Poetry

I’ve talked about it in my newsletter and on social media, but I’m not sure I’ve yet broken the news here on this blog that my longstanding interest in reading poetry has, over the past year or so, turned into an interest in writing poetry.

It’s not completely out of nowhere – in 2018 I wrote a poem that appeared in the “Birth Control” issue from the much-missed Cliterature feminist journal. And “By Steam and By Sail,” in Litro, is a prose poem (I was challenging Carole Maso, particularly her Aureole, when I wrote it – indeed the bit of French slang that inspired the whole piece came from the first part of the book, “The Women Wash Lentils”).

Still, it surprised me as much as anyone. The kickoff was when I had some concepts I wanted to write out as stories, but couldn’t quite make work as a thousand+ words of prose. I started writing in lines and stanzas instead, and playing with sounds, and….

Fast forward to this winter, when I received my first acceptance! “Three Years After,” a six-line poem about intimacy and loss, will appear in Tiny Wren Lit’s anthology All Poems Are Ghosts.

Tiny Wren makes beautiful little chapbooks and I look forward to sharing this one with you when it’s published!

Maybe it’s no surprise that quite a few of my poems are about grief – but it’s also no surprise, I’m sure, that a ton of them are about sex. I entered a sheaf of especially queer sex poems (or especially sexy queer poems?) into the 2022 Penrose Prize for Excellence in Poetry from LGBTQIA+ Writers and I’m delighted to share that they made it onto the longlist!

You can see the full list and read the 3 winning poems on the Death Rattle/Oroboro Lit Journal site.

I’ll be looking for final homes for my Penrose entries this year – I really cannot wait to share them with you!

(Also, keep an eye on The Whorticulturalist, who accepted an early and very sexy narrative poem from me last summer.)

In the meantime, I’m continuing to share excerpts of poetry I’ve loved reading on my Tumblr, and also on the Tumblr of the New Smut Project – speaking of which, if you have erotic prose poetry or flash fiction seeking a home, NSP opens to submissions for Erato II, our second anthology of short-short pieces, on April 2nd! Full guidelines are here.