Hot with the Bad Things

Hot with the Bad Things is a reflective look on intimate partner violence, particularly as it is committed and is proliferated on college campuses. When writing, I was interested in investigating what happens beyond retelling, and how one moves through violence both past and present. I was interested too in how to approach the unsayable when it comes to a violence that is individual and pervasive. The book is a lyric sequence of untitled prose poems, and I assembled this playlist mostly from a section that begins with an epigraph from Louise Bourgeois: “It’s not possible to function, to learn, to connect, to make progress or even to hear in a climate of fear. Fear can be spotted like gold in the ground. Dig them out, and make them help you. Fears make the world go round.” In addition to selections from that section, I’ve included poems that I feel meditate on this estimation of fear as well.

Unsolved Mysteries

These poems are excerpted from Unsolved Mysteries (just released from Roof Books this October [https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781931824897/unsolved-mysteries.aspx]), a book of poems about the 1980s procedural melodrama and also other mysteries: emotional intimacy, sexuality, what happens when you die, and how to change the cruel trajectory of history.

"Unsolved Mysteries insists on the inadequacy of simply wanting what we want, how indispensable to want it insatiably anyways." --Kay Gabriel