Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide Anthology Release

It’s here: Infrasonic Press’s Rust Belt Artists Against Genocide, a multimedia Palestine solidarity publication based drawing heavily from artists in Erie, PA and Buffalo, NY, w/all profits going to the Doctors Without Borders Emergency Relief Fund and the Palestine Youth Movement. Since the Lebanon Peace Deal, the entity’s attacks on Gaza have continued, starvation continues, the [worst thing] continues (you know this, right?). Heartening to see artists adapt their work to the circumstances. It can be a fraught process yeah, but linking our culture-making to material support is better than silence. Lv seeing friends, artists new to me, and activists from across the Rust Belt sharing this space–& foregrounding our own regional settler-colonial context. & being weird, & wild, & pungent, & thought provoking. I got a piece in there too. A lot of the material is free online – but you can purchase too, if you wanna redirect some of those culture $s or donate directly to these orgs. Free Palestine (should be common sense).

3 New Poems in The Dialogist

Snow healing the cracked blocks of Buffalo //// 3 new poems at The Dialogist //// (actually published awhile ago but getting to post in the post-semester hangover) //// Thx thx thx to eds. Angelo Mao & Timothy Ashley Leo //// OR My great love is walking around Buffalo, getting to know it cracked block by block its life, entropy and repair & then to think of my friends among this & see the yellow smudge of memory in the light: futures refracted into the cataclysmic & ordinary each an itinerary through the real & imaginary memory & expectation, as if the city could change in light of our being, could change in spite of the whorling, centripetal force of all the $ & dividing & organizing of the ruling class, a normal, slow rolling disaster & the make-do of everyone else, getting by, taking care thru it all: night classes, feeding strays, plotting gardens while on call. &, yeah, snow. This particular sequence is snow-flooded. I love the snow when it evens and levels and brings us out talking to each other over our shovels.

Entering the Dread: A Close Reading of “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed”

Sometimes a poem comes flap and claw out of you, weird child, sticky & burning. That’s how I felt about “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” (published in Oversound 9) You hope that poem gets some kind of life, as it streaks out, gross and glittering, because it took with it half of some kidney-like, two-lobed organ that you didn’t know you had but now feel it’s partial, unsettling functioning. Metaphor–straining! But, you see, it’s the kind of thing I, as a writer, hope to look at again, through someone else’s eyes because it distends under my gaze.

Anyway, I’m grateful Kent Shaw took the time to give “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” a close read. It’s a poem whose mesh tries to hold several of my most painful years in returning to Buffalo and painful years for Buffalo and recreate an experience of time as recursive and piling w/o release. And Shaw does marvelous work examining its threads and working in a way that refuses to reductively thematize the poem. His series “Spectacular Poems” does a difficult thing. While many close-readings sterilize their subject, these seem to animate the readers’ own reading of the poem with possibility while also up while making some larger, thoughtful point about poetry.