Glass-paper work--

The first recorded instance of sandpaper was in 13th century China when crushed shells, seeds, and sand were bonded to parchment using natural gum. Shark skin was also used as a sandpaper. The rough scales of the living fossil Coelacanth are used by the natives of Comoros as sandpaper. Boiled and dried, the rough horsetail is used in Japan as a traditional polishing material, finer than sandpaper. Sandpaper was originally known as glass paper, as it used particles of glass. Glass frit has sharp-edged particles and cuts well; sand grains are smoothed down and did not work well like sandpaper made from glass. --"Sandpaper," Wikipedia

Though called (by those small but terrible singing voices that emerge from the laundry room and car keys and weedy garden beds) to child-ferrying and doing laundry and gardening this morning, I have also been polishing some poems in The Book of the Red King. I have an interested publisher but am not ready to show the whole thing, partly because the poems poured out so quickly and in such numbers that I almost feel that some of them are strangers to me. But the main issue is that I've been so busy for the past year that I have for the most part ignored revising and weeding out poems in favor of writing new pieces.

And after polishing is done--sometimes to smooth, sometimes to roughen--I must figure out the shape that the sequence will make. Right now I plan to use some sort of alchemical structure as an ordering device, but I am afraid that early parts of the sequence will be too dark if I am very strict about that. Is that off-putting? I'm afraid it would be. Perhaps a series of alchemical transformations is better as a framework--a pattern rather than an over-arching plan. Or perhaps something else entirely will emerge, as the poems are governed by character and narrative to a degree unusual in our day.

Marly, recent and elsewhere:

• Thaliad's adventure in verse, with art by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins (Montreal: Phoenicia, 2012) here and here 
• The Foliate Head's collection of poems with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Stanza Press (UK) here
• A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (novel) from Mercer University Press (ForeWord 2013 finalist in the general fiction category; The Ferrol Sams Award, 2012) here
• The Throne of Psyche, collection of formal poetry from Mercer, 2011, here
• Samples from my 2011-12 books at Scribd.
• See tabs above for information on individual books, including review clips.