It’s called SOLACE: poems for the broken season, and it focuses on light in the darkness, faith in doubt, and courage in the midst of fear. It includes four original art pieces (one for each season of the year) by my friend and incredible artist Josie Koznarek, who also designed the book itself. I’m extremely excited to have it out in the world and into your hands!
Like anything made by anyone, the poetry in this book didn’t come about in a vacuum. It came about within and because of multiple communities. This book exists because of a couple dozen people who believed in my work and supported me on Indiegogo, and because of hundreds more who spoke into my life and work when I needed it most.
But even beyond the communities that shaped this, every poem in this collection was influenced by a broad range of other art forms – stories, song, visual art, etc. Those of you who know me well know that I imbibe a massive (possibly unhealthy) amount of music when I’m writing. And also all the time.
Naturally, when I began thinking about how I to bring extra dimension to the experience of reading these poems, I knew I had to make a playlist.
The last few months have been full, to say the least. In the midst of all of the chaos surrounding making the book, editing, proofing, working with Josie on the design and artwork, navigating the printer’s requirements, ineptly “marketing” this thing, and getting copies out to Indiegogo supporters (you know who you are and I know how awesome you are), normal life still went on. Or rather, in the midst of normal life, all the other things went on. I’m at work from morning to evening and a dad until the kids are in bed, and then I kick whatever energy I have left into overdrive on all of the other things.
I’m so grateful to all of you who supported this project, for all who made it a reality through editing and encouraging, for all who pre-ordered (which you can still do!)
I did not make this book. We made this book.
taking the next step
Today (which I’m referring to as “SOLACE eve” henceforth and forevermore), as I’m flipping out and flipping through this little volume, I’m surprised at what has grown out of something so simple. Several years ago, when I began writing poetry in earnest, I determined to keep myself honest by posting one poem every week on my blog. This habit grew into a steady stream of poetry, which was then bolstered by the merry poets of the Poetry Pub.
This book came out of just doing the next thing. Or rather, making the next thing.
One poem led to the next, to the next, to the next, until a vision for how they all fit together materialized. From this, all I needed was a push out the door by a party of very generous dwarves and wizards. Yes, publishing a book is a lot of work. But that kind of a journey starts with taking the next step, and then letting your community in on it.
I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but here it is: make the next thing, and let your community in. You might be surprised at where it leads you.
experiencing SOLACE this winter
So, fair warning, in the next couple of weeks I’m going to be talking a bit about this book. But I hope to do so by creating avenues for all of you readers to experience these poems in new and exciting ways. In that spirit, here are two upcoming avenues I’m stoked about…
I’ll be doing live “Behind the Broken Season” events on my Facebook page starting this Friday (and then probably every three or four weeks or so). These will include poetry readings, random rabbit trails, and Q&A opportunities, all over at my Facebook page. There will also be some GIVEAWAYS during these, so if you like free stuff and poetry, tune in! It won’t just be me bloviating, I promise. Like my page to receive notifications about these, and join me for the first one this Friday!
Next Monday I’ll be releasing a companionplaylist to the Winter season of the book. I don’t think I can properly communicate how excited I am about this, friends. I’m a sucker for experiencing multiple forms of art together; it offers dimension and layers that would previously never have been explored. I love that all art is influenced in some way by the art around it, and this playlist is an opportunity to experience that. Plus, I’m having a blast choosing the music…
Friends, thanks for joining me on the adventure!
P. S. Remember, today is your LAST chance to pre-order the book, because tomorrow you’d just be ordering it like everyone else. Be a pre-orderer, not an ordinary orderer.
The mountains will always rise up before you as castles to be crested, proving the gold in your veins, cast on the earth merely for you to crumple into crowns.
They will always rise up before you, for their roots run deeper than your ambition, their arms spread wider than your visions, and you crawl across their backs
like an insect: planting flags to prove you are Significant, you are higher than the peak, you are enthroned atop stockpiled conquests. And then one day you will age beyond your ambition,
more quickly than the hills, who have waited long to welcome your stillness, O crippled conqueror. They will open their mouths and swallow you up, and get on with being mountainous.
four
I am unique, just like everyone else: a carbon copy of originality, and some days I want to scream this to the trend watchers and number counters: “I won’t add up!” I am me, meaning no one else, so shove your labels where the sun don’t shine, subtract my numbers from the census, write me out of your economy.
Until I get lonely, and take a number. Because it’s kind of nice to know there are others just like you.
burial
But then he left and we filled the hole in like a socket in the soil. We pressed the dirt down and scraped the top smooth; in hope, we planted no seed but one: a single stone.
