The Sensitive Side of Donald Trump

As we near the end of the Trump administration, I find myself searching for a silver lining. I have finally found it in The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, a groundbreaking poetry anthology.

What if there’s a hidden dimension to Donald Trump—a sensitive, poetic side? Driven by just this question, Rob Sears began combing Trump’s words for signs of poetry. Sears is a creative director at the venerable advertising agency McCann Erickson He has written comedy and fiction for McSweeney’s, and co-wrote wrote a sitcom for Audible He lives in Finsbury Park, London, with his wife.

By simply taking the 45th President of the United States’ tweets and transcripts, cutting them up and reordering them, Sears unearthed a trove of beautiful verse that was just waiting to be discovered.

This profound and engaging collection gives readers a glimpse of Trump’s innermost thoughts and feelings on everything from the nature of truth, to what he hates about the British business magnate, Lord Alan Michael Sugar. This hitherto hidden Donald will surprise and delight both fans and foes alike.

Now in a new edition with fifteen all-new poems, Sears takes us deeper. This timely publication includes Sears’s scholarly footnotes, and an insightful introduction in which Sears excavates new critical angles and insights into the President’s poetry—depths of meaning that the casual reader might initially overlook.

What better way to say goodbye to Trump—the man and the administration—than by delving into his own poetic oeuvre?

• Item Weight : 10.9 ounces
• Hardcover : 176 pages
• ISBN-10 : 1786894726
• Dimensions : 5.3 x 0.8 x 8.7 inches
• ISBN-13 : 978-1786894724
• Publisher : Canongate Books; Main – New edition (November 5, 2019)
• Language: : English

Light That Catches Dust
The Unbuttoned Eye
Poems by Robert Carr
3: A Taos Press, 2019
Reviewed by Reuben Gelley Newman

From the beginning of Robert Carr’s The Unbuttoned Eye (3: A Taos Press, 2019), I found myself haunted by “the piling of bodies” during the AIDS epidemic and the beautiful, disturbing photos of Robert Mapplethorpe. The notorious gay photographer features prominently in the book; letters addressed to him or from him begin each of the three sections. Mapplethorpe thus became an entry point into a book whose lens continually expanded, in continuously engaging ways

In the first “Letter to Mapplethorpe,” the speaker meditates on Mapplethorpe’s X, Y, and Z portfolios. With the exception of Y’s portraits of flowers, the explicit photos are alluring precisely due to their sexual unpleasantness, something like Carr’s phrase “Polaroid fuck collective, porcelain models pulled from Mineshaft piss.” (the Mineshaft, I learn, was a 1970s gay sex club in Manhattan frequently photographed by Mapplethorpe.)

“What draws me back?” to the photos, Carr’s speaker asks, and says later: “Stop asking, Robert, why, when the air is still, finally breathable, and the deadeye of the world is counting blessings, I am writing endings.” But Carr — here the speaker is clearly an incarnation of the writer — is not just writing an “ending” to the era of the Mineshaft, underground gay sex, and AIDS. He draws the reader back along with him on a much more complicated journey. As a gay guy born 30 years after Stonewall, I am learning a history. I am learning about what Carr calls “the texture of possession,” a phrase made most literal by the visceral end of a first, untitled poem:

          I’ve seen the piling of bodies I desire, lost my given name. An open mouth sips air,
upheaval hangs in an empty highball. Stomach churn. Threads of meat between worn teeth.

This spare yet harsh tone carries through the first third of The Unbuttoned Eye. Not all the images are beautiful, and ugliness clashes with grace throughout: “Totem,” a poem that begins with the lyrical “Heel to head he’s kissing my shield / of scars” goes on to visualize the “long-healed puckers” and “animal pocked eye appendectomy” in phrases crowded with consonants. “We are the timeless fuck in skinless / dark,” declares the speaker of “Soldier and Commander.” “We slide shining-smooth surfaces / inside each other,” and then the brutality of living with AIDS seeps into the poem:

Release of shit in a death-bed, spread
	of blood shaken over birth. Salt of first cry, sugar
of breast milk, black rattle vomit.

