Come say howdy to Durell, me, and more than 50 other authors and publishers.
Tulsa LitFest 2026 Book Fair Sunday, April 26, 11 a.m.–2 p.m. OSU Tulsa Campus Mail Hall 700 North Greenwood Avenue Tulsa, Oklahoma 74106
Images: 1. A sign for my collection, No Sea Here. 2. A sign for Durell Carter’s collection, Mr. Monday Morning’sBroken Songs and Testimonies. 3. A sign for Moon in the Rye Press.
Dawn Levitt is doing a lovely job reviewing chapbooks and full-length poetry collections this month on her site, From My Heart to Yours. These are thoughtful reflections on each work and are a meaningful contribution to poetry.
I want to call attention to things like this on a regular basis: poets whose efforts support other poets and poetry as a whole. (I tried to create an acronym for it, but all I could come up with that PoSUPo, which doesn’t quite work, so no acronym for now.)
This is a form of “calling on,” which I discussed yesterday. Contributions like Dawn’s call on all of us to consider ways we can support the community, whatever form that might take for us individually and collectively. I know many folks are PoSUPos already, I’m not supposing otherwise. (See what I did there? With the words? Fun.)
Image: A screenshot of Dawn’s blog showing the post “National Poetry Month Book Review #3” on a lavender background with a photo of poetry collections, flowers, and tea toward the top of the post.
I learned today that we should all be drinking old water, really old water, ancient water, Pleistocene Epoch water, lest we be exposed to Anthropocene contaminants that significantly increase the risk of Parkinson’s and other diseases. If your area has it, it has it. If not, don’t even try to buy it bottled because the bottling process adds micro- and nanoplastics.
Oklahoma has old water. Eastern Washington has old water. Northern Utah has old water. Toquerville does not have old water. It has highly contaminated brand-spanking new water full of pesticides, herbicides, disinfection byproducts, heavy metals, and radioactive elements.
The new Netflix documentary series, Trust Me: The False Prophet, details the story of Samuel Bateman, a man who committed horrific abuses in his attempts to claim he was the new FLDS prophet in Short Creek, located on the Utah-Arizona border, after Warren Jeffs was imprisoned.
Short Creek is thirty minutes from where I live. Its members girdle us, especially since Jeffs’ forced exit necessitated that many of his followers relocate to the surrounding communities.
In 2022, The Salt Lake Tribune ran a series of stories about Bateman in which he says some of the most vile things I’ve ever seen in print. Bateman and his actions shook my own childhood traumas loose and made me feel extremely unsafe in this community, or at least with that subset of the community.
My forthcoming book, Crude (Nine Mile Press, Propel Disability Poetry Book Series) discusses Bateman. In “Litany in Which I Talk About My Horse,” I tell my childhood friend Ruthie about the girls Bateman was hauling around a four-state area in a trailer to “recruit” male followers. He was caught in Arizona when a driver spotted something suspicious about his trailer and called the police. Inside it were just some of the girls he’d married and was trafficking. (Even more disturbingly, he also tried to marry his biological daughter, whom he felt called to wed while she was still a child. Yes, you read that sentence right. The documentary series leaves that part out.)
Below is an excerpt from my poem, which is seven pages long. I wrote it the night before my cardiac ablation when I thought I was going to die. It’s after Richard Siken’s “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out.”
Completing “Litany in Which I Talk About My Horse” marked the moment Crude became Crude, even though I started writing Crude in 2009. It was also the moment I decided to come back to poetry after a seven-year absence. That day was November 28, 2022.
I sent the poem to four poets I trusted that night before I went to sleep. I wanted them to have it in case I died while sleeping or during the procedure the next morning. This may seem like high drama, but I had five types of heart issues at the time, all from or exacerbated by post-viral sequelae, symptoms that linger long after the infection itself. For months, my doctors refused to believe any of these issues were serious, even though it felt like wild horses were stampeding in my chest day and night. My heart seemed hell-bent on trampling me to death.
It was in that state of physical and mental anguish that I finished “Litany in Which I Talk About My Horse.” I was responding quite literally to my heart and also to the fact that someone had just described me as riding into Southern Utah on a high horse, as if I were just some snob whose past wasn’t bruised, brutal, and bloody at times.
As it turned out, one of my issues was atrial fibrillation, which is quite serious. The other was postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which hadn’t been diagnosed or treated yet and was causing a suite of severe symptoms like debilitating dizziness and vomiting. I sometimes had to crawl from room to room. Folks with dysautonomia know what I’m talking about.
Kelly Boyker was one of the poets I sent “Litany” to that night. She had a profound reaction to it, which strengthened my resolve to return to poetry. (Ad astra, dear Kelly.) My version of the poem doesn’t cross anything out. It sets atrocities in boldface. These are the lines about Ruthie’s father and Samuel Bateman:
I’m sorry I did that to you, made that anger in him by speaking Latin, made him use you for supplication … later, in your room, in your bed, your own bed. If the window were a heart, it would always be open not closed
like the box trailer found in Utah. It was full of girls. One wedged her fingers over the right door. I thought of you but not of me. It’s what I do, Ruthie. It’s what I do.
