CURRENT PROJECTS

FEAST

Current manuscript-in-progress.

Feast is a hybrid book-length work examining the relationship between food and grief. In part, this is a pandemic response, as one of the three deaths that haunt this work is that of Zoe Rana Mungin, a writer and dear friend who died of Covid-19 in April 2020, after being denied initial treatment. This work further memorializes the memoirist and baker, Molly Brodak, who completed suicide in March 2020, and my father, who passed in 2021. All three of these people fed me, both literally and metaphorically. Feast  takes the form of a mourning feast, with each of the seven “courses” of a meal consisting of a crown of prose sonnets. 

Excerpts from Feast are published or forthcoming in:

  • AGNI 103: “Hors d’Oeuvres”

  • MASSACHUSSETS REVIEW: “Fruits of the Land”

Folk Physics: New and Selected Poems of Molly Brodak

Forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press, edited by Caroline Crew and Jenny Molberg.

Molly Brodak: New and Selected Poems collects more than two dozen new poems from the manuscripts left behind at the time of Brodak’s death, alongside a generous selection of poems from her collections, Instructions for a Painting, A Little Middle of the Night, and The Cipher. A poet of witness, paradox, and precision, Molly Brodak’s poems push the reader beyond the limits of understanding: “We stand on the rim of the void,” Brodak writes. “We hold our little lamps of knowing / on the rim, and look in.” 

Molly Brodak (1980-2020) was a poet, memoirist, teacher, and baker. Before her death in 2020, she taught writing and literature at numerous institutions, including Emory University, Augusta State University, and Kennesaw University. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she published a full length collection of poetry, A Little Middle of the Night, a memoir, Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir and three chapbooks of poetry. Her last collection, The Cipher, won the 2019 Pleiades Press Editors Prize.