Living Space is a split collection of poetry written by Kevin Ridgeway, Gabriel Ricard, and James Duncan, with poems about the places we’ve lived and how they shaped us. You can find more about the book here, and below you’ll find three sample poems, one from each of us. This collection means a lot to us and we hope you enjoy it. Anyone interested in reviewing it is welcome to a free PDF version, just let us know!
While my horror novel, currently titled House of Bad Bones, is currently out on submission with a bunch of publishers, I thought I’d write a few posts about what inspired the story of a young cancer patient returning to his hometown to discover that his father bought a new house, one with something ancient and wicked hiding in the bones of that place. Something as diseased and malicious as the cancer within him.
I’ve been working on a new collection of poetry with Kevin Ridgeway and Gabriel Ricard called LIVING SPACE, and it’s getting really close to be ready for the world. LIVING SPACE is about the spaces where we live, the cloistered rooms and claptrap apartments, the homes past, present, and future—there are stories in each that live on, existing beyond the spectrum of time. The poems in LIVING SPACE open those doors and invite you inside to hear the walls speak of love, comfort, anguish, and the driving need to move on to find a space that might one day truly feel like home.
Book of Matches is an incredible online literary journal (great words, stellar art) and they recently published my poem “Thompson Hill Blues” in their Eighth Issue. available to read online as a flipbook or download as a PDF. The poem is a quick one about living in a lonely little apartment in Troy, NY’s south end years ago. I hope you enjoy!
ARCH is the poetry journal of SUNY Albany, the state university in my hometown in New York. They accepted two of my poems, and by chance one of them is titled “Clouds Over New York,” while the other is named after a small town just outside of San Antonio, TX, my other hometown. That one is “Killing Time in Bulverde” and it’s a sadder poem, about my grandmother’s passing. You can read both now in the Spring 2026 Issue of ARCH (yeah, I’m a little behind in promoting these).
You can also go directly to each here:
My thanks to the editors and readers over at ARCH and to all of you for taking a look at these poems.
I’ve had some luck with poems lately, and you’ll find new ones in the following three publications…
Understand that even before I landed an agent this last spring, I’d heard how stressful it is to be “on submission” with a novel. Especially a debut. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes years, sometimes never, sometimes right after you give up when a random publisher decides to double-back and jump in with an offer. There are thousands of ways it can go down, and most of them involve an excruciating amount of waiting.
I’m pretty pumped that I‘ll have four poems included in a new anthology called This Is Poetry Volume 5: Poets of the Northeast later this year alongside some incredible writers (and friends!) including Bud Smith, Ally Malinenko, John Grochalski, Puma Perl, Cheryl A. Rice, Rebecca Schumejda, and many others.
