teaches at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. He is the author of Some Necessary Questions of the Play, a study of Hamlet. His film studies include essays on Fosse, DePalma, and Verhoeven, as well as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His poetry has appeared such places as Poets and Artists, San Pedro River Review, Breakwater Review, Blue Fifth Review, NDQ: North Dakota Quarterly, The Centrifugal Review, and Prairie Schooner. His chapbook, Gorizia Notebook, was published by Finishing Line Press. A second chapbook, Sleight of Hand, also with Finishing Line Press, is in advance sales. His book of ekphrastic poems, The Awkward Poses of Others, will be published next summer.

Vertiginous

" It is sometimes said that fear of heights is induced by the underlying wish to plunge into the abyss. What better metaphor for obsessive desire and what finer visual execution of that metaphor than Hitchcock’s Vertigo? In an ekphrastic poem, a visual inspiration offers a starting point or clue—in this case, a big clue—but language always has something more to teach us through some idiom, some half-forgotten root, some lamentation of vowels. "