Trailer Park Psalms: Poems

Longlist Finalist, 2023 Julie Suk Award

Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised world: the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness” of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds isn’t faith but the hope that “if there’s a heaven, we will bend / to examine our old selves / and wonder how something so delicate / was ever allowed.”