The crux.

Things are hot here in Akron, Ohio. I've been busy with everything but writing poetry, and I have two more weeks of this ahead. Finally acclimated to teaching lit again, still not used to teaching every day of the week, but coping. Some moderate sinus drama, and I taught one day feeling like the classroom was under water, but generally surviving. Three weeks down, two to go, and then one glorious month of downtime. 

I had quite a bit of anxiety over grading papers again, after years of mostly commenting on poems and lyric essays and such. It all came back to me, thankfully, and the feeling of having a stack of essays graded was quite monumental. I've been thinking about getting a better desk situation at home, so I can grade there rather than in the office. I don't have much of a workspace right now.

I was super thrilled to see that New Pages mentioned (and quoted from) one of my poems in the new issue of Interrupture. You can check that out here. And many thanks to The Country Dog Review for publishing my poem "To a Wrecking Ball." This is one of the very few poems I've written this summer, so I'm glad it found a good home. I have poems forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review,  Pleiades, Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, and Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. It's time to send more poems out. 

One thing I do love about teaching lit again is being able to set aside time for reading. Reading still feels like such a luxury for me (when it's not editorial work, etc). Today we discussed some stories from Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder, and I almost did a cartwheel when I realized that the students loved the book. Cartwheels aren't good for sinus drama, but I bet reading has a salubrious effect.