I wrote a couple of prose poems with five stanzagraphs. Then I wrote a bunch more. Then I couldn’t stop, and they turned into a book. I named the book Partial Genius. You can read it in summer 2019, thanks to Black Lawrence Press.

Infinite gratitude to BLP, to my friends and students who are always encouraging me, and to the editors of the literary magazines where these poems have appeared so far (there are many that I’m sending out soon, too).

I told BLP a bit about the process of writing this book

On writing Partial Genius

When writing the chapbook Saint Monica, which became my first collection with Black Lawrence Press, I stumbled upon a form that felt both compelling and expansive. The prose poem in five stanzagraphs made its first appearance with “Saint Monica Composes a Five Paragraph Essay on Girard’s Theory of Triangular Desire.” I wrote this piece with the well-worn essay format in mind as a gimmick, but ultimately felt that each discrete prose chunk forged its own identity while striving to, as they say in composition class, provide support for the thesis. I decided to return to this form with Partial Genius and to create a series of these poems that align and overlap to illustrate the experiences of one central speaker.

The poems of Partial Genius build upon the form in a collective narrative arc, working in unison to craft a larger story where plot points shift via juxtaposition and association. Thematically, this book is post-youth, post-love, mid-epiphany. What do you do when you finally realize that you are really good, but only at unremarkable things? What value does memory hold when weighed against other heavier commodities such as money and time and conventional beauty? Partial Genius ponders the years spent waiting for reconciliation of past wrongs, the ownership of former selves, and the desire to truly fit into one landscape or another.