If you’d like to catch up on previous posts, visit “newsletter posts” from the menu on my website and enter the password: poetryismagic!

---

Highlights:

Whatnots

–

Sometimes life sneaks up and says “nope!” and plans get ripped out from under you, like the cozy rug of my planned visit to Louisville to premiere “Tomorrow, Overnight,” my Holocaust memorial poem. Same with the still winter chill in the air here on day one of March in Chicago.

Some days things suck, and then they don’t. I get to expand “Tomorrow, Overnight,” particularly the erasure sequence “On Conduct” (which is now going to be the full page length of the essay I’m redacting). Next week, I’ll be in Baltimore with all the poetry hooligans I could ask for. Magical Poetics is turned in (!) and due out late this year or early next. I’m writing a silly amount and am looking forward to sharing it with you.

Here are some more things that have given me joy lately. I hope you’re finding joy, too, despite the bleakness of the weather, the government, [insert modern horror here].

Dinner and a Show with the Chicago Mob

I interviewed Chicago legend Grant DePorter, owner of Harry Caray’s, about mob history.

These gorgeous orchid babies at the Chicago Botanic Gardens orchid show!

Maybe I didn’t love Richard Siken’s objectively brilliant I Do Know Some Things, but I did love this poem.

(I think I just didn’t need, in my soul, these traumas right now. I’ll come back to this book in a few years!)

So excited to spend time with these lovelies next week! A little scared of AWP paneling, so wish me luck.

Hugs in forever winter,

-Eric

Toodles!