I am pleased to write that my book manuscript “Asylum Seeker” will be published in 2018 by Poetry Press at Press Americana. The book will be the third in a trilogy: Americana that won the 2013 Press Americana Prize; Body Politic that was published by Prolific Press in January 2017; and now “Asylum Seeker.” Press Americana is a non-profit organization “dedicated to education and the belief in the power of American Studies scholarship and creative writing to enact positive social change.”
 
Other books include Gival Press Poetry Prize 2008 winner Voyeur and my first book, The Apple in the Monkey Tree, published in 2007 by Codhill Press. In December 2016 my book-length manuscript “Minds of Europe: A Genealogy to the Fat Man” was a shortlisted finalist in the Beverly Prize in the UK, and my manuscript “Storage Shed” was chosen as a finalist in the 2016 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Contest. 

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​During an interview of Noam Chomsky by Ralph Nader for Truth Dig, Chomsky reported that movements take time to gain momentum, suggesting that we need to be patient but active. He noted the Vietnam War resistance movement that took from 1962- 68 to gain enough steam to be effective.
 
However, it has been 15 years since 9/11 and eight since the crash of the economy and five since Occupy. These two shocks of aggression bringing fear and the final act of the coup d’état by the finance seem to have most Americans traumatized.
 
The mirror test to detect life in the politically minded shows lots of steam leaking from the pressure cooker valve called social media. Little of the steam that the mirror needs to indicate life in a movement is from the body politic in the street. Yet we have indigenous people who have been marginalized resisting alone. Should we be ashamed? Do they want our help physically there? Will a call to the Obama White House change anything?
 
The Sioux at Standing Rock is merely one of many groups needing help with resistance. Is it a beginning, a foothold?