A new chapbook and a prompt

I am thrilled to announce that I signed a contract this week with Sibling Rivalry Press to publish my new poetry chapbook, Midnight in a Perfect World, this November.  It seems fitting that the new book will be published during a year of milestone anniversaries: it's been five since SRP  published Render and an astonishing 15 since the release of my debut collection, Better To Travel. I mentioned in the last post that this blog is also marking 15 years, so there is much to celebrate and remember.

In many ways, Midnight in a Perfect World is the sequel to Better To Travel, which chronicled my first trips to Europe. The bulk of the work in the chapbook was written or inspired by my many subsequent visits to London and the UK. My publisher, the fabulous Bryan Borland, liked the manuscript, but he wanted to see "Feast," one of the poems from the recent New Poetry Project here at Modern Confessional, included in the book. I asked Bryan if I could add a few more, and he told me to go for it. So not only are the London poems in there, but my wanderlust on full display with poems set in New York, New Orleans, Denver and LA. At 32 poems, it's going to be on the long side for a chapbook, but there is absolutely no "filler" or "b-sides" in the bunch. This is the tightest collection I've ever assembled and each poem advances a narrative arc that now feels complete thanks to the latitude given to me by SRP.

The other threads that hold Midnight in a Perfect World together are music, literature and film. The title is inspired by the DJ Shadow song from 1996, while Joni Mitchell, Marianne Faithfull, Kate Bush, Kylie Minogue, David Bowie, Virginia Woolf, Tennessee Williams. Twin Peaks and Howards End all crop up along the way. I can promise you this trip will be dark, sexy, sometimes sad, often funny and completely unexpected. I can't wait to take you on this journey with me.

Since I'm taking part in 2018 Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, I want to leave all you poets with a writing prompt: Write a poem about your favorite journey. Don't write about the place you visited, but the excitement (or nightmare) of traveling  to the destination. Did you meet someone interesting on a bus or train? Did an airline lose your luggage? Was your flight delayed? Maybe recall a family trip and the seemingly endless hours in the backseat of the station wagon. Remember the old saying: it's better to travel than to arrive.