Villanelles are hard to write! But I tried to write one, and @newversereview.bsky.social was kind enough to publish it in the Summer 2026 issue. Thank you thank you to everyone there.

Ya boy has an essay on [...] and [...] in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to [...]! Whaaaaaat?! Quite stoked, y’all, quite stoked. Edit: Not a Cambridge Companion to me!

Tomorrow at 7 at Dear Friend Books in Brooklyn I will be reading poems with the brilliant Anna Lena Phillips Bell. Oh I do hope you can come! 343A Tompkins Ave, Brooklyn, NY.

Yes on both counts! I very recently, and only a wee bit illegally, had a Veronica Forrest-Thomson T-shirt made, which looks like the shirt in the picture (I'm, uh, not in the picture).

Onassis.

A thing arrived in the mail today.

The book comes out in December, but here, now, via the New Yorker, is “Henry’s Ode,” from “Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs,” by John Berryman (edited by me). I am so grateful to everyone involved, especially Kevin Young and Hannah Aizenman. Woo, y’all! Woo! www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

John Berryman has been a central poet in my life for more than half my life. But I never imagined his name and mine would be on the same book cover. And yet here they are, together. The book will be published in December, and I hope you like it. I still can't believe I had anything to do with it.

Another revised poem, since we're back to where we were.

Revising poems for a forthcoming chapbook I came across this ugly poem I wrote about an ugly thing and published before it was ready. So I revised it some more.

Y’all, I am so, so stoked to be judging Waywiser’s Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Both Hecht and Waywiser mean an awful lot to me. The deadline for the Prize is coming up, so send me your manuscript while you can! I wanna read it! hechtprize.waywiser-press.com

Like most? all? of you, I hope this is the last one.

Tomorrow, Michael Hersch's opera, "and we, each," with a libretto made up of extracts from my poems arranged by Hersch, as well as a few pieces I wrote especially for it, premieres in Baltimore. !!!! So, for what will surely be the only time in my life, my name is on a billboard. shorturl.at/dLrYz

New rehearsal photos from "and we, each," the new opera by Michael Hersch (!) based on poems by me that premieres on Saturday in Baltimore! Performances in D.C. and Brooklyn are forthcoming. I have yet to deeply acknowledge to myself that this is happening. www.mindonfire.org/events/2023/...