Advice from Winnemac Park

September 1, 2024

This was the summer of two milestones, personal and professional: I moved into the home I bought with my girlfriend and their wife, and I banished the...

Homes beyond harm

May 29, 2024

Hello again from my mind palace of poems and overthinking what to say about them and how they ought to be. Instead of being paralyzed by the breathtaking...

burn it back again

January 10, 2024

(a little treat of new year's art by my beloved talented girlfriend Chris Gleason) As always starting a new year, I'm thinking of "Let the old year burn!"...

About prepositions and freedom

December 8, 2023

(Now that I've finally dug myself out of a depression hole enough to read and write about poetry again, I regrettably must begin this email newsletter with...

A tiny talk; two short spring poems

March 23, 2023

For those of y'all in Chicago, I'm one of 20 people answering the question "What did you see?" in two minutes for 20x2 at GMan next Sunday evening, April 2....

Dreaming the way to keep going

January 21, 2023

In a dream near the end of last year, I was walking through long hallways in a dorm-like building with art and writing tacked to the walls between the many...

How to hold your long gay life

June 17, 2022

So OK I think I’ve been an out queer person for long enough to write a few cranky words about rainbow capitalism for June, our special month of public...

it's too late for countries but it's not too late for trees

May 1, 2022

Time passes. I keep waking up in the cursed hours between 3 and 5 am, wracked with anxiety then, eventually, grateful for birdsong. With one dear person in...

Singing our survival

February 6, 2022

Every once in a while I get reacquainted with a poem or two and want to effuse about poetry, so I thought I'd fire up the old email machine on a platform...

Days are where we live

April 21, 2021

(I appreciate when other folks provide content warnings on their writing so will strive to offer my own going forward.) Last month marked many grim...

A map of the present

February 7, 2021

Everything, as my erstwhile pal the spam horse once said, happens so much. Horse ebooks @Horse_ebooksEverything happens so muchJune 28th 201282,026...

The generosity of endings

December 18, 2020

A year is an arbitrary unit. But as this uniquely universally miserable one comes to a close, I'm thinking often about cycles, and beginnings within endings....

The far side of revenge

November 1, 2020

This will be short. Everything feels fraught two days before the consequential election, and my nerves and concentration are shot, as maybe yours are too....

Let there be light in my house

July 30, 2020

I'm not going to shut up about Black lives mattering and I'm going to keep featuring some brilliant poets of color in these emails. I read one poem and one...

Black is all colors at once

June 19, 2020

It's Juneteenth. It's a celebratory day in Black culture; I got to post some professional tweet content about it. And it's a strange day for white Americans...

Corvids are the largest passerines

May 10, 2020

We've made it through another mass of time, together in our separateness. Poetically and otherwise, here are some things that are getting me through. I hope...

New onions growing underground

March 22, 2020

It's been a while. Here we all are looking at our email. Everything is strange and I have the start of one of my own old never-quite-for-sure-completed poems...

A homonym for ghost

October 21, 2019

Three women stood on the low stage in the glass building one winter evening, bare trees lit behind them. The woman in the center would read some lines in...

Aloud again: GBOMA, Sept. 17, Promontory

September 11, 2019

I'm honored to have been selected for the third time as a semifinalist in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards. GBOMA is a fantastic event. It epitomizes...

Astrology is fake but poems are real

July 14, 2019

Astrology is fake (as the humorous astrology column on the dearly departed website the Hairpin always began) but Cancer season is here, which means my...

In the wet time, breathtaken

May 30, 2019

I have a new zine of poems that I'm proud and excited to share. Breathtaken is a series of eight poems about swimming pools, memory, family and identity. A...

Hi, Cold. I'm Dad.

March 28, 2019

It's not exactly a poem, but I'm delighted to present a new zine I created with the design help of my loving partner, my friend John Morrison, and my very...

You do not have to be good

January 20, 2019

If your social media circles are anything like mine they crumpled in grief this week at the death of Mary Oliver. People who professed themselves not to be...

We would try to imagine

December 27, 2018

Once there were world wars and that's where modernism came from, the horrors of war that were too much to present in a linear narrative or a classical form....

Wild kindnesses

October 30, 2018

When I was a teen trying to be punk rock, my boyfriend decorated the ceiling of his room with setlists from shows, and so I'd sit around making found poems...

When I was a child, I walked around with cameras for hands.

