Fruiting the substrate

Publishing a poetry book involves nourishing your work in what may feel like darkness, growing networks. It can take a long time until the mushroom-poems themselves burst into the light. And who knows if people will find them, devour them, and find them tasty.

Am I taking this metaphor a little far for you? Too bad! I started writing the poems in Mycocosmic in the late twenty-teens and placed them with Tupelo Press in April 2023, so the trope and its fruit are an extended obsession. Design and proofing finished in October and ever since, I’ve been working on making my long hard work visible to others. Publishing my last poetry collection in March 2020 taught me that the best laid publicity plans gang aft agley, so I keep telling myself, well, I’ll do my best while trying to stay mellow. The world is in bad shape in myriad ways. I write this on the eve of a different and terrible kind of inauguration. Fires, floods, mass deportation, hatred of many kinds: the health and safety of so many are precarious.

But I’ll repeat another thing I know I say ad nauseam: a poem is an alternate possible world in which you can experience a flash of solace, the self-forgetfulness that brings you back to yourself. It’s not environmental remediation, racial or economic or gender justice, a timely vaccine, or a legal stay against fuckery. But art is on the cosmic list of what we need in hard times. I want activists to keep the pressure on; I simultaneously want writers to keep writing and trying to find me.

While I know in my bones that books are important, I also take weird consolation in the very fact that my mushroom-poems are pretty small. Nobody’s life depends on whether I’m given a chance on a particular stage or how well I perform when I’m up there or whether people show up with a little book-buying money in their virtual wallets. A very good case scenario would be connecting with some people along the way but not taking it all terribly seriously. That would be a string of small delights. Being almost invisible can be downright okay.

This is me shifting my mindset from “uh-oh, I sure have booked a lot of events while also working for a living, how am I going to swing this?” to “remember what your friend Jeannine said, book publicity should be fun.” I want to treat it as play-work and have a good time. Besides, I’m awed at how many event organizers have told me “yes, come read with us.” I’ve never had this much luck with cold queries, which is how events got so thick on the ground. Of course I’m still getting no’s, too–and people ignoring me entirely, plus the little glitches attendant on any collaborative effort (oh, publishing) keep coming–but on the whole I feel shockingly welcome. What a trip. An example: someone from the New York Mycology Society (founded by John Cage!) just wrote to me out of the blue, asking for an ARC so she could consider Mycocosmic for their book club. Mind blown.

Below is my Spring 2025 calendar so far, intricately interwound with my teaching obligations (paper grading days are NOT marked below, but they’re in there). I’m regularly updating the list on the Events page of this website. And if you’d like more previews of the actual poems, a couple that have never been on the web before just sprang up on the Nature of Our Times gallery. “Dark Energy” and “Carpenter Ant with Zombie Fungus” originally appeared in the print journal Notre Dame Review; “We Could Be” was online at About Place but I’ve revised it since, as you do when you try to make a bunch of wild shaggy poems herd together. I hope that despite the ill spirits that afflict us, you can find small joys, too.

• March 4, 5 pm: Downtown Books in Lexington, VA with Emmett Buckley, Leah Green, & Seth Michelson: Launch Party!
• March 10, 7:30 pm: KGB Bar in NYC with Lauren K. Watel and E. Hughes
• March 20-22: Virginia Festival of the Book
• March 22, 7 pm: Bull City Press Presents, at Mettlesome Theater in Durham, NC with Bridget Bell, 800 Taylor Street, Suite 9-156
• March 23, 5 pm: Busboys & Poets, 450 K St NW, Washington, DC
• March 26-29: AWP in Los Angeles
  • 3/27, “Underworlds & Mycocosms” panel
  • 3/27, 7:00 pm reading with MER
  • Reading and signing with Tupelo Press
• April 2, 7 pm: Fergie’s Pub with Moonstone Arts in Philadelphia
• April 10-13: New Orleans Poetry Festival
• April 24-25: “Fermentations” conference at St. Louis U in Madrid, Spain, Keynote Speaker
• May 4, 4:30 pm: Poetrio at Malaprop’s in Asheville, NC
• May 7, 7:30 pm: Virtual, Wild & Precious Life Series
• May 11, 4 pm: Hot L Series in Baltimore, MD
• May 30, 6 pm: Toadstool Books in Keene, NH
• June 3, 7 pm: Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA, with Anna Maria Hong; 25 White Street
• August 25: Virtual, DMQ Salon