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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))

Big thanks to Garielle Lutz for publishing “Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan” in Hobart today! A tragedy sends this fiction’s narrator into a spiral of intrinsic and extrinsic doubt, of identity, of his very sense of reality, all further “stranged” by his use of scare quotes and more besides.

Good news! Contrapuntos X is now available. It features “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed,” a single-sentence fiction of mine that limns the liminality, precarity, and atomization of life in/within the Capitalocene-of-the-crime. And yes, the title is from Part III of Francis Bacon’s “Plan of the Work.”

Here are editors Aimée Mendoza and Lucía Orellana’s remarks about “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed”:

A story of approximately three thousand two hundred words told without periods or paragraphs; the flow of thought of a man who, at a crucial moment in his life, gives an account of it in an accelerated tour through the recesses of his memories, his desires, his aspirations; all this interspersed with the present and acute moment and its effects on his body, his mind, his existence. John Madera offers us in “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed” an intense narrative exercise, controlled and at the same time enriched with vertiginous rhythm and language.

Thanks, Lucía Orellana and Aimée Mendoza! And thanks, Marcos Pico Rentería and Ángel M. Rañales!