It all keeps sinking further as we strive to raise it up. Perhaps it’s true, the only thing we agreed on: he could not be replaced.
So we water the stone with hope that someday it will wake and take on flesh.
ex nihilo
I made something, and it made me back. I will one day receive again the stuff of me I pressed into the pages, letters sent across borders from someone in my past, the one I will eventually hide from the world.
Yes, I plan to hide in embarrassment at being seen as I am now, young and full of it, brash and passionate. I will one day stuff this young me into cardboard crevices and pilfer it from shelves, relieving the world of the burden of knowing me undone, for what else, when you are young, can you be but undone?
The night descending took me with it into the long row, laid open like a wound in the earth. I wished to plant myself within it, and knelt, craving the coolness,
but then the moon came peeking round the corner of a cloud, full and round as a belly, and deep in me old hungers arose, and with them the fear: Must I always hunger? Will I always be torn apart by the cloak of flesh I wear and the devil within?
I fear the night not for its darkness, but for leaving me alone with myself.
unleashed
It was all a dream: the scrabbling at midnight, three long scratches on the glass, the crack along the frame where the lock once was, the splinters on the floor next to his tracks.
It was all a dream: the skittering along the floorboards suddenly stilled at my footstep, then rising in the walls to a fever pitch until the paint crackled and peeled back before a million slender legs.
It was all a dream: the rising shadow in the corner, the tall one with holes for eyes and long fingers pointing at my children in their beds, the widening grin, stiff and creaky and rotating like a wheel.
It was all a dream: the house emptied of anything precious except a single figure weeping in the dark, sinking slowly down into the dark.
If only I could wake up.
of the soul
For this one long night Evil has its say,
Speaking from borrowed lips in a purloined tongue.
little light of mine
The merry scrape echoed as the candle was lit in the other room, and my mother’s face hovered with it into ours, covering the cowering with a blanket of light. We huddled then, together, pooling our little flames into larger beams, to wait out the night,
Could it be that being is the greatest act of war?
very serious business
Bend
lower, still lower
until your eye is level
with the little creatures.
Take note of their business,
the very serious business
of being
chipmunks, beetles, and ants –
your claws upon the furrow,
your nose to the stone,
sniffing for a snack,
filling up a home.
Maybe there is more up high to being human, but I think not. These little ones know, (by virtue of proximity) that the earth is alive, and how to live and die upon it in the very serious business of being small.
needle tracks
I’m more comfortable
keeping company with addicts,
cozying up to junkies,
sharing needles
over stories passed
out like methadone –
a retreat from being better,
but knowing all along
the path leads inward past the scar.
Inside, I know who I am: Can’t sit still in the pew. Falls asleep in the alley. Not suitable for polite company. So I listen to songs sung by despondent drunks, broken stories worn by beaten-down ruts, because they feel familiar, like the tracks that I’ve worn smooth.
But I don’t,
really,
know all of who I am,
until I look along Your scars,
and see
an addict, yes;
despondent, true.
A broken child, yet
loved by You.
groundwork
But how will we come to know ourselves
except framed
by the place we have not left
or do not plan to leave?
It is in roots clutching earth
and leaves grasping sky
that we take hold
of our own heights and depths,
and know them all better.
It is by long lingering
in one place
that we begin to see it,
and ourselves by it.
Stay a while. If you have feet, sink them into this soil and let the quiet dawns do their work.
Before it got too dark to see we gathered fallen leaves and snap-dry sticks
and tepeed them there in the pit.
My father crumpled up yesterday’s newspaper, my brother struck the match.
With our backs to the night, we gathered together, half of each lit like the underside of a leaf. We stayed until the flames licked the bones down to coals,
and spoke our stories over the ash.
let me love you
Oh, let me love you like the errant flame that burns the field to ash before the wind, a wand’ring knight with neither place nor name except that which is given here to him.
And let me love you like the passing rain that cools the fever in the furrowed gash. A salve of justice choking out the pain, a promise that the fire will someday pass.
But let me also love you like the sun that drives its drowsy flocks to pastures new and lifts the heads of those who live undone, that they may enter in through gates of dew.
My love is still untamed, a trinity of doubtful forces, yet He harvests me.
speak
When it’s wrong do not withhold the fuel that sets the blaze to reveal what it truly is beneath the shine and glaze.
Do not hesitate, my friend. Strike the spark and lay it deep within the pile, Let fury split the ash, that what remains is only purer for the trial.
What burns within you now but a joining torch of the Eternal Flame? Let all other fires falter but the Holy One, the Same.
solarflare
yes, we carry fragments of the sun with us into the void,
but I am not God, and that makes all the difference.
