When summer started with a sensual slow June, I wondered if I would travel as much as I have done each summer, luckily, since 2021. Looking ahead through April and May showers in Maryland, I had more work lined-up than usual for the summer, which of course, is a good problem. Well, while taking the kids to their usual New Hampshire vacation around July 4th, meandering Western Massachusetts for three college visits for my eldest, then driving both of them to and from being helpers at a Quaker camp in the North Carolina mountains, indeed, I’ve traveled. I have returned home. Now August braids its sweetness toward our family’s Labor Day weekend with close friends in Crisfield, Maryland. Intending to blog here for some time about my recent readings, here it goes!

MARK NEPO is a wonderful philosopher, healer, and poet. I am easing through his new book centered around essential words that are maps for living: LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL, MARK NEPO (St. Martin’s Essentials 2026). His latest prose is a great way to introduce yourself to his lyrical and soulful thinking, through vignettes on what he calls “word clusters,” followed by questions that you can reflect upon or discuss after each deep dive. For those familiar with him, LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL is an excellent circling through conceptual constellations, familiar and renewed.

In addition, I am finishing his three-book poetry collection, THE HALF LIFE OF ANGELS, MARK NEPO (FREEFALL BOOKS 2023). Accessible like Mary Oliver, Nepo for me is less narrative, more internal, and concise. He’s well felt, insightful, and at times, surprising.

DIANA WHITNEY’S third book of poetry grapples with the thorny web of gender norms that entangle us all, examined from her perspective as woman, mother, former teenager, observer, and citizen. Meanwhile, Whitney never loses sight of her passion for living in GIRL TROUBLE (CAVANKERRY PRESS 2026). GIRL TROUBLE is a tour de force. While her concise free-verse lyricism is sensual, crafted, and pleasurable, her felt insights offer hard truths and provocative punches. I am lucky to have met her a few years ago, then read her prior books, so I can say that GIRL TROUBLE presents a fully realized voice of a poet, a fellow citizen asking us to be the change we want to see in the world. After all of this, Whitney ends with a very personal poem of triumph, “Gemini,” which reminds me that a difficult journey should, and can, lead to a passion for living. GIRL TROUBLE is a best book of U.S. poetry in 2026, and I highly recommend it for its craft, vision, and aliveness.

LI-YOUNG LEE’S latest, THE INVENTION OF THE DARLING (NORTON 2024), offers a spiritual book born out of negative capability. After reading it sometime this year, I now am making my way through it again, possibly to explore it through a formal review, we’ll see. Disorienting at times, the second reading has been rewarding so far. Lee’s poetry can be found online here. I have seen him read twice to date, and I am a longtime admirer of his poetry since the 1990s. If new to Lee, I would start with ROSE, his first book. If someone enjoys William Blake or the longer poems of Rumi (when translated as longer into English), that reader will be intrigued by, and maybe even relish, this latest.

ELIZABETH HAZEN is a Baltimore, Maryland-based poet of three books of poetry, most recently THE SKY WILL HOLD (Riot in Your Throat 2025). Her poems are highly crafted yet glide in a casual voice; they offer delicious lyrics that embed a rewarding thoughtfulness. I read THE SKY WILL HOLD this past May or June, and finished her first book more recently, CHAOS THEORIES (ALAN SQUIRE PUBLISHING 2016). I will soon be diving into what I believe will be a darker middle book, which comes before a sort of making peace one finds, during middle age, across THE SKY WILL HOLD. It’s an in process peace, so to speak, that the reader navigates with her across a rickety bridge, with an excellent vista.

This squib does not capture HAZEN’S careful lyrical considerations. Her Website is linked here. However, my bookshelf is so crowded! I haven’t finished the stack hauled from AWP in March, that roving annual literary conference that came to us in Baltimore in 2026. Thank you AWP for coming to me!

This blog post, turned essay, has meandered long enough. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed the colorful, humorous and heartfelt fifth poetry collection from Baltimore poet SHIRLEY BREWER, called GODDESS OF SWIZZLE (Apprentice House 2026). I am finishing NATALIE SHAPIRO’S STAY DEAD (Copper Canyon 2025), which uses abstract expressionist painters and acting concepts to sharp-eyed introspective effect. Yet the book also offers a dour outlook that could use a roadtrip. I just started LARA EGGER’S FLOP ERA (University of Pittsburgh Press 2025), the first book pulled from that March 2026 AWP haul. FLOP ERA takes a surrealist approach to the heartfelt. Her poems are strongest when the surreal is rooted in the real, and zany wit opens a Pandora’s box of emotions, which so far occurs often.

