Posted December 3, 2025:
My poem “Impestuous” was published in The Red Branch Review. This poem is the first in a Portmanteau Series I am currently working on, a series of poems which take seriously the premise of portmanteau, which is when two words are blended together to create a new one, bridging a gap between the different meanings of words in creating a new term, and by extension a new concept. The operating poetics of my Portmanteau Series is this act of bringing various foci together and allowing them the space to articulate new meanings within their juxtapositions.
I am especially pleased that “Impestuous“ was published in The Red Branch Review, which notes on its masthead that the journal “seeks to bring to readers the kaleidoscope of human experience and is responding to the increasing liminality of the Appalachian experience,” and that the editors “are especially interested in voices which grew from Appalachia and the Appalachian diaspora.”
This poem bridges the distance between my childhood in the American South, between visiting the South in 2025 (especially Dollywood), and an experience of camping in the Shawangunk Mountains, an offshoot of the Appalachian Mountains in New York State. The Portmanteau approach helps to bring all of these into relation with each other by creating a new articulation meant to help bring these disparate foci into alignment without reducing any particular focus
You can read the poem Here.
The picture of frosted plants was taken by me on the trip that inspired the poem.