blue sonnets
chapbook, 16 pages, full color, saddle stitched, 8.5"x7"

Fifteen sonnets paired with fifteen photographs from daily blue tarp encounters over the course of one year—a meditation on loss in a hybrid collection.

$10.00 | [click here to order your copy]

“The Stouthearted Son,” appeared in the January 2024 newsletter At Eagle Pond Farm put out by At Eagle Pond, Inc., a nonprofit established to preserve the New Hampshire farm where poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon lived and wrote.

Thank you to Mary Lyn Ray for her hospitality and for her generous editing.

If you have the means, please consider making a donation to support the important work of preserving the farm.

. . .

I love the exquisite texture of Jane Kenyon’s language and the emotional bravery she possesses, especially when writing about her mental health. While reading her poems, I noted specific words or lines that gripped me, then scrambled, recombined, and added to them until they grew into “The Stouthearted Son.” Kenyon’s words allowed me to return to and soothe my younger self—that queer child being raised in Christian fundamentalism—and to call him stouthearted rather than broken or outcast.

Before reading, it may be helpful to know before reading that Rook is a trick-taking card game created by the Parker Brothers in 1906 and played by those in the Puritan, Anabaptist, or Mennonite tradition who consider the face cards in a regular deck inappropriate because of their perceived association with cartomancy.