Thanks on My Last Days of Preorders

original watercolor cover art by the amazing Jenn Zed

Many thanks to Finishing Line Press publisher Leah Maines and her staff! Despite losing four months of prep time to the Camp Fire, I have learned a lot in Thistle and Brilliant’s two month promotional period. FLP has been great, suggesting books to read on poetry promotion and tutoring me on press releases, print and radio interviews, and swag!

As I shift gears now, to a deeper edit of the next collection (Skeptical Goats), applying to Goddard’s MFA program, and envisioning possible T&B fall tours in Kentucky and the East Coast, I feel firmly supported by friends and family in my current and former homes. I think sentimentally of Kentucky, with a poem Leah once selected for FLP’s journal, Paddock Review. It first appeared in Canary, Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis:

Tupelo Coyote

We were tracing Jack’s Creek
where the woods abducts it from the rolling
hills of dairy cows and tobacco.
I on the asphalt, you behind the tupelos.
You stalked me like a fan
afraid to ask for my autograph.
Those alien eyes,
calculating,
measuring my marrow
bend after turn, always
thirty paces aside.

Now you trot out in the farmlands,
legs like tobacco sticks, mapping the median line.
I am roadside, reading.
You are storybook real.
I speak to you, familiar,
as if you are the family dog.
Your answer is a glare-beam
that rips me, rights me.

You put me in the landscape,
that’s all.

Wherever I’ve lived, as close as my relationships were, this solitude has often populated my poems. As I live in California, far from lifelong friends, as I submit a collection of poems called Heathcote, exploring my intentional community experience, I think of my ultimate solitude poem as being symbolic of my Maryland life, and my distance from it. Included in Thistle and Brilliant, I was honored to have this poem first appear in The Cafe Review:

Folding Chair

I told you then I would take it out back
and kill it with a knife. But I couldn’t do it.
You stumbled upon my love today as then.

It’s a folding chair, forgotten in the woods,
rusting beside living oaks and rotting, jutting stumps,
unsuitable seats. Your mind tries to pick up its stories
from the air around. A picnicker, a hunter, absent minded
yogi. But stories are noise, excuses. Mute air transmits
this year’s bird noise, same as the moment before
and the moment after this chair was left here.

You realize the years, four legs grounded through
snow mounding and hurricanes, the inflating
and shriveling of mushrooms. Fox and mouse,
mouse and beetle, squirrel and squirrel.
Food and urges and panic. I remember loving you.
There was noise.

Mute, awake air, used to being taken in and released,
doesn’t suffer seasons or fools, doesn’t root for predator
or prey, doesn’t pray that you find your own heart
among curly, restless ferns. I still do.

Wren at Not. Love. Poems., T&B event at Blackbird in Chico. Photo by Poemcrazy author Susan Wooldridge.

I still do! Hopefully I’ll visit the East Coast in the fall.

I found that folding chair in the woods of Heathcote and brought it to my cabin as an artifact. After photographing it a few times, one day I slipped on my icy porch steps, fell on it, and turned it into a rusty metal pancake. That wasn’t funny at the time, but now I smile.

If I set any records at FLP it may not be for copies sold but for most people thanked in my book. Some birthed me, literally and figuratively, some give endless feedback in critiquing groups, some donated to The Goat Boat that provided me with a workspace and then saved us all in the Camp Fire. When I see the galleys, I’ll probably want to squeeze in more names. I have asked a lot of my disparate community and you have answered with your usual candor mixed with love and a wink.

As a project person, asking is my job. So for almost the last time in T&B’s promo period, I’ll throw it out–If you haven’t ordered your copies, (and yes, wink-wink, if you’re this late I expect you to buy multiples!) please link to FLP’s T&B page or, if you prefer to order through me, contact me via email or Facebook by April 26th, 2019.