Is this death, then, also a kind of birth? “G.R.I.D,” whose title echoes the original name for AIDS — “gay-related immune deficiency” — addresses the disease with devastating irony, and ends with a revelation of betrayal, but also strange innocence:

Come, come to me

in the startled brow

of a lover who called me

his only one,

the small voice saying

the sarcoma on his arm is

a birthmark I’ve forgotten.

The small voice is not the lover’s, but the speaker’s, who, in an earlier poem, recalls how he “fucked in countless numbers, / blades of park grass.” The speaker — also named Robert — tries to hide his loss of innocence, but his desperation remains evident, and he is, in some ways, guilty.

I’m unclear as to who, exactly, the Robert is in the second section of the book, which begins with “Letter to Mapplethorpe.” When Carr writes how “in convex Robert / peers over a shoulder / his face cracks in / carnival glass,” it seems to be Mapplethorpe, the voyeur, except he’s watching a sick man in “Breaking the Fever,” not photographing a nude model. “Researching His Cancer,” meanwhile, addresses a Robert wearing “a white lab-coat” with cancer cells dotting his “unblemished skin.” This surreal characterization is part of the disarming genius of The Unbuttoned Eye, as I took in the poems’ wide range of emotion. Correspondingly, the poems in the second part branch out, including floral metaphors for love and sickness, such as those in “Less Light,” a gem that I’ll quote in full:

Planting a mountain laurel, I strike a root

the thickness of a wrist. Bones in my hand

buck against the splintered handle of a shovel.

a tingle watering heartwood, thick cord of spine

dropped into a hole. A tiny shoot climbs out

of my throat, reaches for the light beyond teeth.

There is winter in the angle of sunset.

There is winter, perhaps, but light does shine through. The third section opens with a second “Letter to Mapplethorpe,” the most complicated of the Mapplethorpe poems, whose speaker — always “that voice preventing and spreading disease” — once ordered Mapplethorpe to fuck “a body substitute” instead of himself. “Robert, even now, we are not lovers,” he writes, but also asks him to “please come home.” The poem becomes both an ending of the era of disease and a new beginning: at home, the speaker will only allow Robert “a bronzed urn on the mantle…You will be light that catches dust through an open window.”

Light that catches dust, not dust that catches light — it’s a striking phrase, and perhaps one that emphasizes just how much history has transpired in this book. Mapplethorpe’s photos, through light, capture the “dust” of history; Carr’s poems, perhaps perform a similar function, while creating a light for future generations. The third section chronicles an older speaker, one who’s made “the defiant transition from glory hole to Daddy”; he has a first anniversary with his husband, “a grownup son” who’s moved away. Now, the speaker, partially freed from the ghosts of his past, can let himself play, as shown most clearly by the delightful poem “Prop the Camera,” where he describes his wish that he’d taped himself and his husband making love, then would write in his will to show it “at the funeral”:

                    …set up a wide screen. Dim

the lights in St. Eulalia, Stephen’s family

church. Tell guests to kneel, hold a hymnal

between elbows, lean into the pew.

“A wide screen,” an “unbuttoned eye.” Puzzling over that beautiful and strange title, I remember that an unbuttoned eye also implies an undressing, a nakedness. Carr’s book, giving us “a wide screen” to view a personal gay history, is naked in the sense of being raw and unfiltered, but also in a playful sense. Both aspects are only accentuated by the nude photos of Carr’s younger self sprinkled throughout the collection, beautiful images taken by the 80s photographer K. Max Mellenthin. From Mapplethorpe’s lens to this last, propped camera, The Unbuttoned Eye is a virtuosic display.

Reuben Gelley Newman, Reader and contributing writer, hails from Brooklyn and is an English major at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition. When he’s not reading or writing, he enjoys singing and listening to classical music.

If you enjoyed this review, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

A discussion with JoAnne McFarland
and Sasha Chavchavadze

By Gerald Wagoner
Culture and Media Correspondent for Indolent Books

SALLY: An interdisciplinary exhibition conceived by JoAnne McFarland and Sasha Chavchavadze, opened on October 26, and will be on view through January 26, 2020, Fridays, 3 pm – 6 pm or by appointment. The exhibition encompasses three distinct venues: The Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse, Artpoetica Project Space, and Old Stone House & Washington Park.

