Saturday, August 20, 2016

New published poems

I've had two of my poems published at Blue Shift Journal! The first poem, "fieldnotes," was a runner up in their Brutal Nation Special Edition and got Editor's Choice. It's a poem I finished up by cutting apart a fairly different poem that I began thinking about at my first Cave Canem retreat years ago. It was essentially a lot of fragmented ideas about the nature of blackness. But I began to see intersections of a number of racist events in my life that took place in fields.

Here's a shot of the poem, cut into pieces and posted in different configurations on the wall of my studio:


The second poem, called "Prayer to the Small God of Misnomers," is something I wrote at a different residency, VCCA, last year.

And it's unlikely anyone will notice, but I did a lot of work over the last few days to make this website more compatible with small displays (that is, it looks way better on cell phones now). Whew.