Publication: Juniper - A Poetry Journal

And here it is, the Summer 2019 issue of Juniper - A Poetry Journal, which includes my poem, "Saudade." A big thank you to editor Lisa Young for accepting the piece and including me with such luminous other poets as Robyn Sarah, Susan Olding, Susie Petersiel Berg, and the late, great Adele Wiseman. Check it out, reads some poems, enrich your summer!

Acceptance: Juniper - A Poetry Journal

Ahem, and speaking of poetry: I got word this week that my poem, "Saudade", also from the new manuscript in progress, has been accepted for the upcoming summer issue of Juniper - A Poetry Journal. This new-ish online magazine has been rocking it lately, publishing works by such versifying luminaries as Lorna Crozier, Catherine Graham and Molly Peacock.

For those of you who don't know, "Saudade" is a Portuguese term for a rather hard-to-pin-down emotion, a state of melancholic nostalgia, a feeling of loss for something you never actually had; I basically think of it as "a longing for a longing." It was one of the ten-dollar words that didn't make it into my 2017 novel The Slip (a book that I am, Lord love me, tentatively referring to as the first Philip Sharpe novel -eep!) but I thought it would make an excellent basis for a poem. Juniper agreed and will be running it soon. I'll share more details about that when I have them.

Contest placement: FreeFall magazine

Well I woke up yesterday morning to some exciting news: my poem "Dracula, Count of Transylvania, Does an MFA in Creative Writing" has placed third in FreeFall magazine's annual poetry contest. 

This will mark my third poem to be published in the magazine and my second time placing in its annual poetry contest: I came in second back in 2011 with my poem, "On Choosing a Mattress," a slightly different version of which is collected in my poetry book, Weathervane (Palimpsest Press, 2016). I've been a fan of FreeFall for a long while and am very proud to have another poem forthcoming in its pages.

This new poem (which, as you can probably tell from its title, is written in a comic register) is slated to appear in the fall. It's part of a new poetry manuscript I've been working on for the last few years, one I'm hoping - fingers crossed - to finish in the next year or so. Every time I get another piece from it accepted by a literary journal, it helps me to feel like I'm on the right track.