An experimental collection of tales, songs, and other forms forthcoming from KERNPUNKT Press, The Field Nig Blues follows a footloose farmworker during a sunless spring in western Washington state. With satire, caricature, and critique, these vignettes delve into the pains and pleasures of contemporary farm labor, and the joys that can be found within which is often exploitation. Invoking the commedia of trickster folktales, The Field Nig Blues builds a world of pastoral absurdity that illustrates the follies of inhabiting blackness within a wider space of white rurality and the constant search for sun and succor when one labors on the land.

How is a cowboy like a buddha? Koans to a Young Cowboi recontexualizes the relationship between zen master and student to mirror how a tenderfooted young cowgirl learns up to be a rancher.

Nestled in a world of cows and stockdogs, horses and sheep, the cowgirl in Koans to a Young Cowboi is a disciple seeking to understand revelations told by soil, grass, and sky. Under the tutelage of an unnamed old rancher, her endless questions are invariably responded to with an ambiguity that makes clear: the sacred path of education/enlightenment—learning to ranch, learning to cowboy, learning at all—is an asymptote that never truly reaches nirvana.

In nine short parables accompanied by black and white photos by the author, Koans to a Young Cowboi sketches the contemporary American West as a verdant expanse of serenity in which stewarding land and animals is as baffling, comical, and enigmatic a study as Zen Buddhism.

Available from Bottlecap Press in both softcover and digital PDF

Forthcoming from Porkbelly Press, touching grass is a micro-chapbook of confessional poetry rooted in preserving intimacy with flora while ceding the solitude of the bucolic for re-engagement with wanton blackness, queer desire, and the human world.

Pre-order

Winner of the Quarterly West Chapbook Contest, saanens, nubians, one lamancha is a collection of poetry recounting the first six months experienced by a novice farmhand on a small raw goat milk dairy in the southern United States. The poems expand the frame of the agrarian by leveraging the specific experience of a black body learning to work, live, and exist in a rural environment. From contest judge and Tuscon Poet Laureate TC Tolbert:

"Every time I re-read saanens, nubians, one lamancha, I find another way to be in wonder, to be stilled by the scorch of song, and to delight in formal dexterity. Centering the experiences of a Black poet farmer in rural Florida, this collection is a corrective to a white supremacist eco-poetics canon. And it is nature poetry at its most sublime—brilliant and brimming with tender and incisive lyrical range."

SOLD OUT | Review at DIAGRAM

rut is a micro-chapbook of prose poems soaked in the wondrous revulsion of breeding and gestation. The work wanders through a herd of 75 nearly-feral mama goats, their shared buck, and pinpoints how procreation can feel both surreal and hyperreal. These poems explore the dank griminess that leads to the miracle of life, backgrounded by running injections of wisdom gleaned from a pregnant farm mentor.

rut was published as part of the Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chap Series and can be downloaded for free.

woman, ALOCASIA
to turn back to the world, Midway Journal
ripgut, SWWIM Every Day
Four Poems, New Delta Review
all natural; bloodsport, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora
Four Poems + Interview, Puerto del Sol Black Voices Series
Dale Looks on the Bright Side, Sheila-Na-Gig’s Pandemic Evolution Anthology

Like Everything, Goatin’ Is A Strange Loop, LandLocked Magazine [forthcoming]
Three Songs from the Field, Miracle Monocle
TRANS ICONS FROM THE FARM, New Orleans Review
A Brief History of Contemporary Wage Slavery, Kitchen Table Quarterly
SB“F” 4 bird, HOBART