The Friday Influence

Just a quick post to announce the release of my latest chapbook, The Divorce Suite, published by Red Bird Chabooks! Copies can be ordered here.

This chapbook centers on a series of poems inspired by my divorce back in 2010. It takes on the idea of divorce as a fulcrum into change, the narrative itself playing out in various forms: from makeshift sonnets, tanka sequences, and the lyric/prose hybrid of the title poem, to the mutated sestina that closes the book, divorce is seen as both event and momentum.

These ideas are embodied in the following lines from Paterson by William Carlos Williams which serve as an epigraph for the chapbook:

Divorce is
the sign of knowledge in our time,
divorce! divorce!

                         with the roar of the river
forever in our ears…

The particular river that runs through this chapbook is the Willamette, as much of the telenovela that was my first marriage played out in Eugene, Oregon.

One of the reasons I’m especially excited about this project is that it brings together a specific sequence of poems around this subject. While the title poem and a small selection of other poems from this chapbook will be featured in my next collection, Small Fires (due out in 2017), this chapbook presents its own particular reading experience. The difference is similar to having a radio edit versus hearing the full version of a song.

Special thanks to Eric Hove & Sarah Hayes for being great to work with as well as to everyone at Red Bird Chapbooks! RBC’s chapbooks are hand-crafted art objects, making this publication all the more special.

Red Bird Chapbooks is planning a print run of 100 copies, so please hurry and snag a copy!

Happy Red Birding!

José