When you write a lot of short prose poetry, micro works, haiku and senryu, one can invariably accumulate quite a few chapbooks under their belt with some rapidity. Amazon does not always have the most effectual way of exhibiting these for purposes of easy review and skimming. A friend and colleague was recently asking what poems I'd written, where to start if he wanted to read something, so I thought well worth cobbling together a little inventory of different collections available for potential enjoyment. They're all priced at cost, as cheap as it would allow me to make them, I don't earn a dime on these and rather the expenditure all goes in toto toward printing and distribution end, am just grateful to every person reading them, hope you find things of pleasure and interests in contents! ^^ I'll list them in reverse chronological order with newest first and oldest at the end, and you can look forward to a couple of additional short volumes forthcoming in the not so distant future which I've been placing a number of pieces from in recent months, which you presently can read in different generous, illustrious publishers' magazines and journals online and in print... (If you care for a preview of individual contents, I'll also include hyperlinks to places where individual works from within each collection were originally first published and are still available for perusal at no cost!)
ekphrastic poems about things
Poems exploring personal as well as universal themes and experiences, through the description of striking objects and visual artworks which communicate them tellingly.
(Including haiku, senryu, and micropoetry which originally appeared in Hey I'm Alive Magazine and Viewless Wings.)
Dog Days: haikus of summer
Poetry focusing on training a new puppy and gardening during convalescence following a brief hospital stay.
(Including haiku, senryu, and micropoetry which originally appeared in Danse Macabre and Waterways.)
Bindle Bum: a travelogue of vignettes
Poetry attempting to relate a memoir via haiku, tracing a personal journal from a small town in the midwest through the sordid inner sanctums of Hollywood, and back again broken and disgraced.
(Including haiku, senryu, and micropoetry which originally appeared in Closed Eye Open and Fauxmoir.)
Walter Takes a Staycation: the romantic disease
Poems written in a bughouse, some of which pay homage to Dante’s Divine Comedy.
(Including haiku, senryu, and micropoetry which originally appeared in Equinox, SIAMB, and Song Between Our Stars.)
;OSCOPY this pantheon we inherited
A short, quick bleed, collecting mostly echoic haikus of the contemplative variety.
(Including haiku, senryu, and micropoetry which originally appeared in Moonstone Press and Tofu Ink Arts.)
Unlikable Protagonists and Unreliable Narrators: or Ithaca Dentata
A poetry collection exploring identity, the veracity of transmitted information, and how what messenger relays it impacts our perception, via a prismatic procession of archetypes from Roman and Greek mythology including the king Agamemnon, warlord rake Ares, faithful old hound Argos, dramatic reveler Dionysus, malformed blacksmith cuckold Hephaestus, model father and husband Hercules, tardy traveler Odysseus, impatient rescuer Orpheus, queen snatching fop Paris, mirror-wielding ladykiller Perseus, penitent fire bringer Prometheus, repetitious mason Sisyphus, loyal son and chip off the old block Telemachus, visionless prophet Tiresias, and sightseeing tour guide Virgil.
(Including haiku, senryu, and micropoetry which originally appeared in Elevation Review, GRIFFEL, Mycelium Magazine, Quillkeepers Press, and Write Launch.)
Flightless Birds: of Donners and Vixen
An ambitious, multifaceted exploration of the women who impact our lives (in them and out of them) striving to situate the personal firmly within the universal, timeless and mythical, via a diverse parade of archetypal characters from world mythology and literature, including raucous devotee Agave, unparalleled adulteress Aphrodite, ironclad advocate Athena, the always handy bawdy consoler Baubo, mopey farmette Ceres, lusty swineherd Circe, idol maiden Dulcinea, absconded queen Helen, tiger mom Hera, self-sacrificing daughter Iphigenia, unsentimental wild woman Medea, long-suffering homemaker Megara, water aerobics instructor Ophelia, courted dowager Penelope, and milk carton expat Persephone.
(Including haiku, senryu, and micropoetry which originally appeared in Barstow and Grand, Lychee Rind, Mycelium Magazine, O:JA&L, Quillkeepers Press, Raw Art Review, Spectra Poets, Wild Roof Journal.)
Plague Poems: and hack haikus
From an old folks home on the outskirts of war-torn Minneapolis, one unkempt millennial expounds upon the phenomena of his day, from the Coronavirus to the George Floyd and Breona Taylor murders, and subsequent protests to abolish the police by # BlackLivesMatter and Antifa. Further riffing upon the # MeToo movement and its surreal echoing across # PizzaGate, in the desolation of late-stage capitalism there are no shortage rife subjects to explore sardonically. As the plague doctors skulk about in the dark of night, walling in presumed infectious, hauling out dead on carts before prying the gold from their teeth, a rat-catching herald mounts the soapbox and cries out the news. Including poems and haikus exploring Covid & the Coronavirus, quarantine, Masks, Black Lives Matter, the murders of George Floyd and Breona Taylor, systemic racism, defunding and abolishing the police, Antifa, Antifascism protests, rioting, the burning of 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis (which the author was present before), the # MeToo movement, addiction, alcoholism, art school, the entertainment industry, young love, yearning, generational divides between Baby Boomers and Millennials, Trump, Biden, Pizzagate, Epstein, gun ownership, late stage capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, mandatory vaccinations, environmentalism, climate change, overpopulation, ecofascism, the military industrial complex, billionaires, proud boys, lynchings, punching nazi’s, tearing down statues of slaveowners, for-profit prisons, the war on drugs, and socioeconomic inequality.
(Including haiku, senryu, and micropoetry which originally appeared in Closed Eye Open, DeLuge Journal, Poet's Choice, Silent World in Her Vase, Snapdragon, Wild Roof Journal)
WILD/LIFE: poems that soar and poems that crawl
A very short book of very short poems by a reasonably tall man, who hunches so he can converse with normally proportioned people without discomfiting them.This book of haikus and snatches of verse explores nature in its many incarnations, human and bestial, regimented and anarchistic. From the bucolic expanses of Richfield Minnesota to the blood-spattered tenements of Los Angeles, wild/life shudders but will not stall on you. It will take you somewhere engaging. The ride is short, best strap yourself in tightly.
(Including haiku, senryu, and micropoetry which originally appeared in the Raw Art Review.)