Of novels recently read, I enjoyed revisiting CALL OF THE WILD BY JACK LONDON, the wild and darkly wry stories of BRAWLER by LAUREN GROFF, and this year’s indie best seller and a contemporary classic, THEO OF GOLDEN by ALLEN LEVI. I also enjoyed poet MAGGIE SMITH’S A SUIT OR A SUITCASE, but was surprised by its emphasis on the cerebral experience over, say, factual story or resonate image; I plan to read it again. On deck, I have the short stories of LAUREN GROFF’S FLORIDA and DAVID RYAN’S ALLIGATOR as well as my daughter’s assigned summer reading which I want to read too.

As a parting aside, I have four poems out with BLAZEVOX: AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF VOICE in the Spring 2026 issue, available here as a PDF from this link.

Stay free, stay funky, stay fresh.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com

This past year, my daughter’s 11th grade AP English teacher assigned SUPERBLOOM, a muckraking history of the development of the Internet to today, by Nicholas Carr. So as way leads to way, I picked it up. It’s a startling depiction of how we got here and where technology’s taking us. It frames the choice we make or do not make using the Internet, iPhone, social media, electronic messaging, whether examined or not, in this one precious life. Let me see if I can sum it up.

Digital Media:

The origins of digital media, in Carr’s account, date back to the Bell Telephone companies’ desire to transmit more phone calls over the same telephone lines, leading one technologist to discover and publish in a 1940s-1950s a white paper that telephone sounds could be translated into zeros and ones. So compressed, calls could be more easily transmitted digitally. To fast forward, Carr then shows how once this digitization is discovered and developed, computer science is advanced, and all media becomes digital and accessed today through one device.

Carr paints a scene I recognize from my childhood in the 1980s. He also notes a stunning consequence. When people were growing up in a typical 1980s American home, they were the center of the home even if there were multiple media devices, a radio, maybe record player too, cassette or CD player, television, phone on the wall, and increasingly, the desktop, stationary computer. This array on a physical level places the person at the center; the person must in fact turn on and off these objects. Now, the iPhone alone offers a phone, email, text message, camera, GPS for driving, music player via subscription service if you have it, and much else, depending on one’s use of apps (social media, shopping, podcasts, news alert, which I myself do not use on my iPhone). Sometimes, it feels like we revolve around it.

Digital Media At Home:

In my life, I raised my children without television. I am proud their imagination bloomed with very few advertisements through their ages 11 and 9, respectively. We watched videos too, and our video watching was limited to DVDs and movies. They did not have digital phones. However, with the pandemic in 2020, I provided my kids laptop computers for remote school, and they discovered YOU TUBE. My son got an Apple watch around age 12; my daughter got her phone (sigh) at age 15.

This essay, of sorts, will veer afield if I continue with these thoughts, but let me add that social media, (outside of personally known friends, meaning that kids are using social media to interact with strangers, influencers, and celebrities) operates differently than yesterday’s T.V. ads. Social media coming from influencers, broadcasters, and celebrities appears more powerful in influencing thinking and behavior of kids, than old fashioned peer pressure. It is different than school-based peer pressure for a parent to tackle and handle.

In terms of my experience with my own iPhone, my alarm clock on my iPhone keeps that handy device near enough to check my email before I go to sleep. Even when there’s nothing urgent expected, my instinct for the new makes it hard not to check it. I always can look at the news, or baseball scores, too. So goes the tug of this catch-all addictive tool.

I recently bought an alarm clock with a CD player to boot, yet I have not been able to force myself to learn it, or relearn it, due to device fatigue. I want to kick that phone out of my sleep zone, yet the stand-alone alarm awaits on the to-do list.

Stones Versus Superbloom:

Nicholas Carr tells two stories to open and close Superbloom.

First, he tells the story about a California valley that bloomed so abundantly one summer, snapshots of it were published on social media, and hordes came for selfies, causing traffic jams, and trampling the meadows. Soon, the selfies generated hateful comments as people online could see the stampede, which is one way Carr notes social media’s feedback loop can become disheartening. Further, Carr notes the line between appreciation and vanity became blurred as people swarmed for their selfies. Maybe, simply put, small delights should be experienced.

To close the book, Carr retells a fable from England concerning critic and poet Ben Johnson who, centuries ago to refute a post medieval philosopher, kicked a stone and said, look, that’s no fallacy. In this way, despite what someone says online, despite the always-changing nature of the Internet, so appealing to our biological vigilance, if you shut it off, it says nothing. If you miss it, life goes on. A spectacular picture of a sunset is pleasing, our daily sunset involves all our senses and blends in our own stories too. We can throw a stone through the fake superbloom, and stroll out into the real superbloom.