This is an ambitious exhibition of 21 women artists whose work is installed in one or more of the three participating venues: Lauren Frances Adams, Meredith Bergmann, Deborah Castillo, Sasha Chavchavadze, Maureen Connor, Katya Grokhovsky, Robin Holder, Jee Hwang, Tatiana Istomina, Fabiola Jean–Louis, Carole Kunstadt, Paula Lalala, Nancy Lunsford, Jennifer Mack–Watkins, JoAnne McFarland, Elizabeth Moran, Amanda Nedham, Ann Shostrom, Marisa Williamson, Philemona Williamson, Hong Chun Zhang.

On a recent revisit, I re-examined the work in each space, curious to know more about the women who curated this collection with such sensitive attention to the relationships and breathing room among the pieces. Sasha Chavchavadze and JoAnne McFarland, the co-curators, agreed to disclose the criteria and the skills they harnessed to realize SALLY.

While Chavchavadze and McFarland came to this collaboration by different paths with different histories, they had known each other and had worked in the same building for a number of years. The two began their creative collaboration after discovering that they shared a vision about life and art. Each woman is an experienced curator and artist in her own right, and each has a history of creating projects that present art in a unique environment. Chavchavadze’s long-time space was Proteus Gowanus, McFarland’s is Artpoetica. Their first collaborative project was called Sediment. SALLY is their second project together.

While both have many year experience curating alternative space galleries, they bring their individual sensibilities to this collaboration. As artist and curator, Chavchavadze excavates women forgotten to history, and explores how past reveals present. “The importance of artifacts and documents is that they are talismans of meaning—a lamentation, an empathetic cry of pain for who or what was lost,” she said. An active facet of her art making has been manifested in yearlong thematic projects that involve community building. “The SALLY project is an extension of my practice as an artist. I’m painting with a broader brush by engaging a community of artists and others in a theme that inspires me personally. I think of SALLY as an ongoing project that JoAnne and I are creating as artists in collaboration with other artists. I get creative satisfaction from this process.”

McFarland asserts that the artist’s work is a world, and that every world has value. “I see art as a way to organize experience, so I relate to a range of artworks,” she said. “My mission as a curator is to arrange a group of worlds so that each is accessible to the viewer. Every artwork is a map of someone’s interior world. As a curator, I look for the passion behind the work; the sense of what is compelling the artist. When I succeed, every artist feels seen, and the viewer feels that their time looking, being receptive, has been rewarded.”

Chavchavadze told me she initially envisioned the project as an extension of her Proteus Gowanus practice, which de-emphasized visual art, focusing on other disciplines. The SALLY exhibition, Sasha said “is truly an exhibition of visual artists riffing on forgotten history through a hands-on visual process.” Text in the exhibition, whether poetry or short historical biographies, serves to enhance the power of the visual work.

McFarland is intrigued by how the human drive for connection and intimacy has impacted women’s lives and professional careers. “For me, the union of Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father, and Sally Hemings, slave woman, became a metaphor for questioning contemporary valuations of blackness/whiteness, youth/age, male/female,” said McFarland. “SALLY was a way to examine how women use art-making and other creative endeavors to thrive. It was a way for me to explore whether every world indeed has value; to assert that all worlds, all experiences are equivalent and magical. The SALLY Project also became a way to address new attacks on women’s autonomy. In military terminology, a sally is a sudden charge against the enemy out of a besieged place. I see violence and creativity as diametrically opposed—art making thwarts violence’s aim to destroy.”

There are, of course, differences between the collaborators’ individual sensibilities. Chavchavadze explained that she leans “more towards work that references specific historical women, which is again related to my own art practice; my project about Margaret Fuller for example. JoAnne, on the other hand, brought to the project her broader idea of including artists who were working on a metaphorical level”.

McFarland noted that while Chavchavadze was particularly focused on how SALLY related to historical women whose lives had been erased or forgotten, McFarland herself tends to gravitate more to the aesthetics, and get excited about what creates visual impact. “I’m passionate about space and see spaces as energy portals,” McFarland said. “When I say energy portal, I mean that a space can be organized to facilitate interaction. For instance, Hong’s scroll is integrated into the space so that the wall and the artwork merge,” she said, referring to a piece in the exhibition by Hong Chun Zhang. “It isn’t that the artwork is sitting on a dead wall, as I often see the typical gallery space. The walls, ceilings, windows are animated by the art and vice versa. This interactive exchange, especially in settings perceived as safe, can set the stage for explosive change.”

