NEW YORK, New York — This year would have been an unusual one for me in terms of publications. I would have had a volume of poems and a collection of nonfiction out, with just a couple of months separating the former from the latter. Two books in the same calendar year: It would have been a first. I hadn’t planned it this way and, as it turns out, that is not what happened. Tattered Boat, the volume of poems, did appear in print last April, published by the University of the Philippines Press, which had also put out my last full-length poetry collection, Museum of Absences (co-published in 2005 with the San Francisco-based Meritage Press). At the same time, I had a nonfiction manuscript—RE: Reflections, Reviews, Recollections—that in July of 2013 I submitted to the University of Santo Tomas Press. The next month its director Jack Wigley e-mailed me to say that UST Press had accepted the manuscript and would therefore publish it. (At this point, no objections were made to any portion of the manuscript—this is important to note, in light of what ensued.) The timetable would have the book out in spring this year, in late May or early June, just in time for a reading and a workshop I would be conducting at the annual Yale Writers Conference, from June 7th to the 17th. The timing couldn’t have been better. But alas the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. Over the course Read More …
