I’m proud to announce that the Leipzig Glocal Publishing micro press I founded earlier this year has published its first book. It’s called Unmoorings: Poems from a Life in Constant Flux. After a decade building the Leipzig Glocal brand as an online publisher of articles and event organizer, I’ve modified the scope to publishing actual books. As previously announced, I’m starting out by publishing books I both write and design, with plans to later expand it to other people’s books as well.
Unmoorings is a collection of 36 of my own poems, written between 2008 and 2025.
Two of my favorite poems included in the e-book you can find for free on the LeipGlo website, from 2016 and 2021. But I hadn’t published many of the poems, especially the most recent ones, until now.
For this collection I have divided my poems into thematic sections, starting with an examination of key relationships, life milestones, and notions of belonging, through travel and living in countries like Germany and the U.S. In keeping with the “unmooring” thread, the last section revisits harbor cities that have had an indelible influence on my trajectory and identity, especially Wilmington, North Carolina. There, my poet persona bloomed running the StarNews blog “Port City Poets” and its offline community (2008-10). In between these memoir-style snapshots, other sections engage with social, political, and economic matters, including women’s issues and inequalities; reflections on grief, maturity, celebrity, and our relationship with social media and artificial intelligence; and reactions to news headlines, partly inspired by Rattle magazine’s “Poets Respond” feature.
In assembling Unmoorings, I allowed myself to rethink some of the word choices and formats of my original poems.
The more I revised them, the more playful I became with the positioning of the lines and near-rhymes. I had to take many deep breaths to overcome my various anxieties and perfectionist tendencies and put such a personal and vulnerable collection out into the world.
The first version of Unmoorings came out as epub (for Kindle and such) last month. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indigo, among other outlets. The prices vary by country where these e-book platforms are located.
Now I’ve also published the book’s pdf version, which is donation-based and can be downloaded from Gumroad.
Currently I have no plans to turn the e-book into a print edition. However, I am working on another book, which fully embraces my love of haiku and will be available exclusively in print. I can’t give an exact publication date for that one yet, but keep watching this space for updates!
For the moment, I hope you’ll consider checking out my Unmoorings, 17 years and multiple selves and ports of call in the making. And if you do read one or more of the poems, I invite you to use it as a device for further reflection on the multitude of little moments, insights, and input that anchor and unmoor your own lives.
Above: Video of the author reading a poem now featured in Unmoorings at the bar Bottega in Wilmington, North Carolina, 2009.
