I have some exciting news to share: my second poetry book has been accepted for publication and will come out next winter!
This book is very close to my heart. I wrote many of the poems at 4am, when I woke with the dawn, and many came after meditating, as if they had been forming inside me for a long time and were only waiting for a release.
Eventually, when I had enough poems, I started to pull them together into a manuscript, and when the manuscript had gone through several iterations and I felt really confident about it, I started to send it to presses.
The book was selected in the University Press of Kentucky's New Poetry and Prose series, which publishes one book of poems and one book of prose each year.
My experience writing and publishing this book—so far at least—has been very different from my experience with my first book, The High Shelf, which I didn't publish until more than thirteen years after I wrote it.
Perhaps it's just coincidence, but I can't help feeling that the publication process with my first book was fraught in part because the experience out of which I was writing was fraught: I was writing from a trauma that I myself couldn't yet fully witness. In fact, I've come to see the first book's long publication process as its own kind of gift; it ended up directing my attention to where it most fully needed to be—not outward, but first, inward, which ultimately then helped me show up more to externally as well.
The poems in my second book are, indeed, much more open, more accessible, and the process of writing and publishing them has been more fluid.
Over the next months, I'll share some poems from the book and say a little more about the writing of the manuscript and the publication process.
Today, though, I just want to share this news—and to remind you that every part of the writing process, from the initial writing to the final publication, can be one of growth and learning. Listen deeply. Be patient. Trust the process. Nurture and love your own voice and allow it to shift and change.