Roadside Press to Publish Cistern Latitudes

Roadside Press and I are working on my next full-length poetry collection titled Cistern Latitudes, with a publication date slated for late spring 2024. The sibling publishing wing of Roadside Press, called Gutter Snob Books, previously published my poetry chapbook Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line in 2022, and I couldn’t have been happier with how that one turned out, so I’m pretty excited. Roadside Press is just as dedicated to supporting their authors and putting out beautifully designed books, so I know this new book is in good hands.

Cistern Latitudes will contain 60 new poems, or as I called them, 60 small descents into moments and places that once witnessed tectonic shifts in destiny that are now as silent and still as subterranean pools of water, clear and dark and carrying the truth that life and the world may have lost its way, that tragedy may linger in the corners of our past, but there are still latitudes and geographies out there that harbor safe, calm, and magical futures if we look for them.

I’ll post more details when the book becomes available, but for the moment, here is a sample poem that will appear in the collection. Thank you for reading!


Tributaries is Now Available!

My latest collection of poetry, Tributaries, is now available from Maverick Duck Press! This collection is a series of poems about the Hudson River, from its humble beginnings in the Adirondacks all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, and the poems examine at the people and places dotting its winding path.

The poems were inspired by my friend Meg Marohn, who wrote me a poem on her typewriter at the Troy Farmers Market in 2017, after a conversation we had about all the places we lived along the river. After her tragic passing in 2022, I found the poem and wrote this chapbook based on its spirit and vision, and I dedicate this book to my friend. I think she would have liked it, and I hope you do too. The book was published by Maverick Duck Press in July, 2023 and is available now at their website. Thanks for taking a look, and if you’d like a signed copy, please reach out to me! Here’s a sample poem from the book called “Warrensburg,” and I hope you enjoy.

"Grunewald" in The Westchester Review

The new summer issue of The Westchester Review is now up, and it includes my poem “Grunewald,” a piece written from my week spent in Berlin in 2010, a journey magical enough that it still spawns new poems to this day. The issue of TWR has a ton of great writers within, and I’m honored to be included. Be sure to check out the whole issue, and you can find my own piece HERE. Thanks for reading!

"Affliction" Now at Live Nude Poems

I’m a little late sharing this but my poem “Affliction” is now posted over at Live Nude Poems. Despite the title, the poem is not read live or nude, but it is presented alongside a bunch of other great poets, including Kevin Ridgeway, Sam Moe, M.J. Arcangelini, Bill Garvey, and many others. The poem is part of a chapbook I’m shopping around, one of four chapbooks I’ve recently finished, and I’ll post more when they find homes. In the meantime, enjoy!

Mama & Papa: A Short Story

“Mama & Papa” is a silly little short story that appeared in my book, Both Ways Home. I hope you enjoy this weird tale of bravado, bruised egos, and a lucky bet. Enjoy!

Mama & Papa

Hemingway’s Poolhall on Wurzbach Avenue became a regular haunt in my final days in San Antonio, but I never expected to meet the man himself in that nefarious establishment. His reputation solidified into a thunderhead force within minutes of his arrival. Every time he shoved someone out of the way to get another beer, his buddies laughed and egged him on as he mugged and posed and talked in a loud, clean baritone about the men he’d seen die in Spain and Africa and how he’d outlasted them all. He shouted “Bully!” whenever someone played Foreigner or Bad Company on the jukebox. The little song the electric dart machine chirped out from the corner every five minutes made him roar with delight and he’d sing back in imitation. His beard and teeth glowed blue in the neon of the bar.

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New Bookshop Hunter Column Focusing on Northampton, MA

Far from being able to encapsulate the many literary wonders that the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, my new column over at the Hudson Valley Writers Guild does attempt to offer a glimpse of the wonderful experience of wandering Northampton’s streets after a strong cocktail and a plate of oysters, darting into one bookshop after another. It’s a real pleasure and I can’t wait to go back and explore some more. And let me tell you, there’s plenty to explore. Until then, I hope you’ll enjoy this bookshop hunting column. And if you like it, there are plenty of others on archive at the HVWG website.

Talking Albany, Hometowns, and Poetry on Sanctuary Radio

This January I got to chat with Thom Francis Jobone of the Albany area’s busiest champions of poets and writerson his Sanctuary Radio program, which you can listen to RIGHT HERE! We talked about Albany, hometowns, personal growth, my books, and hitting the road to travel and accrue experiences worth writing about, and then Thom boiled it down to about 11 minutes of the best bits from our chat. He also included my reading of “Albany,” a poem I performed at The Linda in December of 2021. The poem also appears in my book, Both Ways Home. It was a pleasure to chat with Thom, who is always collaborating, networking, publishing, and hosting one thing or another to promote poetry in our area as part of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. I hope you’ll drop in and give our talk a listen, and be sure to check out the other writers he’s interviewed. It’s an excellent series that encapsulates the wide spectrum of talent across the Capital Region of New York.