I’ve been so long tending this old fire in my chest, that I forget what sparked it. But it still keeps me warm when I worry that I might someday be wrong.
I’ve been so long raging against things I couldn’t know, like a line of cleansing fire taking field and forest too, like a pyre for the witch, for the stranger, for the son.
I am angry at so many things and none of them at all. I can’t look straight enough along the lines to see the source. But I fear it’s nearer still than all of these.
ii. look, the sky
Look, the sky is unfolding like a magnolia blossom and the long tender ears of corn are reaching up and up to touch it, bounty to bounty, sea green to rose gold, but this idiot is driving five under in the passing lane.
iii. wrath is a man
Wrath is a man
who is righteous
but was just told
otherwise.
Wrath is a man
who has never
lost anything
until now.
Wrath is a man
who loves for
what he gets
not receiving.
Wrath is a man
on the brink of
seeing himself
for the first time.
iv. whales and worms
I am too easy with anger for someone with no control, like a prophet under a broad green leaf, hands extended in hope of brimstone warmth.
And the heat is in the word: the tip of a whip opening your cheek. How is it that I pierce this heart that I hold so close to my own, beating together after the blow? How is it that we ever recover from these wounds?
Sometimes it takes whales and worms, sometimes different words. Sometimes it takes long and lonesome to quench this flame until you matter more than me.
The pit-pat of rain and little feet, the splash of a puddle then like liquid laughter, and the storm is just another plaything to tiny toes.
artesian well
Perhaps the hole will fill gradually, as long-filtered rains seep down, the weight of old winters eroding the edges until it all runs over into the earth.
Perhaps it will flood in an instant, like my heart at the sight of her, leaping to suffuse my face with heat, and rapid waves of hope will be enough.
Perhaps it will never fill.
To be empty and to know it may be best, for such cisterns know true fullness when it flows.
stormcloud
Rearrange the clouds around this shadow of a hope, that the sun will fall upon us like the rain.
Drench our souls with truth that darker days will slip away, like the shadow of a cloud upon the plain.
The bitter will be swallowed as the fields lap up the storms. We all will rise up with Him bearing fullness in our forms, and the night will flee before us and the peace ascend like dew out of the pain.
still waters
Just past our door is a little rising hill with an oak tree and a maple sprouting ten yards apart, as though planted in different years by different hands. It inclines its chin to the neighborly fence of the forest framing it, against the still water of the sky.
And my daughter sees this hill whenever she walks out our door to play. Each passing is an imprint of a deeper rest, a widening assent of where she lives: a place of hills and trees and pond-like sky. She has grown to love this little hill across the way. To her, it is the most beautiful place in all the world.
It’s only a hill. But it is ours, and it is green, and it is proof of home — the simple strength of diving roots meeting rising earth just past our door.
“The storm, the blackout, the quiet sea You went running right into it, away from me…” “So Far, So Fast,” The National
maelstrom
He said then, “Do not free me. The sea is hungry, and I have no strength to turn my ear from the song upon the waves.”
As he spoke the lightning flickered, mirrored in aquamarine. “Do you hear it?” And creatures moved in the deep.
When the rope snapped at last, he looked long through me, luminescent: “The call is stronger than the fold.” And then he leaped, heeding what he held in his heart.
The morning brought him back again, floating in the tide. He never looked more human then when seeking to be filled.
erosion
I want more of Your blood, one cup is not enough, and this book ended too soon for my liking, I want 29 sequels, spin-offs, and backstories. And while we’re on the topic,
the life You promised me is hardly as exciting as the one that I read about in the brochure. The least You could do is show up once or twice, a little fire in the night, a miracle or two, a modern-day revival — seems like You would be into that sort of thing, at least, that’s what Your flyer suggested.
I guess if there’s not more than this, I’ll have to take my business elsewhere.
floodplain
Falling down is something I know.
It feels at home in my hands, like the hungry fingers of my children, who also know it.
We are like rivers, I guess. It is in our nature to go down, and down again. and only when we are cupped in a hand or folded into doughy clouds is such a law suspended, only when we fill the thirsty earth.
Now is not enough and never will be, so we roll on to the ocean. We wait to be lifted, filtered, fed — to fall again.
golf-ball sized hail
We were standing in the line for ice cream when the hail started, so we hunched our shoulders and endured for the sake of “two scoops peanut butter cup in a waffle cone, thanks.”
and it’s true, we were made to eat and drink, to like it, but if I see brimstone I’m out of here.
