Book:

Forms of Poetic Attention (Columbia U.P., 2020)

Selected Prose:

“Full of Endless / Distances”: Forms of Desire in Poetic Attention” (Dibur) 

abstract: This essay explores desire as one mode of poetic attention. Through readings of poems by Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hass, and Wallace Stevens, I show how desire is given form through the formal orchestration of attention. In these poems, desire emerges as a mode of attention brought into tension by inflections of interest and lack. This reading gives us a new way of thinking about the poetics of desire and a new language for exploring how desire is not only described but also produced and embodied in poetic form.

 

“We Know it In Our Bones: Reading Reading a Thirty-Five-Acre Plot in Rural Virginia with Three Poems by Charles Wright”

abstract: This meditative essay considers what it might mean to “read” text and terrain comparatively, attending to the nuances of poetic and environmental form that shape experience. I explore this notion through a sensorial reading of a thirty-five-acre plot of land in rural Virginia, alongside three poems by American poet Charles Wright, “Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn,” “Lines After Rereading T. S. Eliot,” and “Reading Lao Tzu Again in the New Year.” Examining place in dialogue with poem, I explore how physical and formal elements in both terrains can produce parallel aesthetic, bodily, and emotional effects and resonances.

 

Some Poems:

“Ferment” (Streetlight Mag) 

“After” (Atelier, Italian translation by Anna Tomasetto)

“Fallow” (Atelier, Italian translation by Anna Tomasetto)

“Unforgivable Elegy” (Atelier, Italian translation by Anna Tomasetto) 

“Periwinkle” (Literary Matters)