literary journals

4 Poems in Colorado Review

I’m happy to have a new batch of poems in the print edition of Colorado Review (Spring 2025), edited by Matthew Cooperman. “Threat Multiplier,” “Cause,” “Inc.” and “Indicator Species” are from a manuscript in progress called “Threat Multiplier.” Threat Multiplier is a militaristic term that denotes how climate change creates additional vulnerabilities and augments “security risks.” This set of poems deconstructs that framework and examines the daily, historic, systemic threats that contribute to harming the people, places, and creatures made vulnerable through the extractive practices that preceded and produced climate change.

A preview below. Buy the issue at Colorado Review.

Carolina Quarterly: Review of Fossils in the Making

A new review of Fossils in the Making written by Tegan Daly appears in the Winter 2021 print version of The Carolina Quarterly. You can also read it online here.

The final section, “Remains,” ranges back out from the interiority of “Wagers” to a sort of cataloging of conclusions drawn from earlier ideas. The poems of this section vary greatly in structure, but seem to hold a somewhat cohesive voice. There is a resignation to this section. If earlier poems served as the forming of a hypothesis, “Remains” is the dire findings of the research. The section explores the ecological disasters of our own making with an eerie matter-of-factness.

Editors Ruminate: On the Poetry of Exposure

Cover Image for Ruminate Magazine: Exposure

” Exposure

“A vulnerability index measures exposure. In climate science, it estimates the resiliency of communities that will bear the brunt of rising temperatures and seas. In social work, it identifies who should be prioritized for services according to their health and fragility. In the financial sector, it gauges a consumer’s level of economic insecurity and stress. In all cases, to be exposed is to be subject to harm.”

Read more about the poetry of Exposure & order your copy today. (25% of all proceeds will go to a local sexual assault victims advocacy center (SAVA).

Editors Ruminate: Hauntings

As I sit down to write this reflection, I feel an overwhelming sense of dread. Not for the task at hand, but for the future. Is this what haunting is? I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, at least not how they tend to be portrayed in movies and books. Specters don’t confine themselves to our simple dichotomies of absence and presence, life and death. They are both and they are between. Haunting is an atmosphere produced by these intra-worldly beings: specters of past lives, of present violence, of the seemingly unalterable conditions of what world will be. The four long poems in this issue will haunt you. You will see in them the faces of children who have been relegated to sacrifice zones; how the smallest measure of matter becomes the destroyer of worlds; how a home buckles under the weight of its history.

Read the rest of my Editors Ruminate on Issue 47: Hauntings

What Nature: a special issue by Boston Review

My poem, “Proof of Hunger” has been included Boston’s Review’s special issue, which has both print and online counterparts.

“What Nature,” as Eds. Timothy Donnelly, BK Fischer, and Stephania Heim explain in their introduction, includes poems that “were not written because poetry can save the Earth. They are themselves far cries: urgent calls for rethinking our place on an imperiled planet. Read more here. 

Ruminate Issue 44: Small

The new issue of Ruminate is here and so is my Editors Ruminate blog. Get a sneak peek at these beautiful poems and order a copy today.

O small ones,
To be born!

—“Eclogue,” George Oppen

Small often means vulnerable. As when one person uses power to make another feel small. As when an individual seems insignificant within a sprawling system. Or when a hurricane decimates a city and we witness the extreme precarity of life. But smallness can also be a source of strength. It’s no surprise that this theme is often repeated in children’s stories: The Little Engine That Could, Jack and the BeanstalkThumbelina. Smallness can be the glitch in the system, the wrench in the machine. It can also be a line of poetry that reconfigures how we see the world. An image that unlocks something new. The poems in this issue explore the many implications and iterations of small, from subtle gestures of kindness to passing moments that accumulate to become something bigger than even the poem can hold.

Read more here.