Fault Lines (The Backwaters Press, 2009)

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In our increasingly pixelated world, nothing rusts. Nothing is lost.  Place and time seemingly disappear.  But place does not disappear—even as its implications and features continually shift. And passing time becomes history, memory. Place and time persist. Many of the poems in Fault Lines recall small town and rural California as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. In part they are attempts to understand the role of memory in making a usable past. In part they are attempts to map things that seemingly no longer matter in this pixelated world—but do matter.

Some of the poems in Fault Lines, such as “California Coast (Sonoma County)” and “Lake County Diamond,” date back to when I was first writing. These earlier poems were recast when I returned to writing after the long break discussed elsewhere. The rest are from the four or five years leading up to the collection’s publication.

Iterations of what became Fault Lines were a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award (Utah State University Press), the Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize and the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize (both Story Line Press), the Holland Prize (Logan House Press), the Saint Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press); and semifinalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize.

(A special thanks to John Hunt for the great cover design.)