Published Poetry

Published Criticism

Other Projects

  • Dante’s Beatrice, Hughes’s Sylvia — At ‘The Legacy of Ted Hughes’, 10th International Ted Hughes Conference, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, 15-18 September 2026 at Pembroke College

    Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters offers a rich and disquieting evocation of the figure of Sylvia Plath, grappling with her enduring presence throughout Hughes’ life via the traces of their love affair, their children, the public arena in which both their legacies grew, her poetic talent, and the role of that talent in developing his. While it is most easily identified for its confessional, autobiographical and mythopoeic modes, Birthday Letters is above all a sequence of love poems that are also elegies, and given its subject, structure, scope and style, it can be profitably read alongside major canonical love sequences such as Dante’s Vita Nuova. With Dante’s framework of love, loss, and idealization as a guide, this paper shows how Birthday Letters can be read as a contemporary reinvention of the courtly love tradition, where the beloved’s absence shapes the poet’s identity, poetic power, and connection to the divine. It examines how Hughes mirrors and adapts Dante’s idealized vision of Beatrice as he wrestles with the burdens of memory, grief, and poetic legacy, and ultimately achieves his own version of an apotheosis for Plath. Through close reading, the paper explores Birthday Letters’ key images and rhetorical strategies against the backdrop of Dante’s Vita Nuova to reveal the works’ intertextuality and the light they shine upon each other.

  • Trial and Error — A book-length poem that explores the Gospel of John, retelling, interrogating, critiquing, expanding, disrupting and reimagining one of the world’s most enduring tales. Through the intricate rime royale form, the poem reimagines key events from the Gospel, yet finds room for digressions on rivers and birds; instructions on winemaking and optics; appearances by Spenser’s Mutability, Orpheus, Sir Isaac Newton and the nine Muses; an alternative and horrific last supper; a point-of-view account of Lazarus’s death and resurrection; explorations of parapsychology; and a pastoral singing contest, among other things. Throughout, Trial and Error bathes the Gospel’s theological symbolism and reflectiveness in jubilant satire, finding both humor and humanity in the divine claim. Yet beneath the playful disruptions and asides lies a sincere appreciation for the Gospel’s power and beauty. In the spirit of Ovid, Chaucer, Byron, Anne Carson and other rigorous yet joyful subverters of classical and canonical traditions, the poem’s ambition is to challenge and cherish one of the richest and most outrageous stories ever told.

  • Fielder’s Choice — A collaboration with Justin Campoy. Fielder's Choice, a collaboration of drawings and poems, explores the heroic and the mundane in baseball in a series of exploded snapshots. The drawings take as their departure images of favorite players as they might appear on baseball cards. Echoing shapes create motion and fluidity, a release of energy from moments of contact, while crosshatching gives rhythm and stability, even amid the loud, near-neon pop palette. The poems, in turn, roam from watching a game to playing pickup softball on a Saturday to a groundskeeper’s turf science to the weather. The poems are actually one poem, composed in a stanza form that combines the Japanese renga, a sequence of linked but loose poetic units, and the ballad. Part picture book, part vibrant but decomposing memory, Fielder’s Choice offers a view of baseball not so much as a game but as a porous meditation on life’s glories and disappointments. Alive to baseball’s poignant contradictions — friendly yet impersonal, symmetrical yet an orgy of angles, a confrontation of rush and calm, memory and wish — the collaboration seeks to find the furthest point away from baseball that still is baseball, and the deepest point in baseball that still is regular life. Fielder’s Choice is an attempt to articulate the game as a human activity, as both a pastime that can take on great spiritual power and an everyday exhibition of excellence and futility that is only slightly less frequent than lunch.