My newest book of personal essays: Bunny and Free

Bunny and Free brings together two interrelated series of essays published initially on Substack in spring/summer 2026. It is a seemingly desultory collection whose through-line may, at first, be hard to discern. There is, though, a strong emotional undertow that holds them all together.  The focal point of Bunny is V.R. “Bunny” Lang, a poet/playwright who came of age as an artist in the 1950s and died young, in 1955. She is best known as Frank O’Hara’s (of Lunch Poems fame) “muse,” with whom he shared both poems and lunches starting in the late 1940s until her untimely death. “Muse” is such a dismissive way to characterize her role in their relationship, which was deep and loving, she serving more often as his mentor than his inspiration. Theirs is a beautiful story of true friendship and mutual trust. The focal point of Free is the character who came to me in a “lucid” dream on the first anniversary of my wife’s death ten years ago, playing out a stunning morality tale that took me months to fully decode. He and that dream became the capstones for the first book I wrote from the shadow of that loss, This Fall, still my keystone book. Because I was discombobulated when I started all this, the self-revelatory aspect of the Bunny series left me very anxious, enough so that I actually unpublished three of the essays. When I reread them after I started Free, I couldn’t fathom what I was so unnerved about, and I re-published them. Here’s what I concluded: Last spring I was feeling vulnerable, unsafe, really, a state of mind that inclines me (as I assume it would anyone) to avoid sharing overly personal material that others might use to judge or criticize me. Now I am serene and confident again, back on my game, so can easily assume such a risk. That’s a lot to get from writing, which is the primary reason I do so much of it. No matter my discombobulation, hunky dory is usually waiting at the other end of the line, of all thoselines I have to write to get there. I hope you will enjoy reading about my “trip.”

Bunny and Free PDF 7-17

My newest poetry book: the other side of the light

November 8, 2024: “Poets, like all artists, can inhabit liminal spaces that are both vividly present, right now, documenting the moment, and powerfully futural, opening ways towards what’s next and new. These two ways of “envisioning,” often at odds in settled times, tend to coalesce cooperatively at historical moments like ours, an old order on the way out, a new one not yet fully fledged, see-er and seer becoming one. The poems in this book may seem on the surface to be doing the former in an extreme way—they are tiny and precise records of perceptions, almost-nothings in a way—and very little if any of the latter—absent as they are of assertions or prescriptions, or even linguistic novelties. For me, what these poems don’t do is more important than what they do. My foundational belief is that the eyes we see with create a default path forward. So to alter that path, which is urgently important right now, one needs first to learn to look in a new way at what’s right there, now, in the moment.” PDF here, paperback via Amazon.

the other side of the light PDF 

My newest work on digital platforms

My Substack page now contains four series of essays: “In the Spirit”  uses poetry, ancient wisdom texts, philosophy, ethics, and, especially, quantum mechanics, to explore a range of issues that have to do with recovering a spirit of presence in the world. “Quite Contrary” explores the relationship between teaching and leadership, using the Gospel of Mary of Magdala as a scrim.  “Bunny” and “Free” are a sort of diptych of dark/light essays I wrote this spring and summer. All of these are available in book form, free PDF here, via the drop-down menu up-top, or at-cost-paperback on Amazon. Here is a link to my Substack page:

https://paulkameen.substack.com

On my Instagram page, called “my tiny poems from olympia,” I write snapshot poems to illustrate photos I take on my walks, a reversal of the customary word/image relationship, again, a link and a sample:

https://www.instagram.com/paulkameen/

I have a series of mini-readings of some of my more recent poems on my YouTube channel: