Sparks & Starts: "Good Bones"

A poem's initial inspiration & early drafts

Hi, Friend.

My memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, is out on Tuesday. TUESDAY! This means, yes, there is still time to preorder a copy. Yes, like now, if you have a minute. Or you can visit your local indie in a few days and grab a copy. I mean, you still have to pay for it. Don’t just run out the door. Grab it, yes, then pay for it.

I’m hitting the road on Monday for the first week of book tour, heading to New York for an event Tuesday in Brooklyn, then off to Parnassus Books in Nashville on Wednesday, then Politics & Prose in DC on Thursday, then White Whale in Pittsburgh on Friday, and Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis on Saturday, hosted at Modernwell. My hometown launch will be Monday, April 17, with Saeed Jones, hosted by Gramercy Books at the Drexel Theater. (I have seen many, many independent films at this art house theater over the years, including Kids as a college student. I remember the sign in the lobby—something to the effect of, “No refunds if you walk out.” I didn’t walk out.)

Anyway.

The memoir’s title is the last sentence of my poem “Good Bones,” a poem I wrote in a coffee shop in 2015. I could not have imagined the life that poem would have, because how can we ever know? We send each poem, story, or essay into the world like a message in a bottle, with no idea where it might one day wash up, or who might reach down and pluck it from the sand.