I agonized over publishing Excavations commerically. In my opinion, it's mediocre.

Excavations won an Amby (Favorite: Poetry) early this year. Not a Grand Favorite, but still, a Favorite. That's supposed to be a very big deal, right?

Not in my mind. 

As I have mentioned elsewhere, both publicly and in private conversation, I'd entered Excavations into the 2024 Ambys as an experiment, nothing more. The book I considered my serious work was Ancilla.

Ancilla did not even make it to the shortlist. Excavations advanced. 

When I saw the shortlist in my feed I spent a night on Discord sobbing to AprilJester about how I must be a terrible writer and why did my worst work have to do well in a contest, anyway, since everybody in my undergraduate poetry workshop laughed at it and told me how pretentious and unreadable my poetry was and... well, you get the idea.

Thirty years ago, and it feels like yesterday. 

I still wasn't going to do anything with it, but Shivran86 told me that she would actually buy my poetry if it was available... and then a few days later came the announcement about the winners of the 2024 Amby Awards, and my name was on there, and I decided to go commercial. 

I'm not publicizing it. There's not much point. Poetry does not sell. It also doesn't get marketed through the usual channels that indie writers use. The only book newsletter that publicizes poetry is The Fussy Librarian, and The Fussy Librarian stuffs it in with "other" nonfiction! Yes, really. 

It's launching on Reedsy Discovery on April 1, to coincide with National Poetry Month - romance_lover16, aka Shreya North, gave it a five-star review there, by the way. Are you an indie writer? She's looking for books to review - but other than that, I'm not marketing it much. It's just there to be available.