Uncertain Acrobats: On Sale in Pre-sale!

I’m excited to announce that my first full-length poetry collection, Uncertain Acrobats, is available in pre-sale from CavanKerry Press, at 20% off of the cover price. And speaking of the cover, here’s the beautiful cover created for the book by Ryan Scheife of Mayfly Designs:

This book was written for and about my father, Thomas Seymour Hart. It’s a love letter of sorts, and it’s also an illness and grief narrative in poems. My dad died in 2012, and much of the book deals with the end of his life and my deep missing of him after his death; it also dwells in memories of his life and how it intersected with mine. Here’s one poem from the book that speaks to the late-summer season we are in now:

Calling Song

Walking accompanied by the soundtrack of summer’s end: 
single leaf falling, squirrels in the underbrush, unseen 
as they blend with the gray of last year’s leaves, 
and the thrum of insects in the greenery, 
bushes shimmering with sound, a trilling 
that isn’t cricket, peeper, or bird. 

Back home, my search-bar questions find articles of answers: 
“The Sound of August: Jar Fly? Cicada? or Locust?” 
and “What Bug’s Creating All That Late Summer Buzz?” 
The buzz, it seems, is the annual cicada hatching, 
the Tibicen lyricen calling song, 
every year new and alive in its short living. 

His old voice is still on the machine: 
Hi there, Becky, Dad here. Then the birthday song, 
curling out the to you in vibrato to make it last longer, 
and it does last, but of course it’s also gone.

I was also pleased to be featured in this showcase of upcoming CavanKerry Press authors in the Sept/Oct issue of Poets & Writers magazine – right in the middle of an article about Kaveh Akbar!: