Talavera Sunsets now available from Bottlecap Press

Talavera Sunsets is now available from Bottlecap Press! This is a 28-page, hand-bound chapbook of poetry about the last road trip I took as a teenager with my father and sister out to western Texas, the last real road trip we’d all take together. I’m so delighted that it found a home with the incredible Bottlecap Press as part of their Bottlecap Features series. Copies are available through them for just $10, and you cannot buy this on Amazon (thankfully!) so be sure to head to their shop. Here’s the back-cover text for the book and a sample.

More than a road trip, it became a pilgrimage and last goodbye. The poems in Talavera Sunsets serve as mile markers along dusty highways in west Texas, archiving James Duncan’s final teenage road trip with his father and sister in the 1990s before impending adulthood swept them all in different directions.

From motels in Del Rio and Alpine to old cavalry forts and the McDonald Observatory north of Big Bend, these poems explore the people, places, and magical landscapes of a region as old as time, yet always in flux with humanity’s never-ending migrations. The three of them never returned, and part of them never left.

Dead City Jazz & the Punk Chapbook Series

Dead City Jazz, my chapbook about the neon and nightlife of San Antonio, TX is now available as part of the Epic Rites Press Punk Chapbook Series, in which you receive 12 books for $40 (plus shipping) all at once. I should have VERY limited signed copies available by early October, but there are so many talented writers in this series that your best best to to get them all before they're sold out. Below is a sample poem from Dead City Jazz called "Death of the Cool". 

Death of the Cool

sewing through Alamo Heights
after midnight, headlights and red lights
and Chet Baker, Miles, news of
your suicide in that cracked little
bungalow further downtown, soft
highway sounds like the ocean
we loved so well

your records and books were gone
by the time we got there to pay respects
but that’s alright, we’ll always
have the night, and all the
pain in the world

Dead City Jazz coming soon to Epic Rites Press

Epic Rites Press has selected my poetry collection Dead City Jazz for inclusion in their Punk Chapbook Series. This is the second season of their series, which includes 12 chapbooks released over the course of a year to subscribers for just $40, a little over $3 per book. This is an exceptional deal considering the subscription includes work from Ally Malinenko, William F. Taylor, Karina Bush, and many other talented writers, with more to be announced.

Dead City Jazz is a collection of San Antonio poems, of late night breakdowns and smoky bar crawls, of darkened streets and glowing cantina lights, of fading love and frightening lust, of death wishes and jukebox laughter. I'll see about getting my hands on signed copies, but I don't have full details yet on how the series works as far as that goes. But at the price listed for all of the chaps in the series, it really is a good deal to go all in. Many thanks to Wolfgang Carstens for accepting my work! More details coming soon.