In his chapbook, Present Conditions, Joseph Massey writes that “the weather within / is the weather without.” His poems chronicle a difficult winter where the universe grows colder, his speaker taking all day to “filter out the debris of a dream.” These poems bring us the aching beauty of the natural world, and the crushing sadness of interior space. A speaker’s failed suicide. The return to sanity. The waiting where we can’t go on, but we do go on, if nothing else when “the windows / . . . go blind.”

Joseph Massey is the author of Illocality (Wave Books, 2015) and a trilogy grounded in the landscape of coastal Humboldt County, California: Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), and To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014). He worked as an instructor and teaching assistant for the University of Pennsylvania’s ModPo (Modern and Contemporary Poetry) MOOC, which serves thousands of students, worldwide, at no cost. He now teaches privately. He lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

1 – Present Conditions – Joseph Massey (Hollyridge Press, 2018)

2 – Nowhere to Arrive – Jenny Xie (Northwestern University Press, 2016)

3 – On Imagination – Mary Ruefle (Sarabande Books, 2017)

4 – Night Animals – Yusef Komunyakaa, Rachel Bliss (Sarabande Books, 2011)

5 – The Blue Nib Chapbook 5 – Adam Levon, Ross McCague, Teresa Godfrey (The Blue Nib, 2020)

6 – The Cows – Lydia Davis (Sarabande Books, 2011)

7 – Snails & Elephants – Nicole Jean Turner (NicoleJeanTurner.com, 2020)

8 – Flower of Scotland: Volume 1 – William Meikle (Independently published, 2020)

9 – The Coming of the Old Ones – Jeffrey Thomas (Forma Street Press 2019)

10 – Will Burtin: The Display of Visual Knowledge – R. Roger Remington (Boydell and Brewer, 2016)