Great to be profiled in the MA Poetry Festival’s June newsletter, Getting to Know Poets with New Books. Click here for the link, which includes a video of me reading the title poem, “Before There Was Before.”

Doug Holder interviewed me earlier this month. The video is abbreviated (7 minutes) because there were technical difficulties.

Hope you can hear over the background noise!

Thanks to my friend John Harrison for the video. This poem is called “The Book of Apology.” I composed most of it at Marie Howe’s workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Marie’s assignment was to write an “embodied poem” for the next day, that is, a poem composed in the mouth and not written down, to be recited the next day in class. Everyone “wrote” powerful and moving poems that day.

Wendy’s poem “Beetle” was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize by the Mid–American Review.

I’m very excited to be collaborating with fiber sculptor Jodi Colella, whose work is amazing. See more of it at https://www.bostonsculptors.com/breath-matter-index/

We’ve chosen to explore moss from visual and poetic perspectives. Click this link to learn more about the exhibit and to check out the other artist-poet pairs. The opening reception will be Wednesday, July 18. Stay tuned for details:

Fiber sculptor Jodi Colella and poet Wendy Drexler met by chance and discovered a shared interest in what’s waiting to be discovered in a consignment-store bin or right under their feet. They both like to launch their artistic explorations with careful observation as a way to explore deeper meanings. And so they turned to moss, first responding visually to its beautiful and minute microscopic structures, then researching how this ancient life form grows, propagates—surviving, in times of drought, on a single drop of water! They’ve discovered that moss, like our own species, is resilient, collaborative, and opportunistic, and that the smallness of moss, with its

genius
for filling
the emptiness—
snatching
a scant gap,
spreading
between cracks

encompasses the dynamic splendor and complexity of the world.