My first book, “Wrecks,” will be published by Noemi Press
Signing the contract with Noemi Press for the publication of my first book.
My first book, Wrecks, is a finalist for the Noemi Book Award and will be published by Noemi Press in October 2025.
Wrecks is a collection of poems inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the mid-1800s. The book investigates how the human–nonhuman binary and the dehumanization it enables makes space for violence—against animals and the environment, but also against other humans. It engages my own experience of dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates my complicity in systems of structural racism, and my inheritance as the descendant of colonizers.
Noemi is an innovative small literary press that has published dozens of brilliant books since it was founded in 2002. What’s more, many of their books have had a profound influence on my work—particularly Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian, which taught me a great deal about how to write the poems in Wrecks.
Wrecks has been an unusual and challenging book to write from the beginning. It has sometimes felt like swimming against a current, and many have questioned my obsession with these poems along the way. I’ve been writing and revising this book since 2016, and it has not been easy, but I loved writing the poems, and that kept me going. It is a real honor to be published by Noemi, and it has already been a pleasure to work with their incredible team. Many thanks to Suzi F. Garcia, Anthony Cody, Diana Arterian, and Sarah Gzemski for believing in this strange little book.
I began writing the poems that would lead to Wrecks during my MFA at the University of Washington, and I believed at first that the book was about the great auk. But as my fellow writers have pushed me to interrogate the broader themes of the book and what they mean to me, it has come to be about so much more. I’ve ever grateful to my writing group, Patrycja Humienik, Erin Marie Lynch, and Gabrielle Bates, for helping me work through so many of these poems. And I’m thankful for my mentor, the brilliant Linda Bierds, for believing in this work from the beginning, and for being the one to tell me that I wasn’t just writing more poems for a first collection, but a separate book.
The publication of my first book is the realization of a lifelong dream that began when I wrote and bound a book with wallpaper scraps when was five years old. I’ve been submitting poems since I was twelve. For so long, I’ve hoped to one day be able to hold my own book in my hands. It has been a difficult and painful road to get here, so there are days when I still find it hard to believe it is finally happening. But there are more people than I can count who have helped me along the way—francine j. harris, Xan Forest Phillips, Joy Priest, Abi Pollokoff, Ainsley Kelly, Rachel Edelman, Eli Briskin, Amanda Baker-Patterson, Brent Schaeffer, Kary Wayson, Knox Gardner, Pimone Triplett, Richard Kenney, Martha Serpas, Andrew Feld, and Billie Swift, to name a few. I will ever be seeking new ways to thank them.
Select poems from Wrecks are forthcoming this winter from the Seventh Wave, and others are already out in the world:
Several poems feature a character named witch-auk, who appears throughout the manuscript:
“witch-auk & me stop over in my hometown,” selected by Joy Priest to appear Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets’ Anthology (Sarabande Books, 2023).
“Great auk in the afterlife,” Poet Lore. Summer/Fall 2021 “Surrealism and Strangeness” folio, selected by Tarfia Faizullah.
“when we are found we will be fused,” West Branch. Selected by guest editor Joy Priest.
“‘Memoir of the late John Wolley,’ by Alfred Newton” and “Notice of an Ice-carried Boulder at Borgholm,” in Nimrod International Journal (Spring/Summer 2019).
“On the Recrystallization of Fallen Snow,” in Beloit Poetry Journal (Fall 2018).
“Torches,” in Bennington Review (Fall/Winter 2017).
