Published by Ginger Press, 2023
Cover Art by Richard-Yves Sitoski
In Butterfly Tongue we follow our hapless narrator—a welder at the Black Clawson-Kennedy foundry with a penchant for patronizing bootleggers—as he staggers from the newly-wet Seldon House tavern and wanders through the city, licking his wounds after his recent doomed love with Susan, a truly remarkable woman with two things on her back: a monkey, and an angel’s wings. Butterfly Tongue and Other Plays also includes the ethereal monologue Airborne, the suburban realism of Why Did You Come Here? and the baroque farce of The Beholder of the Eye.
Butterfly Tongue
Published by Wet Ink Books, 2023
Cover Art by Alan Glicksman
I was trying to read
when a robin crashed into my window.
Only by robin I mean my voice
and by window I mean the sea.
Wait, What? is the 2nd place winner of the 2022 Don Gutteridge Award for a full-length collection of poetry. It is a harrowing and humorous look at mental instability, charting the arc of a life from conception to discharge from a psychiatric ward and an uncertain future. A corrective to feel-good “inspiration porn”, it is nonetheless not a dark collection of poems but one that alternately laments, then revels in the absurdities of questionable childhoods, dead-end jobs, and a strained medical system. If you can lose your head when all about you are keeping theirs, this book is for you.
Wait, What?
Published by Byword.ca , 2022
Cover Art by Catherine Jones
There was a woman who gave birth to an earthquake with your name on it
How to Be Human is the chapbook in which can be found Sitoski’s winning poem from the 2021 John Newlove Award, “Air Kiss”, about which contest judge Elee Kraljii Gardiner said, “in these lines I feel the kindred recognition of the ridiculousness of being human.” The poems range between the lyric and the unhinged, where the author’s mind is likened to a river teeming with carp, and where his love will hold you suspended like the notes of “Let’s Get Lost” in Chet Baker’s broken jaw. Printed in an edition of 126, there are only a handful left.
