09/09/2025
New release! Link in comments. Metates is a book of poetic landscapes from Virginia and Florida westward to west Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and Hawaii. Urban settings similarly have their place, with examples from Paris and New Orleans. More broadly, the book is about what is given to us in the way of scenes, circumstances, and bodies, and our connections to all that. Landscapes and other settings are not inert; they are what we attempt to make of them. Metates is, therefore, about us and our responses to what we encounter.
Both personal experience and imagination, sometimes mythological, suggest human ingenuity in reacting to the given. Kinship and friendship have their place. Memory appears as both a resource and a motif. Nostalgia characterizes many poems. It may be admixed with grief. Meanwhile, around us, nature, in many forms, affords us its consolations.
From the opening poem, with its motif of the oracle, to the final sonnets, concerning fortune and chance, destiny makes itself felt. While it enables us, offering opportunities, it imposes boundaries. Though, like the metates (grinding stones) that facilitated pre-Columbian life, destiny may weigh on us in its inescapability; the stones are evidence of life’s dependencies.
