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"The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed."

                                                      — Sylvia Plath, "Insomniac"

I was in the library stacks looking for something else and came across a booklet of Plath’s "Uncollected Poems" published in an edition of 150 by Turret Books in 1965. It’s a neat little thing with a pink centerfold page that reproduces an early, handwritten draft of the poem "Thalidomide." Still recovering from my spring break flu, I decided to relax with the chap this evening, and came across this freshly-relevant gem. :-)

"I know that I braid too much my own
Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.
They are private and always will be.
Where then are the private turns of event
Destined to boom later like gold chimes
Released over a city from a highest tower?
The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,
And you instantly know what I mean?"

          — John Ashbery,  from "The One Thing That Can Save America"

Recent & Forthcoming Publications

"Fragment 31," The Litlab (full text +)

"Biding, Paris de Gaulle," Third Coast, Spring 2008.

"Meditation: Confessions, Book X," Swink Online (full text)

"The Light Outside This Window Is No Light," Swink Online (full text)

"Dud Helix," The Literary Review (full text)

“As Freedom Is Kale, Just So,” The Cincinnati Review, Spring 2007

“Resurrection Directive,” 32 Poems Magazine, Spring 2007.

“Soutien-Gorge,” Fugue, Winter-Spring 2007.

“Flarf Partially Re/Deconstructed as Unrhymed Sonnet with Late Volta,” Cranky, Issue 8. 

“RSVP(astoral),” Southern Poetry Review, Volume 44, Issue 2.

“Autopsy,” “Aubade,” American Literary Review, Volume XVII, Number 1.

“Autopsy,” was also reprinted by Poetry Daily and in the anthology In Whatever Houses We May Visit: An Anthology of Poems That Have Inspired Physicians, ACP Press, 2008 (Table of Contents)

And still too busy to blog, though I’d like to find time for it again. In the meantime, I’ve recently read and highly recommend:

Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (a novel), Drown (short stories)

Maurice Manning, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (poems)