05.12.2023
comment 0

“The Wound” in Poetry Daily

On Sunday, Poetry Daily re-published my poem “The Wound” from Fugue & Strike. Thank you, Poetry Daily. Here’s a statement I wrote on the poem:

“The Wound” references the creative, successful organizing to remove racist developer Carl Paladino from the Buffalo Board of Education. This included bringing meetings to a standstill with song. It responds to the refrain of a reactionary at a Richard Spencer talk at the University at Buffalo (gloriously disrupted): “burn it all down.” In form it follows Octavio Paz’s “The Wound” and shares the title of a great Jay Besemer poem.

This poem would be nothing without the organizers and friends who did what they did and wanted me to know about it, many of which are continuing to take disruptive action in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as well as their assault on southern Lebanon—a genocide armed and funded by the U.S.

The war machine: shut it down.

This poem is nothing without you.

09.08.2023
comment 0

A Fugue in the Windfall Room

Thanks to Windfall Room & Zach Savich for posting my reading of “Fugue 20 | Consumer Cooperative Bookstore” from my latest book Fugue & Strike.

Here’s what I have to say about it: “Here’s a poem about working at a consumer cooperative bookstore written while I was working at a consumer cooperative bookstore. Non-poet voice: “just work places start with workers being in charge.” Readers bring me back to this poem, particularly Max, a young union organizer, who asked me how I came up with vomiting gold. I don’t know. That’s just how it feels to give away my only life to wage labor. The location of this recording is a chair in my ‘office’ (never really set up–we are between more permanent places), specifically the chair where I zone out after work and try to purge the reactionary feelings work germinates in order to become something that resembles myself again. Instead of zoning out, impulsively, I recorded this poem. I’d been trying to film in my neighborhood but the sound wasn’t good so I figured what the hell. I sent two other takes at two other locations to Windfall Room. They liked this one.”

There’s a gorgeous reading by Chicago mainstay Joel Craig, too, in The Windfall Room.

25.07.2023
comment 0

new poems from the new mess

weird timing. I should be (am) trying to get Fugue & Strike into your hands (o plz plz read it sir! sirrah!) but here they are

5 joy/grief-struck Buffalo poems from the next sprawling thing in the Summer 2023 issue of Action, Spectacle.

whose movement mirrors long lockdown era rambles across its often empty (seeming, though trace-crowded), more often cracked and pot-holed, and only sometimes good-enough streets & sidewalks–a kind of rhythm that got implanted through repetition across a few hundred poems

& trying to get the city as it is & is felt & as it has been prevented from becoming in the ten years I’ve been here.

there are many cities in each city. here’s some.

I wouldn’t have let these poems go (feeling protective), I don’t think, unless my friend, Hostile Books conspirator, and knock-down writer, Angela Veronica Wong, hadn’t asked for something (ty).

v happy to see these poems beside those of ppl I respect & admire: Steven Karl, Alison Roh Park, Rodrigo Toscano, and Wendy Trevino.

also, there’s a link to Fugue & Strike in these poems through my love of waste and scholarship on, well, excrement, waste infrastructure, and the ways municipalities do an do not accommodate bodies. Public restroom poem!