SALT PRUNING ~ Poetry Collection

SALT PRUNING ~ A poetry collaboration by Ignatius Valentine Aloysius & David Allen Sullivan (Hummingbird Poetry Press, Santa Cruz, CA)

The title of the collection references the way sea air & salt spray sculpts vegetation, trees, & rocks, which applies both to the windswept coast of Santa Cruz, California, where David now resides, & the beaches near Mumbai, India, where Ignatius grew to maturity. The title also points to the way we humans are altered and shaped by 
life-events and everything surrounding us.

The back-&-forth nature of the project is reflected in the Table of Contents, where the titles of Ignatius’ poems are flush left & the titles of David’s are indented (though they each helped “salt prune” the poems, so all are—in a sense—collaborations).

The poems sometimes share a theme, or reference the same incident, & some borrow lines or words from previous poems. Terrance Hayes’ Golden Shovel form was employed, & then the two poets created their own variations on it. A Golden Slumber takes the last word from each line of a previous poem & creates a new poem using the same end-word structure of the one being referenced. While a Golden Sliver threads together a single sentence from words inside a previous poem, which become the end words of each line in the new poem, as well as the final line.

BIOS:

David Allen Sullivan’s books include Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, Black Ice, & Salt Pruning. He won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing. Black Butterflies Over Baghdad was selected for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection by Tim Seibles, & published by Word Works. Seed Shell Ash—a book of poems about his Fulbright year teaching in Xi’an, China—is forthcoming from Salmon Press. He’s the former Santa Cruz county poet laureate & teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students. PGRSubmissions@gmail.com. https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/website-1.

Ignatius Valentine Aloysius is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, where he also teaches. Ignatius is the author of the literary novel Fishhead. Republic of Want (Tortoise Books) & Salt Pruning. His prose & poetry have appeared in several journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Cold Mountain Review, & The Rumpus. He is the current host of the popular reading series Sunday Salon Chicago, and is Co-Editor of The Overturning Anthology, due out in early 2025. Ignatius serves as Co-Chair of the Curatorial Board at Ragdale Foundation, where he is also a Board of Trustees member. He lives in Evanston, Illinois. https://linktr.ee/ignatius.valentine.aloysius