My first book, The Sacred Heart, about goodness and complexity, was published by Kelsay Books. You can find a poem from the book, “Chaotic Cell,” at Consciousness, Literature and the Arts.

I didn’t publish a book until I was in my mid-forties. I spent two decades before that writing criticism and teaching poetry, writing and publishing many poems as well. In a metaphor appropriate to the themes of the collection, I would say the genesis of the book was something like the sudden breakthrough emergence of the stalk from a mature yucca, growing very quickly, spontaneously, rooted in and reaching up away from its source.

I see in this book too the emergence of my voice: philosophical, playful, in love with the ordinary. Seeking to unite, or bring close together, the ethical and the aesthetic.