Closing Comments:

In full disclosure, SUPERBLOOM by Nicholas Carr (Norton 2025) is tough chew for a high schooler. You can get a lot out of it from pages one through eighty, which has a far greater history than my synopsis.

Technologists, these days, are targeting us, roping us into their all-in-one devices, their software annual licenses and updates, and those algorithmic content-feeds tracking us as consumers if we’re online, and further, using everything online to train their artificial intelligence. Carr’s deep dive can help us, as he puts it, “ask ourselves [about] what we choose, or what is chosen for us,” and if it’s “worthy of choosing.”

As a side note, I have four poems out with BLAZEVOX: AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF VOICE in the Spring 2026 issue. The poems are entirely written by a real person, yours truly, over the span of years and in dialogue with artists, and available here at this link.

Stay free, stay funky, stay fresh.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com

Excited to read poetry from my new collection on the first Monday of July as the featured reader, followed by an open mike, at the restored Manor Mill hive of the arts in Monkton, Baltimore County, Maryland, in this hearty monthly poetry series.

The reading is my eight for Singing the Forge (Wasteland Press 2025), my third full-length collection of poetry. I also tabled the Baltimore Book Festival and CityLit Festival of Maryland this past year, catching up with some, meeting others, for ten total appearances in the first year of the book’s launch.

Glancing back at my other times visiting the Manor Mill, I was delighted to see Maryland Poet Laurette Lady Brion this past winter as well as D.C. literary polyglot Richard Peabody last summer too. Summer just got here: I’ll clutch a breeze’s belt to savor every last hot or wet drop of it!

I plan to read a few poems from my prior full-length collections, Seasons of Flowers and Dust (2008) and Questions of Fire (2009), as preface, before exploring Singing the Forge, with a dash of surprise of course, sharing a few inspirations behind it all.

As a side note, I remain jazzed to have four poems out with BLAZEVOX: AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF VOICE, edited by publisher and poet, Geoffrey Gatza, in the Spring 2026 issue. The poems are available here at this cool link.

Manor Mill’s monthly series is linked below.
“Poetry Night – G. H. Mosson”
(Monday, July 6, 2026, 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm)
The Manor Mill
2029 Monkton Road
Monkton, MD 21111
www.manor-mill.com
https://www.manor-mill.com/event/poetry-night-g-h-mosson

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com

Excited to have four poems out with BLAZEVOX: AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF VOICE, edited by publisher and poet, Geoffrey Gatza, in the Spring 2026 issue.

The poems are available here at this cool link. I thought to share one, but my formatting skills on this Website are not up to the task. So, the below are the titles:

Holding Poses Until They Open

Sketch at Midlife

Daybreak with Narcisse Diaz De La Pena

The Ferryman of Édouard Vulliard

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com

I am pleased to have my review of Carl Phillips’ Scattered Snows, to the North, a book of poetry, out in the Spring literary showcase of Tupelo Quarterly. The review is linked here. Thanks to editor, poet, and professor Esteban Rodriguez for selecting and placing it.

I saw Carl Phillips read around 2007 or 2008 after he published his first Selected Poems, which appears to be the titled, Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006. I recall the vibe of reading more than the exact date, and for the most part, have read his poetry in magazines more often than in full collections. I very much enjoyed his intimate, intricate latest. His introspective honesty is unique, and fine distinctions easy to savor.

As I said in the opening of my review of Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024):

“Carl Phillips’ seventeenth book of poems presents lyrics of bitter introspection, but in a tenderer tone than usual, kinder to himself and others in meditative disappointments. These poems of late middle-age proceed through casual, yet laser-sharp, free-verse of longish lines, as if readers eavesdrop on interior thoughts. His subject here is failed relationships, reflected upon from the result of living alone. It’s not the delicious nostalgia of Cavafy, the Alexandrian Greek poet of a hundred years ago, thinking back on youth’s passions, reliving them in exquisite poetry. Rather with Phillips, it is a rueful look in the mirror to parse why things have happened just so. The answers are felt as well as stated, which involve differences, mismatch, indifference, and numbness. As a lyric poet of isolation, examining himself, Phillips also is a Horcean social poet thinking through the dance of relationships. While not witty, Phillips at times smiles to himself, and we readers might smile too. Unlike Horace, Phillips’ poetry is not one of moral edification, though his poetry offers introspective honesty, one of intricate precision and sober conclusion.”

