Tridents of Glass and Other Poems

Tridents of Glass is a single long poem told in twenty-four movements, exploring love, memory, and desire in a world shaped by technology, abstraction, and collapse. Intimate lyric passages are framed by choral poems that widen into visions of cities, systems, and forces beyond individual control, placing private experience inside an unsettled modern landscape.

The poem moves fluidly between the sensual and the cosmic: lovers recalled through touch, scent, and place are set against planets, entropy, and the vast indifference of the universe. Scientific and cultural references ground the work in contemporary life while giving human longing a stark sense of scale.

Deliberately expansive and fragmented, Tridents of Glass embraces disjunction as part of its meaning. Influenced by writers such as T. S. Eliot, Rilke, Allen Ginsberg, René Char, Louise Glück, and Bob Dylan, it belongs to the tradition of late-modern long poems that resist easy resolution or consolation.

Tridents of Glass is a work about intimacy under pressure—about love remembered clearly because it cannot be repaired, and about language persisting in a world where silence is no longer possible.

The remainder of the collection was culled from the 1980s to the present, including a large body written in 2022 after Tridents of Glass, exploring lighter moods and more divergent styles.