At twenty, I wrote a short incredibly-morbid poetry collection while an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan. Three years after that, while I was an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University, that collection was published by Whitepoint Press. Back in April of this year, I was contacted about the collection by editor Will Woolfitt of Speaking of Marvels, a site devoted to interviews about chapbooks, novellas, and other shorter forms. He asked me if I wa

Poet Michael Dennis just reviewed Searching for a Pulse as part of his poetry blog project Today's Book of Poetry, where roughly every two days he writes about a book of poetry that he likes. It's quite the kind review, and I'm really grateful that Michael took the time to both read the book and write about it. I admit that being told that my collection is "utterly charming in a Morticia Adams/Janice Joplin/Ann Sexton sort of way" pretty much made my week. You can check out t

I’m about to announce month-old news! Aren’t you excited? Aren’t your eyes wide with barely-contained glee? Isn’t this the kind of build-up you wish every single blog post led with? Okay, I’ll stop being clever now. Or “clever” is probably more accurate. Ahem. Anyways. In order to properly explain this news I need to introduce you to The Soloists. They’re a band from Novi, Michigan made up of the talented Eric VanBuhler and Pat Kochyan. The three of us went to high school tog

I'll be the first to admit this "origin story" is rather short and maybe doesn't qualify as a "story" so much as a "vignette." But for whatever reason—poet rhythm aesthetics maybe?—I think "origin story" sounds better than "origin vignette" and so I'm going to leave the dishonest title alone. Anyhow, enough meta-ness about this blog post. Searching for a Pulse just had its one year anniversary (August 5th), and in light of that I decided I'd tell you a little about where the