Infused in crumbling crust
is delectable violent violet –
a pounded plum,
a welt of fruit.
Oh, if my lips could peruse
that square and powdered sugar-bruise.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2024
Photo credit: Takeaway, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Your absence ever leaves me sour,
annual absconded hour —
that vexing day when March exhibits
sixty fewer sleeping minutes.
Subtract an hour of labor, please!
But leave to me my precious Z’s!
— Eric Robert Nolan
I am currently enjoying The Galway Review’s annual anthology, The Galway Review 12 — which includes my poem, “The Beach House, Early Spring.” (The piece was published online by the magazine in October 2023.)
This really is one of the nicest honors I’ve received as a poet. The Galway Review is the city’s leading literary magazine, with more than a half a million readers worldwide, and I was included along with just seven other poets to see my work appear in this annual publication. I remain quite grateful to the magazine’s editors for selecting my poem.
If you’d like to peruse the anthology, you can read it online for free right here.
Just FYI, if you’d like to keep track of my mad scribblings, I started a new page here at the blog for 2024 poetry and commentary.
Impspired in the United Kingdom released its 13th volume today, featuring three of my poems: “At the Coffee Shop,” “Autumn Girl” and “A Poet’s Short Note to His Muse.” (These pieces were previously published online in Impspired Issue 26.)
You can purchase a paperback copy of Impspired Volume Thirteen right here over at Amazon.
As always, I am grateful to Editor Steve Cawte for allowing me to see my work published by such an outstanding literary magazine!
Got my first rejection letter from a publication in China.
Hey — it’s a “trying milestone.” I failed, but I tried something new for the first time.
Like when submitted to The New Yorker or to The Irish Times.
I’m honored to share here that Lothlorien Poetry Journal Volume 29 includes my tribute to my late friend and colleague, Dennis Williamson. (Dennis was also known by his nom de plume, Dennis Villelmi.) The journal originally published the essay online on October 19th.)
Lothlorien Poetry Journal features free verse/rhyming/experimental poetry, short stories and flash fiction; the theme for Volume 29 is Amplified Voices in the Murmurs of Infinity. I am so pleased to be published beside 71 renowned poets and authors, and I’m grateful to Editor Strider Marcus Jones for accepting my essay.
You can purchase Volume 29 right here at Lulu.
I’m kinda like Herman Munster crossed with Conan O’Brien.
I am so pleased to see a trio of my poems appear today over in the pages of The Piker Press. The set of three is entitled “Three Dreamers,” and the poems are as follows: “The Writer,” “The Secretary” and “The Bureaucrat.”
I wrote “Three Dreamers” very early in my career as a poet, and they were meant as a sort of creative experiment. I wanted to see whether I could characterize three different fictional characters who have relationships with one another. (The people portrayed here were imagined as office co-workers.)
Thanks once again to Managing Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to share my voice at The Piker Press!
I hope you will all join me in congratulating Adele Evershed as Spillwords Press Author of the Month for November 2023.
(Thanks also to those of you who voted for me, as I was a nominee as well. I am flattered if you did so.) 🙂
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 