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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

My new chapbook, Extinction Song, launches with Tupelo Press on May 1st. Pre-order available now: tupelopress.org/bookstore/p/...

Cover of Extinction Song (Tupelo Press, 2026).

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

I’ve got two new poems out in Image. Here’s a teaser, but you can read both poems in full on the website — or order the print issue! imagejournal.org/issue-124

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

This is why they hate us. Because we make things. Because we resist their structures of power, and do so with intelligence. Because they know, as Shelley says, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." This one's mine, from Winter, Glossolalia (BSPG, 2022). #smallpoemsunday.

THRUST // The purple-stippled, / brindled cultivars defeat / the heat, wrest moisture / from topsoil desiccated / by the sun's dialectic / with the earth, ripe plums / further ripened, the fogged light / chalked across their skin / gesturing to the red flesh: / the plant supplants a word, world.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

My poem, “The Field Which Had Been a Meadow Once,” is in THE LAST MILKWEED, out now from @tupelopress.bsky.social. The poem takes its title from a poem in @joriegraham.bsky.social’s book TO 2040 (which I highly recommend) and leans into dialogue with Robert Duncan. #poem #newpoem #poetry

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

A poem for #smallpoemsunday. Robert Hass’s “Iowa, January,” one of my favorite small poems in the language.

IOWA, JANUARY

In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Happy MLK Day to all. Power to you.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

DC from the air. (Well, really the VA side of the Potomac.)

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

This week! DC! Busboys and Poets, K St location, Sunday, 5 PM. @busboysandpoets.bsky.social

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Joseph Brodsky’s “Star of the Nativity,” from his Nativity Poems (FSG, 2001, but originally published much earlier). A holiday post for #smallpoemsunday on this day, the shortest of the year. Happy belated #soltice!

In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than
to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain,
a child was born in a cave in order to save the world;
it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart.

To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam
out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team
of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar.
He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.

Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray
clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away—
from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star
was looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

Another short piece for #smallpoemsunday, this one from A. H. Jerriod Avant’s MUSCADINE (Four Way, 2023). #poem #poetry #shortpoem

“Coroner in the Kitchen,” from A. H. Jerriod Avant’s Muscadine (Four Way Books, 2023).

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Krystal Anali Vasquez’s Lady Without Land is out now! I had the distinct honor to blurb the book, which is so smart (and hilarious), and I’m reading with Krystal next month in DC to celebrate its release (Busboys & Poets, K St). #newbook #novel #fiction #hybridgenre #latinxlit

Krystal Anali Vasquez’s Lady Without Land (Texas Review Press, 2024)

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Here's the beginning to a long-ish poem, "Pastoral," which appeared in Tupelo Quarterly / @tupelopress.bsky.social. It's the last I'll post by way of introduction to Bluesky, but I've got some new poems coming soon! Read the full poem here: www.tupeloquarterly.com/editors-feat... #poetry #poem

Pastoral

A peach tree in the snow.
A black cloud in a peach tree in the snow.

I am talking, now, to a consultant
from the online tax firm
about a form that needs fixing
and this flimsy piece of former wood
wavers in the hand.

In the wind, in the hand.
It could have made peaches, or framed a house’s bones.

Instead it serves as background
for columns of numbers
that signify financial decline.
A real and imminent catastrophe.

It is Greek, catastrophe, meaning “downturn,”
and derives primarily from theater.

A peach tree in the snow.
Paper leaves in a peach tree in the snow.

Across the street, some men fell a tree,
a rigid pine whose torqued enormity reminds me
of the clustered redwoods lining the campus creek
or logged to build Victorian structures
hulking Telegraph’s curb.

They put the wood in a machine
that makes wood chips.
The smell of burning gas precipitates
a real and imminent catastrophe.

A peach tree in the snow.
Wood chips in a peach tree in the snow.

Sheep, deer, wild elk. With their antlers
they terrorize the bark. Anthers.
The purple flowers throw their seed
and other flowers catch it.

Spent stamen, little rusted pistol.
A bullet lodged in the trunk.

My daughter decapitates
dandelions, cradles the heads
in her hand, watches as the old ones
scatter in the real and imminent wind.

They float on unimpeded
in the hand, in the wind.

A peach tree in the snow.
Shell casings in a peach tree in the snow.

My species is industrious,
dapper and intelligent,
formed in the lucid substance between
the sublime and the belligerent.

Ice caps retire and slip into
a warming, gorgeous sea.

We place granite on our counters,
white stones in the garden.
We watch the turbines turn.

A black cloud in the snow.
A peach tree in a black cloud in the snow.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Timothy Donnelly’s “Jonah,” from The Problem of the Many (Wave, 2019). #smallpoemsunday #shortpoemsunday #poetry

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

The kids are excited for tonight’s festivities, whatever they might be… Merry Krampusnacht!

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Not my regular content, but the millennial in me couldn’t resist. 😋

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Read Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost this weekend. One of his best.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

One for #shortpoemsunday. A haiku by the great Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

An excerpt from my poem “Circles,” which appeared as part of a folio in Tupelo Quarterly, along with an interview by the great Henk Rossouw. www.tupeloquarterly.com/editors-feat...

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Here's the companion poem to "Action in the Infinitive," which I posted earlier today. This one is called "Infinite Gyre of Possible Ends" and also appeared in @hopkinsreview.bsky.social, with thanks again to @doramalech.bsky.social! (Click image for alt-text.)

to swaddle the rifle, to wipe clean its lip / to sponge dried milk from an infant’s cheek / to dribble the oil, to torch it completely / to scrape the whole whale from the beach / to stack gold plates, illustrate utopia / to soak the sun’s light from the pitch of the roof / to pace time, its sugared circularity / to unfold its mountainous chain / to husk corn, shuck calcium from mollusks / to shear the lichen-eaten willow oak / to garble the language, gum the words / to tattoo the script on a canvas of palm / to cradle the cycle, censure the system / to scoop, from the floor, a loose silverfish / to swirl the garbage, to compost the knife / to temper the rage in the hurricane’s eye / to filter the fire, to breed the abyss / to pluck bottle caps from ribcages of birds

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

New poem in @hopkinsreview.bsky.social with thanks to @doramalech.bsky.social!! I’ll post it’s brother this afternoon.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

I was grading some student papers and was reminded how strange and beautiful this poem is. Jean Toomer’s “Beehive,” from Cane (1923).

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Here’s one from the new book project, which appeared this summer in Southern Indiana Review. #poetry #poems #newpoems

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

My first collection, The Milk Hours, uses the incessant question inherent in the genre of elegy to explore questions of geography, aesthetics, and ecology. Out from Milkweed: milkweed.org/book/the-mil...

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

There are a lot of good ones out there, but Whitman might take the cake.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Here’s a bit from my new book. Full poem at: poets.org/poem/lullaby-3

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Some mushrooms after a rain. Reminds me of Robert Hass’s poem, “Fall,” which I’m also including here.

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

A friend was asking about very short poems and I was reminded of this one by Carol Snow, which I love to read and teach, and turn over in my mind.

Text of "By the Pond: Watching the Goldfish," by Carol Snow. "(why?)—the body passive, / small eye movements (as though in a dream)."

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Ecotopian @ecotopian.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Shedding some apps. Introducing myself to this one. Here’s my poem “Lullaby,” which received the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize from the Academy of American Poets. poets.org/poem/lullaby-3

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