Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, How to Recognize God’s Chosen.

What do you like most about it?

Honestly, it is hard for me to say what I like. In fact, I tend to focus on the things I don’t like, regardless of what it is that I make. Few are the dinners where I don’t lead with a set of criticisms or a list of things I would change the next time I make it. I think somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that modesty turns away from the self. And so I have overcompensated. But, in an effort to answer the question, the collection was conceived as a long fragmented poem and the fragments to speak to each other across the collection and the collection builds on itself through foreshadowing and repetition. The collection values uncertainty over certainty. Indeed, the harshest criticism is reserved for those who are certain and who in their certainty are blind. And so with individual moments. For example, fire, stone, water, seed, and other elemental things appear and reappear throughout the collection and rarely are just one thing. Even the final denouement both resolves a good number of the tensions that run through the book and still opens up to mystery rather than answers. 

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish a book?

There are mundane things like editing individual poems, like the sequencing of poems and then the editing of poems again once the collection is arranged into a book. These are things you have to learn by doing, by reading, and then by arranging and rearranging. And they are challenges that you must face in order to arrive at a book that might get published. And those are all real challenges. And maybe others have tricks that they use to check the readiness. But, I never have. There is something in me that sees those and runs the other way from them. This is not to say that my approach is right. It’s probably not at all, and it is certainly not as efficient. But the thing I have had to overcome and I have to overcome it with every book is a persistent self-doubt. There is, of course, the doubt that accompanies all writing, but then there is another when it comes to publishing. 

Twelve years ago Katerina published my first chapbook, Broken Tulips. Three years after that Broadstone published my second chapbook, ruina montium. My first full-length collection and fourth over-all book, world as sacred burning heart, was published by 3: A Taos Press in 2021. That same year Valparaíso Ediciones, a Spanish publishing house, published Self-Portrait as an Iguana, a bilingual collection of poems that I wrote in Spanish and translated into English after co-winning a publication prize contest. Almost every single book I have published, including how to recognize god’s chosen, has made several rounds of open-reading periods and contests before finding a home. That means countless nos before the yes. In this sense it’s not different from most everybody.  

But I think that when we look at others we see their list of accomplishments and we don’t look at the struggle and the self-doubt that stands behind each and everyone of their published books. That self-doubt shows up in many ways: wonder about one poem or another, about the arrangement, about subject matter.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

I wanted to speak a word of peace, a word of love, a word of mercy in a time when it seems that we prefer to speak our bitterness and our grievances. That said, there is a thread in this collection that is critical, critical of the hypocrisies that often seem to attend those who claim they are pious, those who readily claim to be among God’s chosen and who in their self-certainty exclude others. Still, what I wanted to say is that we are all beloved, all of us have been chosen.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?

At the Kentucky Book Festival a reader came for me to sign a book she had already purchased, as we chatted, she opened it up and I saw the collection was underlined, highlighted, and glossed. Seeing that in itself was an amazing compliment. But, she wanted to read to me her favorite section, and as she did she teared up. There were a handful of lines that spoke to her deeply in her current season of life. That anything I write would move someone is humbling. Another favorite was when my wife told me that she felt that I had a different relationship to these poems than to anything else I’ve ever written. 

What are you working on now? Catch us up one significant event in your life since the publication of How to Recognize God’s Chosen.

I always have three or four projects going on at one time. Or, at least that has been the case for about the past 15 years. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. First, I understand books as coherent projects rather than receptacles of poems written. Second, I write poems in both English and Spanish. And third, because I am nobody. Being nobody means that a collection of poems of mine once written can take a while to find a home. I don’t lament that in the least. That lag time lets me put the poems down, forget about them, pull them out and tinker with them. For example, how to recognize god’s chosen was shortlisted for a chapbook prize with Tupelo Press in 2018. When I heard back no, I sent it out a few more times and then sat on it for a few years. In the intervening years between 2018 and 2024, when Katerina picked it up, I ended up expanding the chapbook into a full-length. During that time I wasn’t just tinkering and waiting for those poems to find a home. I was writing other poems as well. In fact, in 2020 I published Under the Ocelot Sun with Shadelandhouse Modern Press, a bilingual, illustrated children’s book (that I wrote in 2019), and in 2021 I was fortunate to publish two books: world as sacred burning heart with 3: A Taos Press (a book that I had been writing for about 10 years) and Self-Portrait as an Iguana with Valparaíso Ediciones (a book that has poems that were first drafted in 2000). Self-portrait, while a bilingual collection, was mostly written in Spanish. 

So, right now, I have a collection of poems in English and another one in Spanish, as well as several translation projects underway. Plus, I am waiting for a book of poems in Spanish to be published and I am also waiting on the illustrations for a bilingual Abecedarian Bestiary of Central America to be finished so it can go to press. Had things gone according to my plans and what I had been told, both the Spanish collection and the bestiary would be published. But, that is the other thing about publishing, nothing works on your timeline. Patience is a necessary virtue.