Fiction, Essays, Poems
Feral Ornamentals
March 26, 2021
Poems, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Available for presale now. Cover art by John Green.
Writing Online
See me sink: a branch pulled under. How caught
I must look. The depth’s invisible. I’m dead weight. . .
In 2012, the Belly Button Biodiversity project, a group of scientists exploring the bacterial habitat of the human navel, published their first peer-reviewed paper. They had swabbed 60 navels and found over 2,300 species of bacteria; of those, 1,458 “may be new to science.” Commonality was rare: only eight phylotypes appeared in more than 70% of participants. One person’s navel “harbored a bacterium that had previous been found only in soil from Japan,” where he had never been; another two navels had “extremophile bacteria that typically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents,” places inaccessible to the human body. The vast majority were lonely travelers: they appeared only in one belly button. As it happens, what our navels share may be rare and far-flung.
Essay; Cleaver
Recently, I ruined someone’s moment of mundane joy. The hallways of my campus building were bare—students were taking exams, or locked away in the library and various study nooks they’d marked as their territory, or sprawled on the campus greens. The end of the semester was nigh; my step had a lilt.
Essay; The Southeast Review
There may be nothing new under the sun, but that doesn’t mean we’ve seen or said it all.
Humans see three primary colors; the butterfly perhaps five; the mantis shrimp, a radiant and violent sea creature, perhaps twelve. Bees can detect ultraviolet light. The Himba people, an indigenous group in Namibia, can distinguish between shades of green that other humans can’t.
It’s a human tendency to see one likeness between two people and to assume that likeness implies many more. That narrow identification arose after the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, an epistle to his son that is a memoir and a personal intellectual history. Between the World and Me is formally modeled after James Baldwin’s essay “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” the first of two essays in Baldwin’s remarkable The Fire Next Time; that formal likeness, combined with Toni Morrison’s lone dust-jacket blurb comparing Coates to Baldwin, led almost every reviewer to make the same comparison, usually positively. A qualitative comparison is, essentially, impossible; for us, Baldwin is a figure with a life-long bibliography of stellar essays, stories, and novels. Coates’s career is young, with two books, his writing for The Atlantic, and authorship of a Black Panther comic book series.
Writing in Print
Recent and Forthcoming
The Drowned Man
Poem, Image Journal, forthcoming
Under Glass
Poem, The Gateway Review, Volume 6, Issue 3.
Akin
Poem, Tar River Poetry, Issue 58.2
Dissolve
Short story, Iron Horse Literary Review, Issue 21.1
On Medication
Essay, Salt Hill Journal, Issue 38
Made Out of Words
Essay, Appalachian Review, Issue 44.4
Bio
I live in Central New York and teach in the Department of English at Cornell University. My writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, The New England Review, The Southeast Review, and other venues. My first collection of poems, Feral Ornamentals, will be published by Finishing Line Press in March 2021.
Originally from Arkansas, I earned my M.A. in English at the University of Missouri and my Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati.
Contact
I teach courses in creative writing, creative nonfiction, and reading poetry. I'm available for readings and class visits.