A Publication Announcement & An Upcoming Event

I have some very exciting news! Ghostbird Press has agreed to publish For My Son, A Kind of Prayer, a chapbook of poems about being a father and raising a son. If all goes well, the book should be out in April 2016. The title of the book is a play on William Butler Yeats’ “A Prayer for My Son,” in which the poet asks for divine protection against those “who have planned [the boy’s] murder.” I am not concerned that anyone is planning to kill my son, but he is growing up in a culture, as the level of gun violence in this country seems to show, that is deeply in love with the ability to bring death to others and that values this ability as part of what it means to be a man. The book’s title poem, an earlier version of which you can read here, takes on what it means to raise a son in a culture that is if not precisely in love with rape, then certainly having a hard time not being in love with it. As a whole, For My Son, A Kind of Prayer represents what it has meant for me to be a bulwark of sorts against those values.

“For My Son, A Kind of Prayer,” the poem, will also appear in Veils, Halos, and Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, an anthology conceived in response to the brutal gang rape and murder in December 2012 of Jyoti Singh Panday. This volume, which will also be published in April 2016, by Kasva Press, was edited by Charles Fishman and Smita Sahay and includes contributors from all over the world, including Afghanistan, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, India, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Sweden, the US, and the UK. The editors have set up a Facebook page, where you can find out more.

I will be reading some of the poems from For My Son, A Kind of Prayer at the Queens Poets & Parents Reading, which will take place on Sunday, October 25th, from 3:00–4:30 PM at QED Astoria. Tickets are $5 and can be purchased at the door or on the QED website. (There’s also a Facebook page). This will be an interesting event, featuring five Queens-based poets–me, Wendy Angulo, Jared Harel, Paolo Javier and Sarah Kain Gutowski. We’ll each read from our work and then have a discuss amongst ourselves and with the audience about how raising children has helped to shape our creative lives. It would be lovely to see you there.

(Cross-posted on my blog.)