Bardo" is the liminal space between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism. The so called Tibetan Book of the Dead is originally titled Bardo Thödol, which translates to "liberation in the intermediate state through hearing." It is essentially a travelers' guide to this intermediate state. By throwing in "housekeeping" I hope to imply a more lighthearted "slice of life" tone, as strange a place for a "slice of life" the Bardo may appear.

This will be the first in a series of posts highlighting my published poems. First up is "Urban Renewal," which I began composing while walking through Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood on the way to the bouldering gym. It is a part of the city in which I enjoy spending time, and I relish that my gym's location gives me such frequent occasion to do so. There are good restaurants and coffee shops to be found, along with several boutiques which are generally out of my price range but nevertheless make for good window shopping. On the day "Urban Renewal" began to take shape, I was struck by the ways in which Lawrenceville is emblematic of the history of the city, from the smog-laden steel town where Fifth Avenue's finest sourced their wealth to the marginally trendy tech and healthcare center it is today. "Urban Renewal" was first published in Issue 57 of Uppagus. Follow the link to read it. Below is a sample of the first few lines. Here you see billboards bolted onto new construction, trendy townhomes, tall and narrow; dormant smokestacks taller still: new money's retribution on the methods of the old...