All the best,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com

I am thrilled to have my review of New Jersey poet Yehoshua November’s third book of poetry out in the current issue of The Hopkins Review!

Yehoshua November’s The Concealment of Endless Light was one of my favorite reads of 2024. It’s out from Orison Books (NC 2024), and in fact, I do not recall exactly when I read it. However I bought it right around when published, plus the review itself took me some time to write, after two tours through the book during the process, so it was probably way back then in ye olden days of yore of 2024.

The review is not online but available through The Hopkins Review. Poet Yehoshua November’s website is linked here. I will quote the opening of the review, which basically also is a summary:

“Yehoshua November’s third book offers a spiritual self-portrait of the poet as questioner, father, husband, teacher, and Jewish member of a living Chassidic faith tradition, all amid the hustle and bustle of everyday New Jersey. November’s aplomb in bringing these worlds together—Roy Orbison and Moses, rabbinic devotion and commercial radio, making a living and living a faith tradition—is a major delight of his poetry.”

All the best,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com

Excited to participate in two reading series in DC in May, first as a featured reader at Words Out Loud in Kensington, Maryland, on Sunday, May 17 starting at 4pm. Second and two days later, I’ll be in DC again as one of several readers at The Inner Loop on May 19, starting at 7pm, a Tuesday evening series at Shaw’s Tavern in the U Street area. Details below.

Grateful indeed, and looking forward to reading from Singing the Forge (Wasteland Press 2025), listening to DC poets, and maybe too, I’ll see you there!

G. H. Mosson and Chloe Miller
Words Out Loud
Sunday, May 17, 2026: 4pm Reading and Open Mike
Modena Reserve, 10540 Metropolitan Ave
Kensington, Maryland 20895 (flyer image below)

The Inner Loop: Featuring Poet Tanya Olson
plus G. H. Mosson & several briefer readers
Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 7-930PM
Shaw’s Tavern
520 Florida Avenue Northwest
Washington, DC 20001

If you want to read a short review of Singing the Forge, click here. Otherwise, the series event details are below. Both are active monthly series and worth checking out.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com

I’ve had a wonderful time revisiting the wistful, erudite, tender, sharp-eyed poetry of C. P. Cavafy this past winter into early spring, diving primarily into the excellent translation of Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf 2009). Mendelsohn’s Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy offers stellar positives: a sensitive rendering of exquisitely felt poetry from the Greek into English, reproduced in the order in which Cavafy himself circulated his poetry so you can get a feel for Cavafy’s intentional presentation, with generous annotations for the historical vignettes (for which Cavafy is famous) placed in the back of the book. This way, one can enjoy the poems and access the annotations when needed, or leave them for later too. I believe the prior translation that I have, read about a decade ago, organized the poems simply in chronological order. However, Cavafy’s thoughtful and subtle poetry is enhanced even more when the dance of his ordering can be felt.

In conjunction, I also have been perusing The Selected Prose Works of Cavafy, translated and edited by stateside scholar Peter Jeffreys. Published by the University of Michigan in 2010, this collection offers a handful of early prose poems that prefigure Cavafy’s celebratory nostalgia, allegiance to beauty, and also reverence for the mystery inherent in resonance. These seven prose poems are worth the price of the entire collection.

In the prose poem “The Pleasure Brigade,” for instance, Cavafy announces a Dionysian-like allegiance to aesthetic joy with panache, though I do not imply the poem is anything but utterly serious. His prose poem, “The Ships,” was new to me and tackles the question of the masterpiece in art, and the experience of it as glimpsed enough to know of its existance, as it sails off out of reach. These two prose poems in particular are as memorable as his lyrics. Even here, Cavafy balances romantic feeling with classical restraint, and it was intriguing to note how early on, Cavafy’s themes were present to him, even if these prose poems are dated between 1885 and 1900, while his first accomplished lyrics are finished and circulated in a chapbook form of fourteen poems in 1904. I will circle back to that chapbook below at the end.

The Selected Prose Works also gathers commentary by Cavafy on other writers, including Shakespeare, Homer, Browning, and calls attention to the aesthetic passion and rhetorical delights of the ancient sophists, for instance, over more sober logic and the Socratic preference to be accurate more than artful; this gives one insight to what drives some of Cavafy’s lyric poetry when, including within his historical reenactments, Cavafy and his narrators are navigating dilemmas and competing claims. Overall it’s an outstanding, slender prose collection, simply put, with some gems.

