Today, on the official book birthday of small mammals, the sonnet corona that forms the heart of the collection went live on The Journal of Radical Wonder.
This sequence began as a series of epistolary poems—poems written in the form of a letter—addressing by name a number of different teenagers in poems. As the poems evolved, it became clearer to me that the more I reduced it, the richer and more complex it became. The result was Lost & Found: A Broken Crown.
I am so grateful to Judith Kerman for taking on this book. It’s been like a dream—and in fact, began as a dream: I literally dreamt that I reached out to her, and she said yes.
There are too many people to thank for the making of this book, but I’ll start with all the presses that rejected it—17 of them—before it found its forever home at Mayapple Press. My poetry group friends, my poetry community, my Inlandia community—many of whom overlap—and my family family, related by blood or marriage or shared experiences, and in particular my sons and their plethora of friends and acquaintances.
As I’ve told many people, this was a hard book to write, because there are so many complexities to the stories told in these poems. If you’re in the Riverside area and want to help me celebrate the launch, I have an event tonight at the Dixon Planetarium and then Saturday at Arts Bar and Grill. There is still time to RSVP here.
Or on July 1 I’ll be hosting an event on Zoom featuring members of long-time local poetry group. RSVP for Zoom: tinyurl.com/CatiPorter