Poem Roundup

It’s time for turning ground and putting in seeds, true, but also a moment when seeds I planted long ago are seeing the light of day for the first time. Poetry is like that–sort of a slow food for the literary. I need to be better about making sure the poems that make it into print and e-print find their readers, so here is a little farm stand for you to browse.

A poem for the spring planting season was published yesterday by Heron Tree, my favorite place to find a single, beautiful poem each week.

I am grateful to The Wayfarer for creating such a perfect home for three of my poems in their spring issue. They aren’t available online, but I will lend you my copy anytime, friends. It is a beautifully crafted journal that I savored cover to cover.

Yellow Warbler, was published by Written River and is similarly themed along spring lines.

Back in early winter, three of my  poems –two correspondences and a canticle–appeared in Dark Matter Women Witnessing’s issue on kinship. Let me just say that you know you are reading a Kyce poem if it has a fruit tree or river in it.

My biggest harvest of all is just days–and a craft talk and public reading–away. On Saturday I’ll graduate from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an MFA in poetry. Here’s an outtake from my thesis introduction:

The poems in Understory explore what it means to inhabit a particular landscape at a time of enormous disruption. They are a correspondence with the seasons, both those in the natural world, as well as inner cycles of renewal and loss. Throughout, domestic themes of body, garden, and home point quietly toward the unseen work of mapping identity and place. I think that, contrary to being insignificant, the correlation between those two relationships –self and place—are one of the means available to mitigate the damage of the Anthropocene. My work is a defense and praise of this, and an attempt to further understand and embody it. These poems are a listening that writes my speaker and I back into an ecological language of place.

Enjoy the poems, friends, and may you live your own in springtime’s open arms.