New Interview with Pine Hills Review

In a recent interview I gave to Jasmine Bates of the Pine Hills Review, I urged younger artists and writers to take to the road, travel, live somewhere new, and spend some time living a life worth writing about as early as they could. There are always risks involved in doing that, in quitting jobs and driving cross-country, but there are risks involved in staying put as well. Risk and mistakes are unavoidable, so why not go through with it and have something interesting to say afterward? But even with all my running around and zig-zagging around the country in my 20s, I kept ending up in two places, my two hometowns, which was the focus of my latest collection of poetry and fiction titled Both Ways Home. We talk about that in the interview as well, and I’m very honored that a hometown publication like Pine Hills Review took the time to talk about the book and my process. They’re a stellar literary organization and I hope you enjoy the interview.

Excerpts from Both Ways Home

Both Ways Home is now available, and below you’ll find two poems from the Albany, NY section and then two poems from the San Antonio, TX section, and finally a short story from the Albany section called “Bring Your Son.” If you’d like to see even more samples, I’ve posted some at my Instagram profile, @that_poet_james_duncan. Thanks and I hope you enjoy!

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Now Available: Both Ways Home

My next book, Both Ways Home, is now available by messaging me at jamesnyduncan@gmail.com or by visiting Amazon or my online shop. In these 80 poems and 12 short stories, I explore my two hometowns of Albany, NY and San Antonio, TX, the allure of each as strong as magnetic poles over the many years I’ve crossed the vast American landscape to one or the other in search of work, love, friends, and futures unwritten. Marquee lights, Halloween nights, and familiar neighborhood cafes populate the poems, while the stories range from biographical to quiet studies of those struggling to make ends meet and discover their own paths forward in each city. In “Bring Your Son,” a mother contemplates how her divorce might affect her little boy’s future; in “Little Victory Diner,” a runaway works off his meal by washing dishes and bonds with a lonely waitress; a search for a mother’s grave in the Texas heat goes awry in “Empty Spaces”; and in “Dominion,” a young girl lost in the outskirts of a wealthy rural community learns who to trust and who to leave behind as the lights of San Antonio guide her to a future where she is in control of her own destiny. I hope you’ll enjoy this book, one of my most personal to date.

“This vibrant, heartfelt collection beautifully connects two hometowns, and James H Duncan masterfully brings to life the people and places dear to him. As readers, we are lucky to be going along for the ride and to make it home safely, caked in the stardust of daydream believers driving over the horizon, in love with everything that surrounds us.” - Kevin Ridgeway, author of Invasion of the Shadow People

Two Reviews of Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line

Releasing Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line this summer through Gutter Snob Books was an amazing experience, and I’m profoundly proud of the book, the editorial care the publisher displayed to do the book justice, and the reviews and feedback that came in. I had such a busy summer that I wasn’t able to sit down and share some of the reviews in one place but here are two quick ones!

Dennis Williamson took an incredibly deep dive into the collection, saying, “Proper Etiquette In The Slaughterhouse Line by James Duncan is a book for anyone who is at the mercy of ‘just making a living.’ Over the course of seventeen equally unsettling poems, Mr. Duncan adroitly lays bare that it is the myth of American success that we have to thank for such a condition. Indeed, our myths are no less potent than the mythology in which the Romans put so much stock, to the point that they became the backdrop of the horrors in their arenas. Moreover, Duncan traces a lineage from the Colosseum to the modern day American office.” As well as, “Mr. Duncan has become so attuned to the themes he’s treating that he can be right there beside the reader. He’s arrived, and stands on the platform where we wait to meet him. Poet as prophet. He bids us to board the train – next stop, Apocalypse.” To read the whole review, CLICK HERE!

Michael Grover, an editor and poet also took a few moments to review the book, saying, “What this book does is amplifies and brings to the surface the stress of modern employment. The constant threats, and deadlines that we are all under. How we just take it until we can’t anymore. We have no choice. The end of this kind of tailspins into what I would call prophesy. James is just reporting the facts as he sees them. In this World that continues to become more corporate by the day, it won’t take long.” Read the whole thing HERE!

Thanks so much for all your support and feedback, and signed copies are still available at www.jameshduncan.bigcartel.com and Gutter Snob Books!

Live at the Linda, December 2021

I had the pleasure and honor to join a bunch of fantastic poets at The Linda in Albany, NY last December to celebrate the end of another year of local poetry, and the recorded the session for WAMC, the area’s NPR affiliate, which you can listen to here. Albany Poets and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild have a great relationship with The Linda and they’re slowly releasing each poet’s performance as we near the end of 2022. Mine was posted in September. I haven’t listened yet (like most folks, the sound of my own voice makes me cringe a bit) but it was a fantastic night and I’m really proud of the poems I read, including a few that will appear in an upcoming book of mine (called Both Ways Home) that should drop before the holidays. Enjoy!

Five Spooky Podcasts for the Halloween Season

When you really love Halloween and eerier aspects of autumn, it always feels like Spooky Season is right around the corner, no matter if it’s high summer or the depths of winter. And when it gets to be late August and early September, I start to listen to some of my favorite spooky old radio shows I’ve downloaded over the years, or audiobook short stories that give me the chills. And of course the creepier podcasts that help me get me through the day. We all have some go-to favorites, but if you’re looking for recommendations for something scary to listen to as we enter the best time of the year, these are the five I’d recommend (in no particular order).

