Miscellaneous & Backlogged Poem News

Greetings from Smoke City, USA!  Summer has been preemptively cut short by pervasive wildfire smoke reddening the sun, blotting out the sky and the mountains, and forcing everyone to stay indoors.  It’s basically hot winter out here.  On the bright side, Missoula’s air quality has just been upped from “hazardous” to “very unhealthy,” so there’s that, and I do have a few pieces of good news to share, so the world keeps on turning.

First off, my poem from the most recent issue of Crazyhorse was featured on Verse Daily the other day, which means you can read it even if you haven’t had a chance to check out the crazygood Crazyhorse issue itself.  Note: there is a typo on the Verse Daily page.  What says “black dad” in the third line should say “black-clad.” Read it here!

Next, more poems from my YesYes Books chapbook, Inside My Electric City, which is due out in September 2016, were published last month in Phantom, and you can read them here.  I was also pretty obsessed with this poem by Laura Creste, so read that one too.  (I mean, really, you should just go ahead and read the whole issue.)

I’ve also got a poem that’s partially inspired by my yearly attempt and utter failure to sustain plant life (but also loss, making things, etc.) in the current issue of Fugue, the entirety of which you can read online here.

Two short poems were published in the current issue of Bat City Review, but it looks like they’re redoing their website, so I’ll hold off on linking that for the moment.  In the meantime, here’s a weird picture of me reading the issue at a diner in Minneapolis!  (Posed?  Certainly not…that’s definitely how I read things…)  There’s some glittery dialogue going on between the cover and the booth-sparkle.

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I’m also happy to report that Willow Springs published two poems, “Chain,” and “Year of Coming Close” in their Fall 2015 issue, and while you’ll have to get your hands on a print copy to read them, you CAN read a few Ed Skoog and Devin Becker poems as an issue appe-teaser online.

Last but not least, the folks over at NightBlock were kind enough to select and publish a poem called “Not Penelope, Although Unraveling” in their current issue, and I’m hanging out in there with some other YesYes Books authors like Emily O’Neill and jamie mortara!  This journal can be digested in a sitting, but will keep your poem-brain fueled for a good long while after you get up.

That’s all for now, folks.

Chapbook Forthcoming from YesYes Books!

This post is a little late in coming due to graduation and the subsequent obligatory “what do I do I do now” panic (answer: sit by a river, don’t think about it) but I’m pleased as spiked punch to announce that my second chapbook, Inside My Electric City, was a finalist for the YesYes Books Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest, and is going to be published sometime in 2016!  Beyond publishing beautiful texts, (have you seen their roster of crazy-good poets?) YesYes makes a damn fine physical product, and they’re great to their authors to boot.  I’m so happy that my little book has found a home with this awesome press.

As a preview, some poems from this manuscript were published last summer on alice blue review, and you can read them here.

Extended preview en route, as a few more will be published in the July issue of Phantom Limb, and issue 15 of ILK!

Spooky Boiler in Jeopardy at AWP

Folks! (Folks?) I’m repping  The Boiler with poets Michelle Y. Burke and Jenny Molberg in Minneapolis next week, at an AWP off-site event called Spooky Boiler in Jeopardy!  The Boiler’s teamed up with Jeopardy Magazine out of Western Washington U and Spooky Girlfriend Press for a night of readings and revelry.  Come by and hang out at Mason’s Restaurant Barre, 528 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis on Friday the 10th at 9 PM!  Check out the event details here.

And check out these poems by Michelle Y. Burke and Jenny Molberg in The Boiler!

Michelle Y. Burke, The Boiler, Summer 2014 (“Driving Alone” just won a Best of the Net award!  Which is awesome, and well-deserved.)

Jenny Molberg, The Boiler, Spring 2015

Also, if you fancy, here are the poems of mine which the Boiler was kind enough to publish this past summer:

http://theboilerjournal.com/2014/06/17/caylin-capra-thomas/

 

Fist pump!

Ghost Town 7

While I still have yet to make the 40 minute drive to Garnet, the most nearby Montanan ghost town, I can happily report that I have two poems in the current issue of Ghost Town!  OK, alright- cheesy intro, but give me a break; actual winter (not that 50 degree weirdness we had for a few weeks) has returned to Missoula, and I’ve been consuming Netflix episodes of Friends so voraciously you’d think I didn’t have any of my own.  If you’ve only got 20 minutes, I’d definitely recommend dipping into this issue over continuing mindlessly to relive 1995.  Joan Naviyuk Kane‘s three knockouts are enough to make February seem bearable, and these poems from Brandon Rushton and Laura Kasischke  could also help one temporarily forget the swirling vortex of existential malaise outside the plastic-wrapped windows.  What are you waiting for?  Go forth and warm thy cockles, or whatever.  (What’s a cockle, again?  Some kind of bivalve, I think.  I guess they should be heated before consumption.)  Don’t worry– the mid 90’s will be waiting for you when you’re done.

Tinderbox 1.3

IMG_20150131_124434_176        Yesterday was a damn fine day.  I was reading and writing and snacking in my sunny little apartment when, at some point between fistfuls out-of-season blueberries and a turkey sandwich, my friend Phil texted to tell me that the new issue of Tinderbox Poetry Journal was up, in which we both have poems!  (I guess the turkey sandwich was celebratory.)

I got pretty excited about Tinderbox when it first appeared this summer.  They hit the ground running with the first issue, and haven’t lost any steam since, so I’m really grateful to editors Brett Elizabeth Jenkins and Molly Sutton Kiefer for including two of my poems, “Mechanism” and “Window” in number 3.  (Three is also my second favorite number, after nine.  Which is only my favorite number because it’s three threes, and is so, then, “three-er than three,” as my friend Alicia has said.  Which is to say that probably, in the end, three is my favorite number. So…third issue!)

This is one fat baby, and could last you all afternoon if you chew slowly.  In particular, I was into Brandon Amico’s “Wherein a Trip to Western New Hampshire Predicts the Outcome of Our Relationship,” (“A pine cone is to a grenade / as sex is to a pine cone, but I don’t remember // how, exactly;”) all of the poems by Jessica Bixel, but  especially “Almanac” and  “Departure”, as well as “Mountains” by Anna Lea Jancewicz and “The Weight of It” by Nicole Rollender.  I also recommend checking out Philip Schaefer’s “Autobiographies,” which manages to get a circus, a mirage, the state of Idaho, a silver shovel, a piccolo, “talismanic mania,” porcelain dolls, hickeys, and edible jewels all into one poem without losing momentum.  Finally, props to Julie Choffel’s “You and Me Dear,” especially for the phrase “sentient motherfucker.”  Dig in!

Yemassee 21.2

Got my copyof the lovely Yemassee 21.2 in the mail yesterday!  (It could have been the day before.  My mailbox is all the way at the front entrance of my building, and this seems like a hopelessly impassable distance sometimes.)

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Cool cover art and full-color center spread by Chambers Austelle, and my poem, “Say Uncle,” is keeping pretty great company with their Pocataligo Poetry Contest winner and runners up, fiction contest runners up, and the rest of the grade-A contributors.  I’m particularly digging the poems “Wild Child” by Dara-Lyn Shrager and “This Attic,” by Pocataligo contest runner up Catherine Bresner.  Packing this bad boy with me today so I can sink my teeth into it at the farmer’s market, along with an overpriced egg sandwich and a suspiciously under-priced bloody Mary.  Cheers to the last day of summer.