I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First

Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

In the same way that the speaker in these poems often seems itinerant, lacking a place or person to call home, the poems themselves have their own roaming quality. The reader is moved somewhere unexpected, the poems seem to shapeshift or suddenly beckon from somewhere else, or they may zoom into focus. Like a succession of Russian dolls, the poems open toward and magnify the concealed, removed, or forgotten. Throughout, whether from cosmic or microscopic perspective, the details here are handled tenderly, and these poems, even with their constant sense of mobility, return to and are anchored by the familiarly human.