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A huge thank you to, first, Palaver Magazine for publishing this piece here on page 79, and then for Poetry in Data for also publishing this piece here (you can listen to the poem here). I must also acknowledge Dr. Wulfila Gronenberg, as this is a found poem sourced from his 1999 paper: Modality-Specific Segregation of Input to Ant Mushroom Bodies. All of the words in this poem were found in the various sections of Dr. Gronenberg’s paper and – as is the case with all found poetry – it is the essence of the source that provides the true poetic inspiration. This paper is Read more…

A big thank you to The Trumpeter for publishing this poem, Comma after Late Budbreak: Defoliation by an Invasive Pear, here (listen to it here)! This is another poem in my sugar maple cycle, which deals with a pest – pear thrips – which can pose a real threat to sugar maple trees as they leave ‘Budbreak‘. Pear thrips (Taeniothrips inconsequens) are very tiny, around 1.5 mm, thin, striped brown bugs with a hairy fringe that are invasive to the United States and damage the leaves of sugar maple (and other) trees. Sugar maples are noted to be attacked most frequently and severely. Pear thrips were introduced Read more…

A big thank you to The Trumpeter for publishing this poem here (listen to it here). This biopoetics may be a bit of a cop-out but there is a reason for it – promise! This poem was the beginning. My first – ever – poem that combined science and poetry. What you see in this poem is something that desperately needs unpacking; something beautiful on its own, which gains additional power upon explanation. So why won’t I explain it? I have. Acerum on Fomalhaut b was the inspiration for the following poems (with their biopoetics linked if available): Acer saccharum Dicotyledons Deepnight Sapriver Budbreak Read more…

A big thank you to Palaver magazine for publishing this poem; you can read it here (pg 75) or hear me read it aloud here. Deepnight is another poem in my sugar maple cycle; when I first began working on this poetry series and thinking about trees more deeply, I came to the conclusion that trees wouldn’t obey our seasons. So I created what I thought were important ‘seasons’ for trees: Sunleaves, Deepnight, Sapriver, Budbreak, and Windborne. Deepnight occurs after the trees shed all their leaves and enter a state of dormancy until the days become longer and warmer again. While Sunleaves tells Read more…