Four poems published in Narrative

I still haven’t had the chance to sit down and really process it. In May, Narrative magazine published four of my poems: “Innocence,” “On inertia,” “Self-portrait as a plague doctor,” and “Falls of the Ohio.” It’s incredible, humbling, and also a little terrifying to see my work in a publication that’s featured such poets as Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Javier Zamora, and Ocean Vuong.

You can read the poems here. (Reading them is free, but you may have to log in to read more than one.)

I thought I might just offer up a bit of context on the poems here, to hopefully aid and deepen your reading, and to give you a sense of where these poems fit into the manuscripts I’m working on.

A Louisville Poet

“Innocence” and “Falls of the Ohio” are both set in Louisville, Kentucky, my hometown. My hope is that they can contribute to a much larger critical interrogation of whiteness & white supremacy. I know that this work—& my work—have only just begun. And I still have a great deal to learn about how to take on such work in meaningful, productive ways. But it is certainly a project that one of my books, Termination Shock, is trying to take on. Termination Shock a book about leaving home and the inevitable return. And it is, every step of the way, about Louisville: the desire to escape my city; my privilege in being able to do so; my inability to escape it completely.

"Innocence" (which I’ve since renamed “Self-portrait in sheep’s clothing”) quotes from a 1937 assessment of a Louisville neighborhood published by Redlining Louisville, whose crucial work sheds light on racist city planning and real estate practices that have denied communities of color access to wealth for generations. You can view their full project here.

On Rivers

While “On inertia” and “Self-portrait as a plague doctor” are less directly entangled with Louisville, the yellow river in the latter poem is, inevitably, the Ohio River. It’s possible that every river I’ve ever written about is the Ohio.