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.