Cavafy’s wistful and at times nostalgic romanticism–watching the world from the dark room of loneliness at times–is illuminated too by the recent biography, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Jeffreys and co-author Gregory Jusdanis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025). Its first half is helpful especially in situating Cavafy in the context of his family life, their economic struggles, his relationship with his brothers, as well as within the 19th century Greek diaspora. It frames Cavafy’s focus on Hellenistic history as advancing Greek identity after centuries under Turkish rule, and re-sees the Mediterranean in a way that does not cede everything to Roman dominance and Rome’s imperial shadows.

The careful scholarship and engaging discussions of Jeffreys and Jusdanis led me to the prose work of Cavafy, especially when they discussed the prose poem, “The Ships,” which they identified as a potential early masterpiece.

Lastly the biography, for my purposes, began to wander in the bulky middle section, after detailed recounting of debates among Cavafy’s contemporaries within the Greek literary world of 1870-1930 approx., which segued into an open ended, but also selective, discussion of Cavafy’s poetry. Here, the biography might have hewed closer to its genre’s task. This said, it enriched my ability to see into Cavafy’s perspective.

Cavafy is a delight of a poet. He authorized about 200 total pages of poetry, so the lyric corpus imparts a real aesthetic sensibility and worldview through a lifetime’s honed output.

I decided to stay away from some of his unpublished and repudiated poems that have been gathered from his papers, to savor better the flavor of his fully realized work, though these are in the Collected, including the clever early poem “The Bank of the Future” (1897).

Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation is my favorite so far. However, Cavafy circulated an early pamphlet of fourteen poems, “Poems 1904,” which has translated by Paul Merchant, and republished as a chapbook by Tavern Books (Oregon 2016). According to Merchant and Tavern Books, Cavefy circulated this pamphlet in 100 total copies, one of which made its way to novelist E. M. Foster. Foster soon enough helped make Cavafy widely known. In the back of Mendelsohn’s Collected Poems, these fourteen poems are combined with a few other good ones under a section called, “the Sengopoulos Notebook.” It was not entirely clear to me, from Mendelsohn’s introduction or notes, why he did not reproduce this circulated chapbook in the same manner as reproducing the order of Cavafy’s larger and later folios. This said, Merchant’s fourteen poems are exquisite in English, including in the order as presented by Cavafy, and necessary supplement in my library.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com

With spring comes CITYLIT, an annual literary festival in Baltimore, Maryland, that has been running for three years past two decades now, and returns on Saturday, April 11, 2026, from 10 AM to 5 PM. CITYLIT offers a curated, wild bouquet of intriguing readings, panel discussions, and a free-form Literary Marketplace with about twenty or thirty magazines, artists, writings, small presses, and other literary related creators tabling for the day. Ages ago, I saw Mark Doty read at CITYLIT; last year I too pursued the literary marketplace for a great and informative time; this year, I shall be tabling and talking to folks in support of my new book of poems, Singing the Forge (Wasteland Press 2025).

Mark your calendars.

CITYLIT will be held at the Maryland Center for History and Culture, which has an entrance either on 610 Park Avenue or 200 West Centre Street in Baltimore; I suspect the entrance is on Centre Street. You can find more, as well as the lineup and the right door, at the CITYLIT link here: www.citylitproject.org

By May 1, 2026, Singing the Forge shall be one year old. It’s been a fun year, and the book is my sixth overall, yet also decades in the making.

Right now, I have three more readings lined up in May and July 2026, and probably will read from Singing the Forge through the end of this year, fingers crossed.

I hope to see you at the 23rd Annual CityLit Festival! For real, it’s a low-key, good time.

Stay chill, stay fresh, stay grounded.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com

Thank you to the Baltimore Ethical Society (BES) of Maryland for inviting me to read from my new book, Singing the Forge (Wasteland Press 2025) tomorrow morning, April 5, 2026, and talk about personal journeys, there and beyond.

BES is online at https://bmorethical.org

Singing the Forge involves snapshots of a personal journey from young adulthood to young parenthood in the first and third sections, from the life of yours truly, of course. These bookends are paired with a generous middle section featuring vignettes from diverse lives of men and women from the last two centuries, including two poems involving Verdun trench warfare in France during WWI, three lyrics by Goethe translated from the German set decades earlier, several poems based on 19th century etchings by Whistler, and also slices of life from a airline attendant in “Winging It,” a retired surgeon in “Ghost Village,” two sisters in “Gertrude and Rebecca,” a daydreaming artist, a snowed-in explorer, and more.

I plan to talk about the creation of this book, which occurred over time, as one way we can think about journeying and what happens along the way.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

Maryland, USA

www.ghmosson.com