Image of art with strings suspended in air. Eva Hesse - Right After, 1968

THE DAYBOOKS

I started writing The Daybooks in 2014, when my child was 4; at the time, I was struggling to write again after having a child. Beginning in 2024, it will be released as 4 books, one annually. Below are links to previously published poems from the book, then an explanatory note about the text.

PERIODICALS

  • 8Poems, excerpts from The Daybooks, “1 July 2018 / Birmingham” (Issue 1.1, 2018)
  • Bear Review, excerpts from The Daybooks (Spring 2020)
  • Can We Have Our Ball Back?, excerpts from The Daybooks (Spring 2020)
  • Poets.org, “Daybooks 3 May 2013” (excerpt from The Daybooks; Miami University Academy of American Poets Award winner) (2019)
  • Glass Poetry, excerpts from The Daybooks, “11 June 2016” (100 Thousand Poets for Change – Birmingham, 2018)
  • 8Poems, excerpts from The Daybooks, “22 April 2018” (Issue 1.1, 2018)
  • Open Letters Monthly, from The Daybooks, “5 June 2016” (2017)
  • Dusie Advent Calendar, from The Daybooks, “4 November 2016” (2016)
  • Opon, from The Daybooks, “17 November 2002,” “4 December 2014,” “4 November 2005,” “7 November 2009,” “3 December 2004,” “14 September 2007,” “25 December 2007,” “21 October 2013” (Issue 4, 2015)
  • Pine Hills Review, from The Daybooks, “17 June 2007” (2015)
  • MiPoesias, from The Daybooks, “29 May 2012,” “11 December 2009” (Spring 2015)
  • Touch the Donkey, from The Daybooks, “23 June 2009,” “27 June 2003,” “28 July 2009,” “28 September 2003,” “19 November 2005” (Issue 4, 2015) (print)
  • Drunken Boat, from The Daybooks, “30 March 2005,” “6 May 2011,” “31 October 2002” (Issue 20, 2014)
  • Delirious Hem, from The Daybooks, “13 December 2006” (December 2014)
  • Open Letters Monthly, from The Daybooks, “22 October 2013” (December 2014)
  • Entropy, from The Daybooks, “31 January 2009,” “10 March 2010,” “2 April 2005,” “21 June 2005,” “29 September 2013,” “12 October 2002,” “20 November 2007” (November 2014)
  • Bling that Sings, from The Daybooks, “2 March 2004,” “10 April 2014” (September 2014)
  • Boston Poetry Magazine, “30 January 2014” (July 2014) (Pushcart nominee)
  • Zigest, “from The Daybooks / 7 July 2005 / Stockholm” (May 2014) (no longer in print)
  • Newport Life, “from The Daybooks / 8 June 2009 / Buffalo” (April 2014)
  • The Rumpus, “from The Daybooks / 11 February 2004 / Buffalo” (April 2014)

CHAPBOOKS
The Lover is Absent. above/ground press, 2017.
Poems from The Daybooks. Mondo Bummer, 2015.  
Trauma Mouth. Dusie, 2015. 

NOTES
The Daybooks is a diaristic poem-memoir that comprises one poem per day for a 366-day year. Like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, it begins and ends on the same thread, so it can be read repeatedly (circularly). The Daybooks seeks to capture, like the last chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, one woman’s life, with the good, bad, beautiful, and ugly.The poems are arranged chronologically by day, but not by year. Thus, a poem from April 3 will be placed by April 4, but they may be from two different years, like 2003 and 2011. Titles of poems contain the date and the place to which they pertain. The years go from 2001-2021, or twenty years of my life.Influences on this work include poets Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Joanne Kyger, Stephen Ratcliffe, Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley; novelists James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust, etc.; there are also artistic influences, most of all Eva Hesse, but also Käthe Kollwitz (via Muriel Rukeyser), Cai Guo-Qiang, On Kawara, Allan McCollum, Frank Stella; and musical influences such as John Cage and Morton Feldman. There are 12 motifs running through the text to help it flow together, like a piece of music with 366 micro-movements.Visually, I imagine it as clothes hanging on a line. They all go together, and each one is both unique (a piece of clothing) and dependent (it can’t be laundry without the line). But the poems are fragmentary and interwoven, so they remind me more of Eva Hesse’s “Right After” (1969), pictured above.
​The first half of The Daybooks was submitted as my MFA Thesis at Miami University of Ohio, directed by Hoa Nguyen and read by Laura Van Prooyen. Many poems from the entire manuscript were workshopped there, and excerpts were awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize for Miami University. The Daybooks was a semifinalist in the Nightboat Books Prize in 2020.