I started writing poetry as a counterpoint to academic writing during my Master’s Program in 2017. Academic writing can have its own beauty, to be sure, but it is a beauty that belongs to its genre: clarity of thought, precision of argument, rhetorical symmetry. But I’m guessing most academics could tell you that there are moments of insight in the process of reading/writing/thinking that the academic essay is not adequate to. These are moments of what I can only call spiritual insight. These are moments for poetry. After collecting a small body of work that commemorates moments like these, I sent them to my brother-in-law. “Have you considered sending these to journals?” He asked.
These three poems represent one of my first successes sending out poetry submissions. It’s an online lit journal based out of Shelburne, Nova Scotia.
Here’s one of the three, a love poem I wrote during my PhD program in Dublin, Ireland. You can read the other two in the collection here.
“My Meadow,” “After Having Kissed the Stone,” and “The Shrine.” The South Shore Review, 2025.
