I am so excited to submit Exile in Gayville to my publisher. For four years, I've been writing and revising; I've also been playing around with different creative concepts for the book. I'm so close to done. So close! The wonderful thing about taking four years to finish a poetry collection is that the time has given me the opportunity to put pieces down for months and years and then revisit words that I forgot I wrote. The distance provides clarity. Many of the poems I thought were, at the time of writing, brilliant lost their luster when I came back to them a few years later. Other poems that I thought were crap blossomed with age and revision.

Exile contains 4 themed sections. Parts 1, 2, and 4 are exactly where I need them to be. Many of the poems chronicle my father's death, academia, and move to West Hollywood to become a college professor. They are unapologetically honest; many of the pieces contradict one another. I love contradiction because I find tremendous honesty in the incommensurable. I can't wait to share this with the world.

Section 3's my Achilles' heel. Ironically, the third part of the manuscript's intended to be the most playful and absurd of the 4 parts. I say "ironically," because I normally feel most satisfied with my zanier poems. I'm just not sure if the spaghetti's sticking to the wall. Sections 1, 2, and 4 make me laugh, cry, and think; they challenge me to revisit the past and to alter my sense of future. Section 3 makes me feel like I'm reading a random chapbook somebody gave me, a chapbook I never asked for. I fear I'm being too hard on this section. Some of the poems in Heterophobia that people love and think are among the best in the bunch are some of the same pieces I came very close to leaving out of the book.

I'm giving myself another week to try to "fix" the section. After that, I'm sending it to Lethe and letting them decide. All in all, I think the second collection's better than the first.