Got out of the house for the first time in three days today. Lots of work over the past week and one does tire of the same old spin around the neighborhood. But at twilight things are different, and the autumn air is wonderful. Close my eyes and I could be on my childhood street, 3,871 miles away.

Days and days and days. Hopefully by next November we’ll have emerged from the pandemic. Many think it could be sooner but optimism rarely helps me. I have had the luck to land in Germany for these months, rather than Spain. My family is here, I speak the language. I was here for Easter dinner. I escorted my elderly dog into the next world in May. We planted a tree in the summer. Next up, lonely Christmas.

Anyway, trying to stay safe with indoor reading and poetry activities! I made a video (click here!) with poet friend Dave Bonta. Actually we made two but one isn’t accessible because it was part of a Sarabande reading . We’ll probably flip the switch to public at some point but at the moment I’ve had enough of looking at myself.

I’ve also had some visual poetry and such published over the past month: two visual poems at Quarterly West, including “Tatters” – pictured here, and five more at the Indianapolis Review, plus an interview with Kelcey Parker Ervick and a book review by Amanda Auchter. Thanks to these generous people.

From the review: What sets Sloat’s Hotel Almighty apart from other collections of erasures is the attention to art and graphics embedded within each poem. This brings the work alive even further, giving it a depth that simply inking or crossing out often fails to do. In the introduction, Sloat notes that “The physical pages resembled miniature canvases, so I added a visual element that let me defy the constraints of the source text further, with stitches or a strip of fabric, with confetti, or most often, collage.” Each page of this collection is indeed a surprise that surpasses the expected constraints of erasure poetry.