New Work at Heavy Hands Ink

A pair of poems in the new issue of Heavy Hands Ink. Available in a free download.

Some pleasant new work appears in the latest issue of Blood Lotus. Take a peak. I beg you. I dare you.

New Piece

Some new work up at Breadcrumb Scabs. Dig it.

“Giving Up the Ghost”

Much to my delight, I found a PDF of my poem “Giving Up the Ghost,” that originally appeared in “the minnesota review” and later in my collection The Rust Belt MRI, is available online. Take a look!

“Love Poem for Scott Walker”

Many states, including my own state of Ohio, are facing severely anti-union bills. Anti-union sentiment is nothing new, and these governors and legislators are not creative or original in the least. They repeat century-old arguments while calling them new solutions for a way for.

Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us that responsibility means literally the ability to respond. There are many forms this response can take – in Ohio, a response to SB 5 is to organize a public referendum vote with the goal of repealing this un-democratic law. But poetry can be a response, to. And in that vein, I wrote the poem “Love Poem for Scott Walker.” Let me know what you think of it.

Poem-A-Day (PAD) Challenge

I’ve tried this challenge several times now, always with abysmal failure. Perhaps the habit of a daily writing routine is just too foreign to my practice. Who knows? But this year, I have several writing projects in mind that are all outside my comfort zone, and so shaking the dust from my writing habits becomes a necessary practice. The good news – it’s day three of the Poem-A-Day challenge, and I’m hanging on! For anyone interested, I’m using the prompts suggested by Robert Lee Brewer via his wonderful blog “Poetic Asides.”

In the interested of making the PAD challenge a little more orderly for me, and to cut down on the responsibility of “finishing” every poem by forcing it to fit in the box of my preconceived notions, I’ve decided to write all my PAD poems as ten line poems, in five sets of couplets. I’m also trying to write with a different voice, different themes. Different everything, I hope. The pieces are so short they feel like poetic note-taking. I’m also not worrying about editing too much. That is, I’m not worrying about the writing as “final,” I’m not going back and nit-picking, on obsessing. At least not right now. Maybe when the month is over, if it’s worth it, I can go back in and pick, pick pick away.

I thought about trying to post my daily poem here, but that just seems like overkill. And as these aren’t finished pieces, I have no desire to foist them upon unsuspecting readers. Consider yourselves lucky.

“Asians in the Library of the World,” by Beau Sia

via Radius: From the Center to the Edge.

Skrillex – “This Is a Shark Attack”

Amsterdam Press + Bragging Time

Amsterdam Press has announced the winner of their annual Flip Kelly Prize for poetry – they’ll be publishing Joshua Gage’s chapbook Bedtime Stories. Joshua runs the Deep Cleveland Poetry Hour, so it’s especially wonderful to see this collection receiving such positive attention. Congratulations, Josh!

On a more self-congratulatory note, my own chapbook manuscript Life Models was selected as an Editor’s Choice by Amsterdam Press! Woo-hoo! Thanks to everyone at Amsterdam Press; looking forward to working with you!

“Drunk Catholic priest offers oral sex to cop”

How can I say no to a headline like that? And to sweeten the deal, this took place in Akron, OH, not too far from where I live (Canton,OH).