works about Holyoke

I used the non-de-guerre "Paper Queen" while living in and writing about a post-industrial neighborhood of paper mills in Holyoke, Massachusetts (2007-2015); the city held this nickname during her heyday. My work featuring Holyoke includes:

Poem lanterns - Glass Cathedral 

in the studio of Maryanne Benns, Holyoke, MA, January 2024:

Poem lanterns - Glass Cathedral 

in the Poem Atlas Hauntings exhibition, Brewery Tap, Folkestone UK, November 2023:

Roofing, Sheathing, and Carpet-Lining Paper, a poem about Holyoke's fires, in UNLOST Journal of Found Poetry and Art, Issue 29: How daily my life, August 2022.

Prose poetry - Building Letters in Doubleback Review, Issue 4:1, April 2022.

• Dear Old Burnt-Out Former Mill Building that I Met on a Walk One Sunny Day Last Month

• Dear Empty Parsons Paper Building Before you Burnt Down Last Summer in a 9-Alarm Fire That Brought 80 Firefighters from Surrounding Towns

• Dear Open Square, Full of Gentrified and Glorified Hugeness, Clean Immensity

Audio, Prose poetry - Ways to Enter an Abandoned Mill read on the Poetic Press Alphanumeric podcast, June 2021

In print, Prose poetry - Ways to Enter an Abandoned Mill in Nonbinary Review, Issue 24: Industrial Revolution, May 2021

Collaboration - Japanese teahouse build by Chris Nelson with my poem Dear City, City Love projected onto a window covered with paper, for the Paper City Studios spring exhibition - interpretations of the theme works on paper. May 6 - June 4, 2012:

Dear City, City Love

     Even in Kyoto,

I feel the frames of your hollow

mills carved tenderly in my mind.

The white Washi paper door slides

wide to un-

                 fold tearoom into dewy grounded

garden -- as at home, City Love,

river rot sets deep

      into beam

until bricks crumble down-

ward to let light fall furiously within.

A poem, Taming the Quinetucket, in the Naugatuck River Review: a Journal of Narrative Poetry that Sings (Issue 6, Summer 2011). 

The Parsons Hall Project Space hosted an evening of music; literature; video art; scandinavian edibles; hot drinks; and ice sculptures. Alexis read Building Letters. Saturday, January 29, 2011