The poems in Under a Gathering Sky—published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in April 2024—present a quest narrative that examines the essence of questing itself. Grouped in five sections, the collection opens with a gathering called “Auguries,” marked by the crossing of spatial and temporal thresholds. Section 2 offers poems in “slant” dialogues with such writers as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lucille Clifton, W. G. Sebald, and Robert Hass. The third section, “Ingathering,” engages most directly with twenty-first-century reckonings as well as voices and images from the author’s past. Section 4 consists of mostly four-line poems, which demand that the reader engage with the text and their own ethics. In the final ascent of the fifth section, the concluding poems reflect on personal and collective geographies as well as on the limits of our knowing.

The official launch, reading, and book signing took place at Francie & Finch Bookshop April 19 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Earlier that day, I did a fun interview for Friday Live on Nebraska Public Media with Genevieve Randall and took part in a conversation event with Darlington Chibueze Anuonye at UNL.

In July, I did a First Friday zoom reading for the wonderful Larksong Writers Place.

In October, I had a wide-ranging conversation with the inimitable Ethelbert Miller for his On the Margin podcast, broadcast live on WPFW (Washington, D.C.).

On December 10, Major Jackson read “Time || Immemorial” on The Slowdown show.

In other news, my conversations with Frederick Luis Aldama and Chibueze Darlington Anuonye recently appeared in American Book Review and Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.

What others have said about the book:

“Just from these few poems I can see or hear a guiding voice and aesthetic and probably a trajectory to the book—a journey (through this ‘new country’) as much through time and circumstance as place, and a seriousness, an accompanying tenderness (for nature, for prospects of hope, etc.). I detect something like a five-act movement, with a magnitude and a real sense of progression. There’s also a kind of expository riskiness, which I am drawn to here, with a balance of a type of lyrical image and something like a thinking-through of the large issues even in relatively short poems. And it looks like much of the coherence is natural—that is, the placement of conscience and history-making in a palpable location in a natural scene. There’s a classical seriousness throughout.”—David Baker, Denison University

“I find the book prophetic, and the work of a mystic who is in touch with tellurian and human forces that remain hidden to the common person. ‘Days of Reckoning’ in particular is very powerful, and so is the eponymous poem, ‘Under a Gathering Sky.’ The volume is a journey—sending the reader into the unknown, into another dimension, broader and faraway. . . . The homecoming in part 5 is also an atoning, and rearranging the homestead with love, creating a new, pared-down harmony, keeping the essential harmonies, creating order. The homecoming is spiritual, physical, and intellectual. Writing poetry or harvesting the grain, both are inseparable in their rhythm. And ‘Knowing’ sums it up: climbing upward, returning to our departure point, ready perhaps for another journey—it is a poem that brings closure yet manages to keep the volume open.”—Alice-Catherine Carls, University of Tennessee at Martin