Essays

City of Dead

Ruminate Magazine

"I wonder how we would live in the West if we had such intimate relationships with our dead. Would our optimism give way to cynicism, our cheerful chirping supplanted with the sullen sighs peculiar to men who congregate in alleyways?"

Twelve Lessons

The Chaos

"Twelve years of watching men in regular-looking jackets step in front of the train after work. Seven men, in total. Seven men in twelve years stepping casually off the platform, as if they’d forgotten something on the tracks, as if they had an appointment between the rails."

Tables in Transit

Apogee Journal

"Eat, I say, between bites of kimchi. His response is a stare that might put a spot on the moon but instead burrows into the back of my skull. I scoot my seat closer to the table."

Recipe for Salat Olivier

Hippocampus Magazine

"Fathers are meant to drink; mothers provide the accompanying zakuski—little bites—cajoling pickles onto the fathers’ plates, spoons of red caviar into their mouths, a passive resistance..."

Recipe for Khash

Matador Review Summer 2017

"I'd been brought here for a baptism, I thought, to be cleansed of cheeseburgers and leftist ideas. I ran in; the water churned me, turbulent and unforgiving. On the shore, I thought I caught a wisp of a smile on my father's face."

A Treatise on Eczema

FIVE:2:ONE #thesideshow

"Eczema is my body communicating with me. Eczema wants to know why I’m walking around in someone else’s sun while a thousand books go unwritten. Face growing unshedable second skin, cracked as the earth..."

Urine

FIVE:2:ONE #thesideshow

"My mother sensed the acrid aroma on my father’s pant leg and opened her door anyway. The wall outside the avtazavod in Gorky, where workers of the car factory shuffle through the mush-brown snow and soak their toes to the hilt..."

with light steam

Mud Season Review Issue 9

Pushcart Prize Nominee

"When I was a child, the bathhouse was a frightening place. Adult-sized penises swung freely in the heat. Monstrous penises like dripping elephant trunks at eye level. Sweating, bulging potbellies bullied the space a child’s head normally occupies."

on love and fish

Red Fez Issue 78

Pushcart Prize Nominee

"... watching the Russians, seeing the slope of their shoulders, the forward lean of their hips pushed forward by their palms, their crooked Communist smiles – these things communicated their comfort along the shore of the Moon River."

Eye Contact

Prague Revue

"There is a girl. There is the girl I see every day. I smile at her on the platform while we wait for the train. She smiles back and adjusts whatever skirt she is wearing that day. She wears skirts every day. On her feet she wears shiny-soft leather boots with cowboy heels, the kind that slope towards the toe."

Q&A with Brett Sigurdson

Mud Season Review

"Q: You have an admirable beard. What’s your beard-care regimen? A: Ox blood and sparrow tears, applied liberally every morning and twice a day in the winter. Also, regular brushing, and the kind fingers of a good woman."

The Straw Man Grows a Brain... Sort of

Medium

"The straw man has come alive! He is an orange Troll — proud and over-the-top in that profoundly unapologetic way often lionized by White American culture."

Reviews

Profile of NYT-bestselling author Daniel José Older

Lunch Ticket Summer/Fall 2016

"... he tells me it can be as simple as diversifying who you’re watching... It takes some sifting. But, he tells me that, after a while, “you start to see whose voices the people are lifting up.”"

Writers Read: The Feel Trio by Fred Moten

Lunch Ticket

"It’s difficult to be fresh with language. It’s easy, as a writer, to fall into personal patterns or, worse still, clichés or archetypes. And yet Fred achieves this freshness..."

A Shaky Read of Jessie Janeshek’s The Shaky Phase

FIVE:2:ONE

"Love poems if love was spoken in unapologetic noire, vodka, Pine sol, and leopard print... Work that demands your attention. Biblical. Somber."

A Review of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout

FIVE:2:ONE Issue 14 (Print)

"Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, his fourth novel, is uncomfortable. I do not just say this is a white man wracked with white guilt..."

Blogs

Thank You

Lunch Ticket

"if given an opportunity to join a collective of writers in any capacity, take it. Jump at it. Continue jumping throughout, reeling with joy, swimming through the words of others."

What Do You Do?

Lunch Ticket

"The reality is that one’s job and ones calling are separate, often disparate, aspects of one’s life. This is why I stammer—the sputtering words that never quite make it out of my mouth are, There is more than this. I am more than this."

Poetry For Prose

Lunch Ticket

"Poets, through practice and reading, learn techniques that help us snag a reader’s attention. We learn about the aesthetic power of words. We learn to use language boldly and economically. We learn that a narrative is not panacea."

Avoiding Fedoras: A Guide to Authentic Living

Lunch Ticket

"Like my friend who was once fixated on picking up chicks, I’ve learned that what makes a great writer—or a great partner—is the same thing that makes a great person: curiosity, compassion, empathy, experience."

On Umwelt and Writing About Family in Nonfiction

Lunch Ticket

"Wor a writer, this process of inhabiting a different self while shedding objective reality is a peculiar form of self-empathy. I step into a bubble that no longer exists. Or perhaps I construct a bubble based on what latent emotions are accessible to me."

How To Tell If You’re A Writer

Lunch Ticket

"You might be a writer if you are able to state that you are a writer without examining your shoelaces. You still think it’s a conceited thing to say."

Short Fiction

Election Cycle | Sonic Boom, Issue 6 | Winner of 2017 Best Small Fictions

The Quince | Sonic Boom, Issue 10

Poems

Alexandr Simanduyev | Maudlin House

Evolution of a Pop Star | Drunk Monkeys

Blossom | North American Review

Two Poems | San Diego Reader

Russian Dinner in 11 Courses | Drunk Monkeys

The Morning After | HOOT Review

Old Donald Had A Farm | HOOT Review

Brexit Strategy | HOOT Review

my father's mustache | Five2One Magazine, Issue 11 (print)

The Willow's Roots | Ekphrastic California

The Hussars Rode | Angel City Review

25th and York | Ash & Bones

When We Pose For Photos | Drunk Monkeys

Hear, O Israel | Drunk Monkeys

Tracking Tortoises | Ultraviolet Tribe

Echoes of Alexander | Silver Birch Press, SAME NAME poetry series

Seasons of Seventeen | Silver Birch Press, ME AT 17 poetry series

If I Were a Poem | Silver Birch Press, IF I poetry series