Here is everything I’ve finished over the last six months or so. PDFs free, paperbacks on Amazon at cost of production.
Newest Monograph
Willing Spirit: essays on quantum mechanics and capitalism
March 14, 2025: It struck me the other day while I was walking that my greatest gift might be that I don’t actually believe in any singular set of answers to the eternal human questions. A singularity in quantum and cosmic physics is merely a place where the mathematics we have available to us crashes, usually by defaulting to infinity as a solution. I prefer to see in each -ism I explore the insights it is good at proffering, the foundational values or principles that inspire it, all the way up to the point where the math defaults to infinity. I do this with every system I study, exploring it until the math fails, which it always does. Then I superimpose what’s left of them, one over another and another, creating a sort of palimpsest. The Venn diagram of their overlaps, tiny as it might be, becomes what, at the moment, I feel I can relatively reliably trust as “true.” At least until a new math becomes available. This book pursues that initiative in two contrary directions: The first essay proposes quantum mechanics as a new paradigm for an ethical life in the 21st century. The second critiques the most serious impediment to that enterprise: capitalism.
willing spirit 4:17
newest book of essays: Reading/Writing Outside the Lines
November 26, 2024: “All of a sudden, in late October [2023], I went from having no books on my docket to five, each of which looked really interesting to me.I figured I’d read a bit of each to decide which to focus on first, then stage the others going forward. They were all so captivating to me, though, each in its own way, I just couldn’t pick one. So I ended up reading them all simultaneously, ten or fifteen pages of one, maybe a chapter of the next and so forth, night after night for a couple of weeks.Very shortly a wonderful thing began to happen: I’d be in the midst of one and would think I was still somehow in the midst of one of the others. Or, occasionally, all of the others! It was as if I was not reading five separate books about widely divergent subjects set in vastly different contexts, but one book with five different facets. I began to wonder how that could possibly be.” The essays in this book report three successive iterations of that wonderment, enacting a method (not a theory) of reading anyone can apply to their own reading preferences and rhythms.
reading writing outside the lines 4/7
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.”