Work in The Lineup: Poems on Crime

The other anthology shoe has dropped, in a good way.


My poem "From a Deposition" is one among many by more than two dozen poets in Issue #4 of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, edited by Gerald So.


I am grateful and amazed to see my own work in the volume as poems by far better-known writers such as crime novelists Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman, and poets Randall Watson and Charles Harper Webb.


If you're trying to convince someone that poetry touches on real life and real people, you may want to share this collection. It includes vice, theft, muggings, murder and post-traumatic stress disorder, all in language that is moving as well as accessible.


As a man once said to me while he was trying to sell me a possibly gold chain in Chicago, "Don't cheat yourself, treat yourself."

In Time for Valentine's Day (of 2012)

In all the excitement of recent weeks I have forgotten to mention an anthology publication that would have been perfect for yesterday but remains timely for Valentine's Days yet to come.

My poem "Intermezzo" (originally published as "First Blush") is included in the recently released Touching: Poems of Love, Longing and Desire, edited by Sari Friedman and D. Patrick Miller, which is the second volume of the Fearless Poetry Series from Fearless Books of Berkeley, California.

I am honored to appear in this volume with quite a few accomplished poets, who include but are not limitied to the following: Maureen Tolman Flannery, Linda Nemec Foster, David Knopfler and Sy Safransky. Last but by no means least among my neighbors in the anthology is Myra Sklarew, with whom I had the great good fortune to study while I was an undergraduate at American University.

Come for the poems, and stay for the photographs by Kelly Puleio.

The Next-to-Last Word

Sometimes you don't need to have the last word.

Having the next-to-last word can be quite fine in its own right.

For example, my poem "Sweater" is the penultimate entry in the anthology Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, edited by Ellen Foos, Vasiliki Katsarou and Ruth O'Toole, and published by Ragged Sky Press. That strange and wonderful book title is drawn from the title of a strange and wonderful poem by Eileen Malone on page 65.

Besides her poem and mine (which previously appeared in my collection Settling for Beauty), there is work by very well-known poets including Kim Addonizio, Jorie Graham, Paul Muldoon and Charles Simic. Clothing from head to toe is covered, and the moods range from the solemn to the hilarious. Among the latter is Janis Butler Holm's "If Paris Hilton Wrote Poetry," which must be read to be believed.