My second full-length collection, Pocket Universe, is now out with LSU Press. Along with poet Emily Pérez, I’m the editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, published by UGA Press in Spring 2022. My first full-length collection, Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), was selected by Alex Lemon for the National Poetry Series, and my chapbook Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) won the Black River Chapbook Competition. My essays have appeared in Slate, Romper, Electric Literature, The Millions, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere.

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Pocket Universe explores how the world becomes more wondrous and more perilous in the permanent after of parenthood. The collection begins in the public hospitals in sixteenth-century Paris—where women giving birth were as likely to die of fever as go home with healthy newborns—travels through the dizzying world of Instamommies and celebrities who effortlessly got their body “back” after baby, and ends with children singing at a bounce-house birthday party. Poems set those intimate, ostensibly domestic matters against weighty questions about human origins, our place in the universe, and the pervasive historical and present-day violence against mothers and children.

The Long Devotion is a collection of poems, essays, and writing prompts that celebrates motherhood and creates a space, as poet Molly Spencer has written, to “tell an unlovely truth about family life and not have to take it back.”The poets in this book represent and describe a wide range of experiences. They write about encountering the world anew through their children; intersections of parenting and race; single parenting; adoptive, foster, and step-parenting; life with chronic illness, mental illness, and disability; and the choice to remain childless. Essays and poems suggest ways to write through the disruptions and chaos of family life. Prompts invite readers to use the work in this book as a starting point for their own poetry.