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Heel Spurs: Top 10 San Antonio Players Who Make Great Heels and Villains

The San Antonio Spurs have had a reputations of being a straight-laced, team-first squad for decades, to the point where many fans think they’re boring. This is thanks to the humble, nice-guy leadership of legends like David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Avery Johnson, and so on. The “buy into the system” expectations for this team are as clear as the black and white on their jerseys. But there’s silver in those jerseys too, a gray area for players who are harder to tame and buck at the heavy-hand placed on them by Pop and the front office (affectionally know by Spurs fans as PATFO). Now this list is mostly tongue-in-cheek, and like great heels in wrestling, these are the Spurs players who took a turn toward villainy, providing some drama (be it entertaining or franchise threatening) for a team that is unfairly treated as vanilla, as plain paper, as drama free. They’ve been anything but over the years, thanks to these thorny Spurs in our heels.

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A Quick Look At My Unpublished Novels

I just finished a major revision of one of my novels and restarted my literary agent search, so I thought I’d take a moment to list and encapsulate the five “completed” novels I’ve finished over the years, never mind the first novel I wrote in college that shall never see the light of day, or the three half novels I started but have yet to finish. Hopefully one or all of these will find themselves on a bookshelf near you someday!

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About My Instagram Account...

My Instagram account was hacked by some crypto loser on May 19. If we are friends on there, please report @jameshduncan, but don’t block it or you won’t get to see my new account. The hacker is STILL using my old account and Instagram has done NOTHING to help me despite dozens and dozens of reports by myself and others. My new account is @that_poet_james_duncan. Please only use this one to contact me. Thanks!

One Perfect Episode in Drunk Monkeys

The new Pop Culture Spectacular! issue of Drunk Monkeys is now live! Inside you’ll find my One Perfect Episode essay about the fantastic UK sitcom Peep Show, specifically about their “Nether Zone” episode, which I think is one of the best of all time. By condensing the show down to what works best, trapping the two “odd couple” main characters with each other and letting them riff. It’s staggeringly hilarious and I can’t encourage you enough to go find it and watch it.

The rest of the Drunk Monkeys issue is packed with poetry, fiction, essays, movie reviews, and more, all drenched with pop culture references from a huge variety of writers and voices. My thanks to the editors for taking another piece of mine, and for putting together a truly epic issue.

Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line

Now available from Gutter Snob Books! Order from the publisher or order from my Big Cartel shop!

“The work we do, all of us, this whole universe of spreadsheets and emails and wrenches and lesson plans and bus routes, this work we do is just to keep us from thinking of Love.”

When our value is judged by our productivity, when we’re seen more as cogs in a machine than human beings, when the warnings of a world on fire are ignored by CEOs and politicians cashing in at every turn—doom is inevitable. These poems explore the grinding, churning world of the working class waiting in line for their turn in the slaughterhouse, and when the world begins to fall apart after years of dour warnings, we’re still expected to come in and punch the time-clock as the bombs fall, the water dries up, the toxins spread, and the end comes for each of us. But the boss is throwing a pizza party at 4 p.m., so don’t punch out too soon!

“James Duncan shows his work. He is thorough and true. There is a cadence to these poems that goes beyond the poems themselves. The entire book moves like a train. Duncan uses language as a vehicle in which the reader truly travels. There are depots and little worlds along the journey. There are tiny poems inside each poem itself. His poems are crafted like stories told between friends, stories too painful to tell, stories written in real time and reflection, stories that are windows and stories that are lessons learned through the grinding grief and unpredictable joy that define nearly every life ever lived. Duncan reminds us that our lives are large, real and precious, but so much is lost in the paperwork and the phone call and the everyday business of our lives. This book is a catalog of the glory and the desperation of being alive in a world that challenges decency. These poems fight to deny that challenge, to disregard it even as we live it and see it out the windows of our brains, our bargains with ourselves and as we bump along the tracks of our lives. Duncan reminds us that "if you’re going to die, die with decency.” — Dena Rash Guzman, author of Joseph and Life Cycle

“James Duncan's new collection of poems punch me square in the teeth. Most of us work a job we hate just so we can survive in a world that would rather see us exhausted than in love, that would rather see us depressed than creative, that would have us put our heads down and live among the meaningless than to look up and discover awful truths. These are poems in the vein of Carver, Bukowski, and James Wright. Workers, fighters, and people with little hope, trapped in a system they cannot beat, but sometimes can beat late at night during the exhausted hours. These poems take the everyday mundane existence we are force fed eight hours a day and show us there is hope, but only if we are willing to open the doors of the slaughterhouse.” — Frank Reardon, author of Loud Love on the Sevens and Elevens, Blood Music and others

“With Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line, James H. Duncan does a superb job of showing us our humanity exactly as we are living it, the pain, the struggle, the sickness and all the manifestations of any joys we can find to keep ourselves grounded. Duncan’s poems are both heartbreaking and equal parts exuberant within the expression of the simplest speck of human minutiae. This book of poetry exposes our very soul.” — John Grochalski, author of Eating a Cheeseburger During the End Times and P-Town Forever