The Hush and the Howl

I work with words and paper, with verbs like tear, paint, weave, and stitch. The Hush and the Howl is a pilgrimage—prose poems, hybrid art, collage, persuasions.

Always Beginning

“It was everything we wanted. It was the luminous dawn. It was the unwritten, never-to-be-written, never-ending, always-beginning book. It was the book that left nothing behind …”

Shortly after I read those words on the near-final page of Sofia Samatar’s Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life, I was rumbling down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, headed west, to Morgantown. A solo trip, as my son would call it. Away, if only for a few hours, if only to unshackle myself from the tyranny of domesticities, if only to wander the wide and silver, green and blossomed aisles of a monumental greenhouse, or to sit alone at a weathered picnic table eating a sandwich slathered together by a girl who ditched my gratitude with a roll of her blue eyes, or to buy myself a bouquet of Sylvia Ball dahlias that were preposterously puffed, or to watch what I thought were rust-colored birds rising and settling among the fields, but it was detritus being chased by a breeze.

Away, and no one else was speaking, and so Samatar’s words remained: never-ending, always-beginning, the kind of book that leaves nothing behind.

The Hush and the Howl will be that kind of book—unbound and without bounds, digital ink, the cracked seeds of what I dream and how I see and the traceries of books I read. Internal rhymes, if I please, and the ragged edge of thick Rives paper, the intensified blue of double cyanotypes. I’ll be speaking freely here, for time runs short. I begin what I will not finish.