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I’ve long loved Rae Armantrout‘s ingenious, lyrical, witty, probing poems; so you can imagine my great delight to share Armantrout’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“In his poem ‘No Things but in Ideas,’ John Madera identifies first as a succulent, then as spider plant twisting itself toward a distant light. There’s something appealingly modest and persistent in this image. It is also an apt way to describe what Madera does in Nomad Science as a whole: his work here acknowledges death but seeks out life-forwarding currents in an often otherwise hostile environment. We need more of that.”
—Rae Armantrout, author of many books, including Go Figure, Finalists, Conjure, and Versed (winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)

Delighted to share that “First-Person Shooter, or Jeux Sans Frontières”—a fiction of mine with an implicit critique of a certain kind of gamer and gaming, not to mention the oppressive systems that enable them—was published in The Dialogue Within, the 40th anniversary issue of Eckhard Gerdes-edited The Journal of Experimental Fiction! Ka-pow!

The issue features work by Eric Altemus, Tanvi Bhandurge, Steve Biersdorf, Eddy Burger, Anca Cristofovici, S. C. Delaney, Sophie Drukman-Feldstein, JF, Christine Faught, Ramiz Garalov, Seth Geltman, James Gierman, Selah Grenewood, Daniel Y. Harris, David Jelinek, Stanley Kelman Jr., John Kinsella, Amy Kurmań, Jesse Levy, Charles Lowe, John Madera, Constantinos N. Makris, Robert John Miller, David Moscovich, Chris Okum, Daniel O’Reilly, William Owen, Vahid Paeez, Fereshteh Parizi, Steve Pastis, Peyton S. Perry, Agnès Potier, Doug Rice, Doren Robbins, Mario Senzale, and Michel Vachey!

In other words, I’ll be in great company, to say the least. Thanks, again, to publishing editor Eckhard Gerdes!

The Spring 2024 issue of Sixth Finch, which features my poem “First as Comedy, Then as Force,” is now live!

It also features poems by a host of other poets:
Mary Kovaleski Byrnes, Nicole Hefner Callihan, Matt Hart, Becca Klaver, Caroline Manring, Rajiv Mohabir, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Jeff Whitney, Matthew Klane, and many others.

Big thanks to Rob MacDonald!

Good news! The New York State Council on the Arts has awarded me a $10,000 grant to support my writing an epic, speculative cross-genre novel that limns the continua of exile, diaspora, fusion, limbo, and hauntology, and their interstices. The novel deeply engages the poetics of not only relation but of being and becoming, displacing conventional notions of the “self” and the “self”’s “surroundings,” that is, the external conditions and forces and histories that are always fraught, always contingent, etc.

Excelsior!

(Image: In, Between, In-between Worlds, John Madera (2016))