My mother tries to translate it on the phone:

Harnică means you’re vrednică.
You’re pricepută, îndemânatică, dibace.
You work with spor.
Muncești cu râvnă.
Lucrezi cu zel.

For me, a poem is "finished" when it flows so smoothly that lines will randomly pop into my consciousness like catchy song lyrics. I know it's time to step away from the page when everytime I make a change, no matter how minor, I revert back to the original.

Between the day in June when Mrs. Harrison booked her death 

and the day in July when the doctor came, 

she grew heavy in the hospital 

on twelve last suppers.

Love felled her like a tree
a robin’s egg in a windstorm
a pretty blue thing
a gift of spring.

The whole of The Blue Gate weaves threads of love and loss. But in the long central section, where I’m thrust into grief, reality ravels and unravels. Death destabilizes, throws one into a space and time that is unknowable. I move physically into an unknown country but emotionally hold close to what is lost. In this time of transformation, I walk in two simultaneous realities. 

Although a collection of minimalist poems (or one long poem composed of minimalist fragments), Wound Archive has a lengthy origin story. In 2016-2017, I was a Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. I was researching instances of Holocaust survivors reading poems as part of their testimonies and was deeply invested in exploring the place poetry held in survivor testimony.

Let us accept the crowd-fostered confusion of person. Let us precariously enjoy the close-call near-cliché which hugs us with homely familiarity: are we nearly there yet?  Let us reconsider the title: The Character Actor Convention. Convention – is this the only  Convention we may find? Or not?

Poetry that explores our “post-truth” society, NMLCT holds up a mirror not only to nature, but also to its unnatural distortions and facsimiles. Imagine The Matrix retold by the reanimated cyborg bodies of the Brothers Grimm.

The last time I attended a writing workshop was in 2014. It was the Tone + Text opera workshop in Vadstena, Sweden at the Vadstena Akademien, a school for opera artists. I was there as a librettist. This was part two of the workshop, which lasted four days, culminating in a showcase of scenes written by librettists who had been paired with composers at part one, also a 4-day affair that took place the previous year.