September 12, 2018

That subject line is the first line of a new poem I will be reading at the 25th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards, one week from today. Reciting at...

The plums and the car roof

August 10, 2018

It is the 21st century and my friends and I live on what we call "the bird hellsite." While Twitter has lots of strikes against it (primarily that they value...

Junk is letting go

June 22, 2018

I picked up a glorious junk drawer of a book-length poem at the library last month: Junk, by Tommy Pico. All in couplets, it covers the end of a...

The letter of the law

March 28, 2018

With the mendacity and misdirection involved in American politics, it's easy to lose track that a law, like a poem, is a thing made of words. Enforceable...

Your world doesn't make sense

February 3, 2018

Between Star Trek: Discovery, the comic series Saga, and a despondent postmortem revisiting of Ursula K. Le Guin, I've been on a huge science fiction tear...

Art urges voyages

December 11, 2017

The year that is drawing to a close was my tenth year in Chicago and the centenary of the great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Her poem "We Real Cool" is as...

Poems made of pieces of other poems

September 27, 2017

There are attention games I play with myself as I go from place to place. These are various strategies for attempting to notice my surroundings more, to...

A long history with hurt

August 16, 2017

It is a good week to read Danez Smith. I've been reading his frequently breathtaking collection [insert] boy. And reading the news moved me to revisit the...

James Joyce and being addressable

June 10, 2017

Sometimes a phrase from memory takes me by surprise. Some weeks ago I was walking across the Chicago River with my partner and a friend, talking about...

A real live ghost

January 19, 2017

I don't go in much for quantifying my behavior or experiences. Not for me the Fitbit, the Foursquare, the daily selfie. The one exception is my regularly...

Picking mushrooms at the edge of dread

November 15, 2016

The shock of the recent election can't be ignored. I've spent the past week in grief. Still, "the sun shone / as it had to" on the half of the country that's...

Holding the living

September 1, 2016

We have this dog now. His name is Basil and he is the most perfect being ever to lick his own butt. Having a dog has made me more attentive to the texture of...

The slump experiments

May 31, 2016

Lately I've been in a writing slump. Nothing strikes me as poem-worthy; I struggle to get started and seek out as many distractions as possible. Recently, I...

In a word, a world

April 20, 2016

The week that David Bowie died was also the week that C.D. Wright died. Maybe you had this experience, too: going into public spaces and being surprised at...

Bad poetry, oh noetry

January 18, 2016

The only time I was ever called out in a rap battle, I was wearing a Toothpaste for Dinner t-shirt with the little wobbly guy shouting "shut up shut up shut...

Loss and surprises

December 18, 2015

My beloved email address (erin (at) ibiblio dot org) is sending spam. Having this happen feels to me like a great loss — a disaster. So I'm thinking often of...

Keep telling me what to do

November 15, 2015

I like poems that tell you what to do. They satisfy my inclination to speak in the second person when I write poems, talking to a "you" that's always partly...

entwined / little red knife

October 14, 2015

I'm having a hard time being in my head lately which means I have a hard time writing. (Which is to say: this will be a short message.) Still, I made a poem...

In other homes

September 22, 2015

I have a story in Story Club Magazine. It’s about where I’m from. I hope you’ll read it; I’d love to hear what you think. Without drawing any sort of...

A speck of white paint, off to the side

August 12, 2015

Just as songs can get inexorably linked to a season or a feeling, so can poems. There are poems that are tied to rooms and smells and people in my memory....

May I never be afraid

July 15, 2015

This poem arrived in my life with the force of a benediction. More prosaically, I kept seeing Alice Notley as a tag on things I liked on poetry Tumblr. Alice...

"could do without this"

June 16, 2015

It is considered corny to like Billy Collins. His poems are as easy to read as your standard airport bestseller paperback. This makes them less important...

Dragging a dead poem up a hill

April 12, 2015

For the past eleven days of April I have been writing a poem every day. It’s a challenge that I’ve heard called the grind or a 30/30. I am learning a lot...

You are publicly listening

January 15, 2015

Long ago in Internet Time (which moves much faster than Everyday Life Time) I sent an email where I recommended this prose poem by Claudia Rankine. The poem...

Recent work; future hangs

December 16, 2014

I don’t have a long letter this month. I have a few links to other things I’ve written and done, and one thing I will be doing. If you like reading these...