In the Company of Giants

I just received my copies of a new anthology, Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic Depression, edited by Thom Schramm and published by Eastern Washington University Press, which features my poem "The animal night sweats of the spirit burn." I am thrilled to have a new publication, and deeply honored to appear in a anthology that also contains poems by such greats as William Matthews, Anthony Hecht, Jane Kenyon, and C.K. Williams, to name just a few. Here's the poem:

“The animal night sweats of the spirits burn”
(Robert Lowell)

Adrift among damp sheets you turn
and turn the pillow over seeking
the cool side that isn't there. You turn
your face to the window. Rain smears
the glass and beads the streetlamp's light.
Tires hiss along the pavement.
You turn away.
Driftnets of feeling
wash over you in the dark
and finally carry you down to sleep, to dream
in fragments half-remembered when
the sun pours in across your face.
Arising
you awake to the perpetual
daily crucifixion: pinned by desire
to desire, you wriggle like an insect.

Buy the book here.