Works
Five books of poems, a forthcoming third Cornerstone volume, and a debut book of fiction in progress.
The Cornerstone Trilogy
Three collections published by Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, sharing themes of love, war, and place — with the Upper Peninsula and Detroit interwoven through every poem.
Forthcoming
All That My Body Can Bear
Cornerstone Press · Portage Poetry / Made in Michigan Writers Series · 85 pp.
The third volume of the trilogy. Apollinaire wanders Whole Foods at seventy. Whitman bathes in Lake Superior with Ginsberg and Burroughs while Brueghel paints them. Federico Fellini visits the Old Marquette Inn where John Lennon is staying with May Pang. Borges, Levon Helm, Sam Spade at a Birmingham patisserie — and Henry Zender, the poet’s great-grandfather, before a hooded photographer on the Detroit River.
From “Monk”
Maybe my old soul belongs to a monk
mumbling the words from an old Latin text,
or washing his hands with French soap
that he found in the former post office.
Cornerstone
And the Heart Will Not Quicken
Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
The second Cornerstone book, where the hotel poems begin and Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, and Richard Manuel return as recurring figures alongside a younger self in dislocations of time and space.
Cornerstone
Let It Be Told in a Single Breath
Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
The first book of the trilogy. Recurring characters and personal heroes move through the poet’s remembered Michigan — both ends of the state speaking to one another.
Earlier collections
2017
Somewhere We’ll Leave the World
Wayne State University Press · Made in Michigan Writers Series
Draws on the poet’s own experiences while imagining fictional characters and personal heroes. The book that opened the imaginative geography the later work has continued.
Earlier
Misfit Hearts
A book-length sequence
Chronicles the making of The Misfits through the filming-location photographs of Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift.
Fiction in progress
A debut book of fiction — Strange News from Another Hotel, eleven linked stories forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2027 — is set at the Old Marquette Inn in 1980, the winter John Lennon was killed. The dead check in: Brautigan, Hemingway, Kafka, John Lennon spooning chili at Dirty Annie’s. Czeslaw Milosz reads in the Queen City; his wife Janina, dying on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, waits for the phone to ring.
Read about the fiction →
From the postscript
You could only clean so much of the night’s mess, for there would remain
this hopelessness that would never be swept away from the hotel’s floors
or feathered from the radiators burning hot in the cold of the Upper Peninsula.
Selected recurring figures
A partial index of the people who keep arriving in my fiction and poetry:
Walt Whitman · Allen Ginsberg · William Burroughs · Czeslaw Milosz · Jim Harrison · Lawrence Ferlinghetti · Apollinaire · Langston Hughes · Leonard Cohen · Borges · Hemingway · Brautigan · Kafka · Federico Fellini · Marcello Mastroianni · John Lennon · Levon Helm · Robbie Robertson · Richard Manuel · Sam Spade · Henry Zender.