Coming soon

"poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step" - Amiri Baraka

This is Teeth - Trees - Lemons: a newsletter about what every poem must contain, the erotics of revision & other ecstatic musings.

I only wish to master revision, both on and off the page. As a neurodivergent afro-surrealist blues poet, my work harbors the question of how it feels as opposed to what it means. A speaker’s presence is given not so much in the absence of meaning but in the non-reduction of non-meaning. The poem’s making is akin to my life’s making, a Black life: an ongoing improvisation. 

This living ad-lib, poetry by ear, dreams alongside poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant’s suggestive definition: Blackness as the consent to not be a single being. This fact, both defining and defying a Black psyche and social life, accounts for the many voices languaging my poems, voices that, once confronted, actualize my living. The themes of my work include adoption, migration, queer desire, sacred rage, grief, prayer as theory, orphanhood, and home.

I’m using this newsletter, via three or four weekly posts, to share my creative practice in real-time. I used to say I didn’t have a creative process, but I realized that almost every moment of my day fuels my writing and revision. Poetry is the water my brain needs to breathe. I am forever submerged. 

You’ll receive new poem drafts, budding essays, and writing prompts. You’ll watch poems go from the notes app to voice notes to a google doc to published. If you know me, you know I’m much more likely to send a voice note than a text, so expect a few midnight notes ranting about my musings. I’m most excited to share my obsessions: new music that won’t quit me, my favorite poems (that I’ve considered tattooing but realized there’s only so much room on my body, lol), visual art, live performances, interviews with friends, etc. 

I hope this newsletter helps you begin to name and track your creative processes. I hope to laugh and learn alongside you.