SALLY is installed in three different venues, about which McFarland stated: “We were not creating one show that happened to be in three places; rather we wove a theme through a series of community and living/working spaces that fall outside traditional art venues. SALLY’s three venues, gave us the opportunity to break one theme into three distinct modes that would flow through each other to form one complex, cohesive exhibition.”

Chavchavadze elaborated, saying that SALLY is “an exhibition consisting of one general theme realized in three separate iterations and spaces. Old Stone House, a Battle-of-Brooklyn oriented venue, emphasized the historical aspects of the show. Artpoetica gallery focused more on the metaphorical, and the Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse exhibition included imagery of shipwrecks, boating, and fiddler crabs, reaching out to the community that uses the boathouse.”

McFarland and Chavchavadze both value skilled, hands-on visual art making; both share an interest in building community through collaboration; and both aim to weave themes through non–traditional art venues. This process, they believe, revitalizes the art which compartmentalization has cut off from its potential impact on the viewer.

Both curators have a strong sense of what it takes to work day to day in an art economy that can be hostile and market-driven, rather than focused on social issues that matter. Their aim is to use community and shared goals as leverage against aggression and encroachment. “I’m protective of my own and others’ ability to work.” McFarland says, “Women in particular have a tendency to either de-value or undervalue the artifacts of their lives, evidence of their histories.” Their belief in a culture of generosity rather than a culture of scarcity, make McFarland and Chavchavadze a good team as they create new collaborative creative communities.

Gerald Wagoner is a former Studio-in-a-School-Artist and New York City elementary and secondary English teacher. Born in Pendleton Oregon, he holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Montana, and a MFA in sculpture from the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). His artwork has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, The Queens Museum, and PS 1. In 2018, Wagoner received a six-month visiting artist residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (sponsored by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation). During this residency, he wrote a series of poems inspired by the Navy Yard’s history, and by the people who labored there. His poems have appeared in Right Hand Pointing. Wagoner has lived in Brooklyn since 1984.

If you enjoyed this discussion, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Tracks
Poems by Lynn McGee
(Broadstone Books, 2019)
Reviewed by Gerald Wagoner

New Yorkers who ride the subway daily to commute, or irregularly for millions of other reasons, tend to look down. They look down at phones, at books, or at the floor. They tend to cancel out their surroundings with headphones. The subway is not the their living room, unless they are the poet Lynn McGee; then it is “the room I live in ten hours / a week.” (“The Subway Car Is My Living Room”). If you are Lynn McGee, the first thing you tell the reader in your new book of poems, Tracks (Broadstone Books 2019), is: “Don’t forget to look up” (“Jackpot”). McGee’s poems explore our primal need to connect with others. More specifically, these poems deal with the untimely death of the poet’s sister, and the impact of her sister’s death on their father and on her sister’s children. Using language that is at once unadorned and sensual, these superbly crafted poems are distinguished by the poet’s love of the body, and by a remarkably tender regard for her subject.

The first poem of the book, “Jackpot,” with its refrain of “Don’t forget to look up,” immediately commands us to pay attention to our surroundings, and to be optimistic. The anaphoric “as” invokes the movement of trains and of lives. McGee, the ever observing poet, gives the reader the tired, the children, the wounded woman with a black eye who “…holds her mouth taut, / moves the red tube tenderly / over her lips.” The poems enters a mode of the potential, the contrafactual: “That could have been you… / You could have been that man…” then brings us back to the specificity of the factual and the real: “but instead you inhabit this body / you were born into….”

Nearly all of McGee’s poems are composed with an awareness of the body, a sense of inclusivity, and a tenderness that is both painful and compassionate. “Kid’s on a Train,” for example, begins with the body:

A teenage girl sits on the subway bench,
legs apart, pops her gum
and gazes up through false eyelashes
at another girl who stands
facing her, pushing those legs wider.

