Friends in my writers' group and elsewhere have been encouraging me to put together a collection of my poetry. I've done it a few times before, little comb-bound chapbooks I put together by hand at Office Depot and sold for a little more than it cost to make them. But if I'm going to do it again, I want to make it a bit nicer. I'll go through one of the online print-on-demand sites, either Lulu or LightningSource, which will save me many hours of time and let me sell a nicely bound 6x9 paperback of about 100 pages for around $12. I've asked my daughter, a very fine artist, if she'd be interested in doing some drawings, both to illustrate a few of the poems and to build on some of the themes, and she likes the idea. So maybe it will happen. Maybe sometime between now and Election Day.

So what I'll be doing until then is examining work I've already done, trying to choose which ones to include, rewriting some pieces, editing others, grouping and regrouping into some kind of coherent order, and pondering possible titles and covers. For now, the provisional title is "Each Joyful Little Death," that being the title of the last sonnet I wrote for Priya, and I'm figuring the finished book will be about 50 poems plus maybe 12 drawings.

Anyway, I'm going to start posting some of my old pieces, especially the heavily edited or rewritten ones but also some of the ones I've just never been sure how I felt about. Feedback is what I'm needing, honest feedback about which ones work or don't work, and which parts of each do or don't speak to you.

Thanks in advance, my friends.