Good news for National Poetry Month!

First piece of good poetry news: last weekend I finished the last piece for Catechesis, my first full-length poetry collection! It is a total of 27 poems and 12 poem-collages: fairytale-girl poems, Silence of the Lambs poems & collages, and Alien poems & collages. I'll give the manuscript a little breathing room, and then I'll start looking for open calls at presses.

Second piece of good poetry news: my poem "Wait a minute, there's movement. It seems to have life—organic life" has been accepted for publication in the Spring 2018 Issue of Passages North! This is the first out of my six Alien poems to be taken by a literary magazine, so it is very encouraging for the rest of the series. Riding the high of this acceptance, I've just submitted the remaining five poems to another crop of journals.

 After nearly four years of working on this manuscript, it's a very strange feeling to be finished. I've been entirely project-focused in my writing for such a long time now, but I no longer have a project on my desk or even waiting in the wings. I'm itching to get back to writing new poems but I have no idea what direction they will move in. Writing the Catechesis poems has made me so much more confident in my voice and style, my relationship with language. There has been so much self-discovery and growth. But for the first time in a few years, I don't have a ready subject. I'm both nervous and extremely excited about what comes next. I'm going to try pulling back a bit and waiting for the next project to float to the surface.

 Happy National Poetry Month, friends!

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