A poem of mine appears in the latest issue of Asheville Poetry Review. “Dickens in Manhattan” comes out of my experience of reading Dickens’s travelogue about the US, American Notes, while living in Tennessee. I originally conceived of this poem as a pastoral, a poetic mode I was focused on at the time.
The poem begins in New York as described by Dickens and then enters the South to find a new landscape.
…To rise means
falling with upstanding scum, superior-
seeming, well-dressed nothing. To speak
of this mirror’s wrong. I must trust
it will crack and I’ll slip through.
Thank you, Editor and Founder of the Asheville Poetry Review, Keith Flynn, for including my work in what will be the last issue of this legendary journal.
6.13.2026