I’ve got a crop of three new poems up in the latest issue of Nice Cage. I’m excited about them for a lot of reasons (they’re in the good company of great work I greatly admire, including this poem by Christian Anton Gerard), but the foremost reason is that they represent what I’ve been moving towards in my work since I received an NEA Fellowship. In my artist’s statement, which you can read here (please also stop and read the incredible work by my fellow Fellows — I’m still not sure how I’m in this group but God almighty am I grateful to be), I mentioned my plans to write about St. Teresa of Avila, which I did, for a little while. But then these other poems started to crop up, and suddenly my throat was full of the cadences of the Deep South, where I was born and raised and have returned. Before I knew it, I found myself far down the path of writing about that, about the ways the South has formed and destroyed me, about the beauty and the brutality of the place I have called (and refused to call) home. These three poems are part of that project, along with this poem in The Breakwater Review: an exorcism of sorts that started the project. Stay tuned for more!