—
Like I’ve said, Crude isn’t just about Oklahoma. Those same patterns repeat everywhere, including places like Utah. Folks should check out Trust Me: The False Prophet if they have the stomach for it. I barely made it through the series and don’t have the luxury of viewing it as a tragedy that unfolded a world away. This atrocity played out right here: first with Jeffs, and then with Bateman.
Image: My photo taken in Zion National Park outside Springdale, Utah, about thirty minutes from Short Creek.
I’m thrilled to announce that I signed a contract with Nine Mile Press today. My collection, Crude, will be part of the Propel Disability Poetry Book Series and will be available in June 2027.
I’m also stepping into a contributing editor role for the series. Between the authors, editors, and founder Steve Kuusisto, Propel is doing phenomenal work around poetry and disability poetics.
This series matters deeply to me. Crude could not have found a better home.
Image: A screenshot of the masthead for the Propel Disability Poetry Book Series from Nine Mile Books.
What can I say about this stunning collection? How about: I had to tape the cover down to take these photos because I’ve already wrecked the book by reading it so intensely in my hot, fiddly hands.
A Brief History of My Sex Life from Lily Poetry Review Books is like the Salish Sea, which once spread across parts of the Pacific Northwest not far from where Bacon lives. Ancient seas like Salish were lush ecosystems teeming with life. They’ve left behind more than we could ever discover: traces of lives and worlds not unlike the ones this body of work pulls from history, family, culture, art, poetry, spirituality, and more, as if excavating artifacts from the seabed.
The book’s scope and what it sets out to achieve are evident in the title, which mirrors Stephen Hawking’s landmark cosmological book A Brief History of Time. But Hawking’s work was not just an encyclopedia of all things vast. It made complex concepts accessible to people, even those without a background in physics. Bacon’s work does that, too, bringing us in close to tell us stories about their life and the lives of those around them.
This collection is about identity, not identification. For me, that’s an important distinction. Some of the stakes are high in the work (and getting higher every day in this world). But A Brief History of My Sex Life doesn’t stake claim in the sense of asserting. Rather, it’s a kind of gleaning without possession or possessiveness, of scratching below the surface, looking closely at what’s there, and saying, Here, come have a look at what I found. I want to show you so you can see it, too.
Images: 1. The cover of A Brief History of My Sex Life. 2. An interior page from the collection. 3. Another interior page from the collection along with a pomegranate. 4. The back cover of the collection with the pomegranate and an hourglass lying on its side. Get it? Because the book literally stops time while you’re reading it.
Speaking of loneliness, I once played with light as a friend. When my brother-in-law, who was much older than me and a physicist, was visiting one summer, he showed me how to capture light in a small mirror and project it onto a wall. After he left, I played with the light for hours and hours in an otherwise dark hallway, the one that led to my parents’ separate bedrooms and to my bedroom and to everything that happened in them. I don’t know what I thought I was going to accomplish by getting a ball of light to bounce around on those nicotine-beiged walls, but I knew it was better than going it alone in that house. My light friend was everything to me that summer. It only let me down on cloudy days.
On this second day of April, I’m honored to share Scott Abbott’s tribute essay about Utah poet, sonosopher, composer, and musician Alex Caldiero, published today by Rob McLennan at periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics. This tribute means so much. I only knew Caldiero’s work, but I recognize what a loss it was for Utah and for poets, artists, thinkers, and creative folks everywhere when he died. Rob was kind enough to reach out to me after I posted about Alex’s death to see if anyone wanted to write something about his work. Scott generously took the time to write this piece about Alex, his life, and his work. Read it. Then read it again whenever you start to think poetry and the arts don’t matter. Ad astra, Alex.
Images: 1. Alex Caldiero with Scott Abbott. 2. A poster for a Howl event with Alex Caldiero at the bottom. 3. An open page from one of Alex Caldiero’s notebooks.
I know it’s April Fools’ Day, but this is no joke. My full-length manuscript Crude has been accepted for publication. It took most of the morning to write that last sentence because it doesn’t seem real. I’m actually just sitting here now thinking of what to write next.
I feel funny in a good way like when you have a colonoscopy and they give you Propofol so you wake up loving everyone and wanting to call them on the phone to say I love you and you love your gastroenterologist so you tell him so and you love the nurses and techs so you tell them so and you run around in the waiting area in your paper gown with your butt hanging out telling everyone you can how much you love them because you love them you really do you really love them.
I’ll share more details when I can. At that time, I’ll do a more formal announcement that doesn’t read like this one.
Dana Henry Martin 