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Poem: "Losing Track of the Conversation"

The latest issue of Dunes Review includes both my first poem published in print since undergrad and my brother Sam Linstrom's first print publication, which is this image that he made in response to the poem. You can order a copy of this Winter/Spring 2018 issue here, and you can see my poem and Sam's illustration as they appear further down in this post. I've already begun to tear into some of the other work in this issue, and there's some good stuff.

insideyourmouth

Inside Your Mouth, 2018, by Sam Linstrom, b. 1992

Thanks to editor Tanya Muzumdar for her help making this poem what it is today and improving the momentum and pacing throughout it, and thanks to Steve Pett, for whose class on Craft and Professionalization in my first semester of the MFA I wrote the first version of this poem, as an imitation of Alberto Ríos. (Let students everywhere be reassured—imitation assignments yield fruit!) Thanks too to Saronik Bosu for reading a draft of this piece and encouraging me to have faith that it was good, and to my awesome mom, Rebecca, for giving what was by all accounts an absolutely arresting reading of the poem at the issue's launch party in Traverse City last week. And I'm grateful as well to Michigan Writers, for supporting the literary arts in Michigan and for publishing this gem of an independent journal.

Dunes Review cover

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