The physical tension of teenage sexual play between two girls, one with legs apart and one pushing wider, is complemented by two older women, one who

          …talks softly with her
partner in a V-neck sweater,
gold cross dangling deep
into her cleavage.

and by a “beefy kid sprawled on the bench.” We think we are in a world of difference, but the speaker quickly affirms a kind of inclusive commonality:

I’ve seen this all before.
I have been the girl popping her gum,
the older woman showing
the shadow between her breasts.
I’ve been the boy wanting to be
part of something that doesn’t
want him, and I’ve been the stranger
watching, unwatched.

Her compassionate solidarity with the lone boy wanting inclusion is echoed in “Woman’s Long Commute,” a poem about a transwoman that concludes, “She looks tired / like me”; and again, in “Headphones at Rush Hour”: “Everyone around me / does the same”; and in “Flashback,” where a man, “breath flammable / face crumpled with damage / that took years to amass” bolts out of the car when he awakes to discover he’s on the wrong train. The speaker describes how the man

feints and dodges through
the crowd, his younger self
emerges all cheekbones
and speed, showing me how.

“Autism, Children’s Ward,” one of eleven taut poems triggered by the accidental death of McGee’s sister, exemplifies the poet’s ability to balance what James Wright called “tenderness and horror” (in “The Stiff Smile of Mr. Warren,” a review of Robert Penn Warren’s book Promises, which appeared in Kenyon Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Autumn 1958), 645-55). The reader learns that the speaker’s nephew will not be home for Christmas because he is on suicide watch. She describes a boy tragically ignored:

Nurses turn their backs
when he drops his pants;
puberty, a bully come too soon,
hormones mean as marbles
on a slippery floor—he is falling,
fighting, his world tipped
since birth….

There are struggles “placating his terrible need / to hoard,” as well as with ill-suited schools and medical bills. On a visit, the speaker sleeps in the boy’s bed, and leaves him words of tender compassion:

a note—You have so many
Good books! I liked
Monster Trucks the best
I did not touch
your other things.

The images of boy’s “tipped” world speak for themselves, while the note from his aunt speaks directly to the boy who lives in that world.

There are many equally potent poems in this collection, wherein tenderness, for McGee, is the lingering soreness of wounds that were once raw. It is also the gentle empathy for “the things I notice / about strangers—it’s as if / we were once close” (“Details Heading Downtown”). Her love of clarity, and of the American language, guides us through our underworld with uncommon tenderness while she takes notes, as she says: “to wake myself / and write this life / into something I want” (“Waking on the Long Island Rail Road”).

Gerald Wagoner is a former Studio-in-a-School-Artist and New York City elementary and secondary English teacher. Born in Pendleton Oregon, he holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Montana, and a MFA in sculpture from the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). His artwork has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, The Queens Museum, and PS 1. In 2018, Wagoner received a six-month visiting artist residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (sponsored by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation). During this residency, he wrote a series of poems inspired by the Navy Yard’s history, and by the people who labored there. His poems have appeared in Right Hand Pointing. Wagoner has lived in Brooklyn since 1984.

Un Amore Veloce
Poems by Hilary Sideris
(Kelsay Books, 2019)
Reviewed by Gerald Wagoner

Hilary Sideris’s new poetry collection, Un Amore Veloce, records the poet’s journey through stages of mature love. The book is organized into four sections, focusing in turn on the end of a first marriage (Real Estate); falling in love again (Un Amore Veloce); living together (Come Non Detto); and entering a second marriage (Anima Mia). Sideris’s poems, in the best lyric tradition, expand on moments of seeming insignificance to reveal a deeper truth. Like the moment itself, her poems are brief. Within their restricted compass, however, Sideris consistently establishes a creative tension between conflict and resolution.

Section I, Real Estate, presents a series of emotionally charged quotidian moments that provide insight into the speaker’s emotional adjustment to her separation and divorce, and to the demands of single parenthood. In the section’s opening poem, “Real Estate,” a list of items in a new apartment quickly escalates into a series of referenda on the speaker’s life and choices.

Your little sister pities you
the hardwood price, lack of light,

fact of working all your life
(does not include hot water, heat).

The speaker’s mother seems to be in denial about her daughter’s new life:

Long-stemmed glasses, dishes, pans,
potpourri your mother sends,

as if you’d married, not left him.

