Portfolio
Writer’s Statement
I write poetry for the same reason I read it: to be startled by a sudden apprehension of beauty or insight. When I first discovered Sylvia Plath in the pages of my high-school textbook anthology, I thrilled to her “riddle in nine syllables.” I was electrified by e. e. cummings, and rocked by the music that is Langston Hughes. Since discovering those first loves, I continue to be amazed by what the sound and sense of words can do, how they lift, as Shelley says, the veil of the familiar. Through a poem, a clumsy making, I make out, however dimly, the unmakeable; I am unmade and remade. So I write to be awakened, and I write in order to see.
Through precision of form, language, image, and sound, my poetry aims to dig into the mud-luscious mix of anxiety, sensuality, doubt, love, beauty, and loss that inheres in our shared human experience. While the bulk of my work is written in syllabic verse, I also explore a variety of other forms ranging from pantoum and sestina, to blank verse and alliterative-accentual, to sprung rhythm and prose poem, and more. From the “tangled ripe undergrowth” of “sleep’s black wood” to milk-drunk orchids, birds in palpitations, drowned lovers, and a headless Christ, these poems invite you to “reconcile yourself to clay” and tamp down on this one wild anagogical life we’ve been given.

Publications
My poems have appeared in several literary publications.