Category: publications

This was one of those rare poems that is almost identical to the first hand-written draft (the only change was renaming Jimmy Two-dogs to Mikey Two-dogs). It’s a bit of a a tribute to the vanished world of the Chicago outfit, overly romanticized, sure. They were, after all, violent thugs, but at least they wore […]

My poem Chicago Sonnet #26 is out in the newest issue of Rat’s Ass Review. This is a rare bit of reported poetry in that I went out and talked briefly to one of the people in a homeless encampment (not the one that’s in the poem though) wondering how he ended up living in […]

I have a trio of new poems in Great Lakes Review.  The first of the three poems, “Pantoum of the divine absence” is derived from another poem (still unpublished at this time) which, having eight lines was a good candidate for being transformed into a pantoum, a form in which the lines of the poem are […]

The latest issue of Meniscus has my poem, “A Song of Bathsheba” in it. 

I’ve got a newly published poem from my Chicago Sonnets sequence in the premiere issue of Bronze Bird Review. While numbered as #43, this is actually the second sonnet I wrote for the sequence, depicting the young women of Lincoln Park as seen through the eyes of age and regret. The issue can be purchased […]

Electric Literature does a weird thing where they give a different title to the webpages that have their stories than the story actually has and use that in their promotion for the story. A couple years ago, they did this with Elizabeth Campbell’s story, “The Big Bang” giving an alternate title of “A busted family in […]

In both Paris and Brussels, there are metro stops called “Stalingrad,” a fact I found fascinating, especially since the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in the wave of de-Stalinization under Nikita Krushchev. On my last visit to Paris, I decided I had to see what was at the stop with this name so one evening […]

I just got in the mail the latest issue of California Quarterly (Vol. 47, No. 3, which for some reason is not yet listed at their website) which includes my poem, Chicago Sonnet #19.  The poem details my vague memories of the Beverly House restaurant in Chicago’s Beverly Hills neighborhood on the South Side, an […]

This story was one that unfolded itself gradually over time. It started with the title which came to me one day during a residency  for my MFA. I wrote down the title and even got so far as writing down a list of self-destructive behaviors, but put it aside for a while after that. I picked […]