Finally, the speaker confronts the challenge of putting the past in its place, with all the pain and anger that entails:

Stainless steel spoons & forks

in a drawer you have to throw
your weight against to shut.

Particularly powerful is the poem “Custody,” addressed to the speaker’s daughter, in which a “tiger-striped, / tangerine-glazed, tomcat-head” teapot, made by the daughter at ceramics camp, becomes a flash point of raw emotion. Though the daughter was loathe to admit it, it turns out that the teapot was intended for her father’s wife, her stepmother, and not for the speaker, her mother. Presumably in an apostrophe, rather than a truly direct address, the speaker reproaches her daughter, who “uttered the name that beyond / the face of diplomacy remains, / in this household, unrecognized.” Then she begs her daughter’s pardon:

Forgive us. We will not transcend.
Your father will call & we’ll

sputter our toddler lines: I want
that teapot. No, it’s mine.”

It hurts to sunder a marriage, and collateral damage is unavoidable.

In Section II, Un Amore Veloce (in English, “a fast love”—that is, a love moving at a fast pace), the poet’s new language, Italian, becomes the language of love, where words become things, and love seems characterized by a materiality made all the more palpable by the need of both lovers to navigate strange linguistic waters. In the poem “Fluency,” language is barely penetrable, but love makes everything easier. After a series of linguistic fumbles, the speaker recounts, “Gin & tonic deliver us / to that safe, opaque place / where I simply // give him what he / asks: more kiss.”

The first poem of Section III, “Come Non Detto” (in English, “as if not said”), explores, as do the other poems in this section, the tensions of mature love and cohabitation through the little things we do in relation to one another. “I confessed I loved / living alone,” the speaker says, and although she tries to recant, she soon realizes there is “no such / thing as unsaying.” “Common Law,” with its double entendre title, addresses agreeing to disagree; “Venerdi Sera” (in English, “Friday evening”) touches gently on resentments; “Figlio Tuo” (in English, “your son”), exploring the problem of family relationships that predate the current one, ends with an aptly analogous image of the husband’s grown son’s rage:

I watch him fainculo.
A yellow Hummer

runs the light. I cede
my right of way.

The final section continues to examine the complexities of mature love. Foremost on the speaker’s mind in the poem “Marriage” are aging and death: “We take our pills, // the adversary still // a breath away….” The mundane—the world, not the heavens—still reigns in these poems about the tensions inherent in married life. In “Wind,” nominally about the intricacies of long “i” and short “i,” time and change are what’s really at stake, as the wind

                   …blows
tonight, more than

a breeze, less than
the kind that gives
us chills, a change of
season we can stand.

The early ardor of  “more kiss” has cooled, not died, and, “your old Omega’s / gold crown turns” reassures the reader that the relationship in the turning seasons is still precious. The final poem of the book, “Anima Mia” (literally “my soul,” but in effect, more like “my soulmate), sets the balanced tensions in the kitchen. At first, the spouses argue about the proper way to operate the coffee machine; but in the end,

we end up in this kitchen,
where our mothers still

tell us how much the meals
we cook would cost
if we ate out.

As the old saying went where I grew up: lovin don’t last, cookin do. In Un Amore Veloce, while relationships always contain conflict, the successful ones nourish the partners.

Hilary Sideris’s poems live in the ordinary, the daily, and the quotidian. The poet’s concision, and the subtle implications of unerring details, masterfully sustain tension, the movement between conflict and resolution, to reveal the essential. And yet, throughout the book, Sideris resists the lure of an over-the-rainbow conclusion, in which love conquers all. As the book’s penultimate poem, “Animal Channel,” concludes—

Man & sloth must face
adversity, whatever

form it takes, an eagle
circling, a woman
bent over a sink of knives.

Watch out for those knives: like love, they can move at high speeds.

Gerald Wagoner is a former Studio-in-a-School-Artist and New York City elementary and secondary English teacher. Born in Pendleton Oregon, he holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Montana, and a MFA in sculpture from the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). His artwork has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, The Queens Museum, and PS 1. In 2018, Wagoner received a six-month visiting artist residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (sponsored by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation). During this residency, he wrote a series of poems inspired by the Navy Yard’s history, and by the people who labored there. His poems have appeared in Right Hand Pointing. Wagoner has lived in Brooklyn since 1984.