I made a playlist for Fossils in the Making! Listen and read more about it at Largehearted Boy. 

My poetry is grounded in music. I do not consider sense to be more important than sound in any hierarchy of “meaning” and often trust what I call the “sonic logic” of a line or phrase more than its semantic logic. For this playlist, rather than choosing songs that influenced or inspired individual poems, I collaborated with musicians Trevor Welch and Levi Bagdanov to do the reverse: to find songs that were conjured or evoked by the music in the poems themselves. What follows, then, is a type of sonic accompaniment for Fossils in the Making that echoes, recalls, and responds to different aspects of the collection.

Read / Listen here. 

Thanks to EcoTheo Review for asking me to discuss the process of writing Fossils in the Making as part of their Micro-Essay Series on First Books.

No one’s asked me for advice, including this essay prompt, but if I were to offer any, it would be to pay more attention to these quiet poems. These poems usually don’t get published. They don’t like being alone. Like our own selves, they are formed through their relationship with others, emerging from the ecology of the book rather than being inserted, fully formed, into it. I think this is where the real joy of a collection comes from—the surprising turns and pitches and swerves that propel the reader through it. Journals and magazines tend to favor poems that resemble hit singles, especially in this like-and-share-driven literary market, but you need quiet poems to bring those poems down to earth and draw them into conversation with one another. Nurturing these interstices is, I think, what turns a collection of poems into a poetry collection.

You can read the full essay here.