New Vrindaban out this month
The experience of launching a new book is hard to define. As this is only my second book of poems, it has the shine of something I don’t expect will happen very often. Second books are also odd in that, in most cases, the challenges of creating a book of poems, the detours and delays, that went into the first are overcome. The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business (TLOTDIOFB) took about 17 years of starts and stops. A couple of those poems began the world in a graduate class workshop at BU in 1999. New Vrindaban, including about the same number of poems, was written between 2016 and 2022. What a different world these poems grew up in. And so much more recent! But even for all that shine, the second book feels more remote, more mysterious.
What I mean is the long gestation of the TLOTDIOFB gave me time — time to be a student, time to start multiple projects, time to give up, time to get married, time to have two children, time to buy a house, time to build a career, time to figure out my writing practice, time to merge those multiple projects under one banner or discard them — to learn what I was writing about. TLOTDIOFB is about West Virginia and the toll on the people from the extractive industries in the state. By the end of all my hunting and pecking, nearly every poem in that book was built to illuminate that theme.
New Vrindaban is mysterious to me because I don’t know everything that it is about. Yes, it’s fair to say this is a book about grief, but when I drill deeper I find that grief refracting into very different subjects. The book starts in a sci-fi landscape that is also the landscape of childbirth, my children in fact. But it quickly shifts to a poem about music set in a dystopian West Virginia. Sci-fi, family, music, West Virginia, and suicide and cancer and …. Without an easy way to categorize the “whatness” of New Vrindaban I turn to its “whenness.” The playwriting teacher in me doesn’t want to claim this book as a slice of life, the things going on while I was writing the poems. Where’s the drama in that? But I do think the context of the book helps define it.
During the short years of writing New Vrindaban I lost three friends, all former bandmates of mine from high school and college. My children are both nearly adults. My parents are deep into retirement. Valerie, my partner of 22 years, had her second book arrive last fall. And, during the pandemic, I met online Eva Strautmann, an artist based in Frankfurt. We don’t know if we’re related, but we’ve been really fruitful responding to each other’s work. It sounds corny, but the grief and the healing are one and the same in New Vrindaban. Some of the book looks back to TLOTDIOFB and some looks forward to a third(?) book grounded in Eva’s art, tentatively titled Golden Horses.
And that brings me to the title. New Vrindaban is an intentional Hare Krishna community I grew up next door to in Marshall County, West Virginia. A quick look at Wikipedia will clarify the struggles of the community by the 1990s, and there was a point when I wondered how they would continue. But they have, and are now growing again. Not particularly spiritual myself in practice, New Vrindaban has been a touchstone for me my whole life. As a kid I could hear from two ridges over the chanting of Krishna’s name while I played with my trucks in the dirt. At night, I knew we were close to home when I could see the lights of the Palace on the horizon. Their darker years and resurgence sets an example for me.
I knew I wanted my second book to be different from my first. But despite the raw subjects in these poems, I also wanted it to be a more hopeful book than the first. Was I successful? I’ll let you know when I find out everything I was writing about. https://fourwaybooks.com/site/new-vrindaban/