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Back when I was an MFA student, a professor in workshop told me that every good poem maintains a “contract” with the reader—that is, it establishes a certain set of terms that need to be fulfilled in order to ensure its success. I have a lot of problems with this approach to poetry. First, it…

At the direct center of this sharp, 13-page stapled chapbook is a poem titled “Analog.” Circling around the motif of spliced and “gutted” VHS tapes, Canese Jarboe constructs an elliptical, fragmented narrative of childhood trauma that collides with a pastiche of analog moments ranging from Disney movies, to pornography, to recordings of televised cattle auctions:…

I’m bringing this Mossy Blog back from the dead for two reasons. First, my life as a parent has finally reached a level of stasis that I feel like I can once again occasionally participate in non-academic poetry-related dialog. Second, I have an increasing desire to write about other people’s poems in a loose, not-terribly-formal…

Kina and I are in the middle of production on Ginger Ko’s chapbook, How glossy the plastic. (Which by the way, you should purchase. She’s a brilliant fucking poet and this book is great.) Like most of the recent books we’ve published through Garden-Door Press, it has a letterpressed cover. Our process goes something like…

If you’re on poetry Twitter at all, you’ve probably seen, in the last week or so, a number of critiques of the Poetry Foundation. I think these critiques are smart and warranted, and while I start to get overly anxious when I spend too much time on Twitter, I find myself particularly interested in how…

Happy July. There’s things I like and dislike about every season, but I think summer is the time I most identify with as a poet: half of the time I feel ecstatic, energized, ready to read and sit by churning bodies of water (very easy to do in Ithaca), and half of the time I…

Friends and strangers, Thank you for subscribing to my TinyLetter–this is the first of hopefully many emails I’ll write about texts I’m consuming; mostly poetry, but possibly other media as well (music? video games?). I’m currently in the process of writing the prospectus for my dissertation, which is tentatively titled Countermapping Arcadian Geographies: Rural Poetry…