New Book, New Poem, New Song

Hang on to your hat, pardner. I've got a lot to share.

The past few years have been for me a season of artistic tending, attending, growing, drafting, and revising.

Now, God willing, 2025 is poised to be a year of harvest. To wit:

1. New Book - Forbearance

I’m pleased to finally announce here that my first book of poems has been accepted for publication with Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Forbearance will appear early this year—as in a few months from now (!)

This collection is largely the culmination of my work in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University, though some of the poems date back to as early as 2019.

I sent an advance copy of the manuscript to Bruce Roseland, South Dakota’s current Poet Laureate, and he was kind enough to offer this word of endorsement:

When reading Cameron Brooks’ Forbearance, the heart of his work spoke to me from lines describing our relationship with life, with the changing seasons, with ourselves, as “longing after longing and longing again;” “another day comes down to this: my sense that silence never proves an emptiness;” and “not possible only, but probable that today’s most needful determination lies dormant among the caches of the past.” He is acutely aware of nature and how we occasionally cohabitate with it, but never rule it. We must make peace with these realities. I enjoyed the time spent with this book.

I’m still working on the book’s cover art. However, it may or may not end up resembling the painting “Just a Little Sunshine” by Charles Russell.

Yes, I submitted the painting to be considered for the cover, but it’s no guarantee my designer will take it. Either way—pretty cool, huh? Source: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX.

Do follow me on Instagram if you’d like to receive updates closer to publication. I can’t wait to share this book with you. Which brings me to…

2. New Poem - “Pickup Smells”

One poem from the book—“Pickup Smells”—appeared in the latest issue of New Verse Review, which released just this morning.

PICKUP SMELLS

The strongest scent’s a final sip of Coke
mixed in its can with spat tobacco juice,
Dad’s musky leather Carhartts on the dash,
the cab’s upholstery, ripe with coffee stains,
dog fur, and dust sputtered through broken vents.
In early spring, or on some winter day
that smacks of early spring, the floor mats shed
their ice and waft about the cab bootprints
tracked in since October or so: of pine,
alfalfa, milkweed, smoke, and cow manure,
of rust and gas and blood from last year’s stag,
the one we hauled across a jagged field
in fall’s last incandescent blush, his neck
so adamant, so warm against my touch
as I knelt down beside the truck to pose
for a picture, the sweet metallic bite
of blood, of death, of life leaving the earth.

---

Special thanks to Steve of New Verse Review for including me in this most impressive issue. Go subscribe to NVR on Substack if you haven’t.

3. New Song - “Sea Glass”

Finally, my new song “Sea Glass” is now streaming across the web:

Listen on Spotify:

(Also available on YouTube and Apple Music.)

This is the first single I’ve released in four years, and I’m quite happy with the vibes, as we say. “Sea Glass” is a song about time—about coming to terms with the fixity of the past, the precarity of the future, and the endless work of attending to each present moment in light of it all.

I’ve been writing music longer than I’ve been writing poetry, come to think of it. The two creative expressions have always been linked for me, but at some point poetry took priority.

Writing and recording music is both time-intensive and expensive, for one thing, not to mention the added demands of touring or live performance. Whereas, to write poetry, all one really needs is pencil, paper, and a bit of spare time.

I’ve heard it said poetry is language elevated to the level of music; I’ve also heard it said poetry is music lowered to the level of language.

In any event, sometimes the Muse calls for a six-string.

I wrote “Sea Glass” in response to two remarkable residencies at Camp Casey on Whidbey Island, WA, as part of my MFA studies. At the time of my second stay, I had just reread Eliot’s Four Quartets and was mulling over his notion of the “still point of the turning world.” Overlooking Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains to the west, Camp Casey had become for me a place of deep stillness in my own turning world.

Time becomes irrelevant in a place like that—a place about which Annie Dillard once wrote: “Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.”

Anyway, I hope you enjoy (and share) the song. Given what I’ve said above, I’m no longer promising a full-length album or 2025 world tour. But I do have more music in the works, of course. Stay tuned.

SEA GLASS

V1
Out at the edge of the west
Among the seagulls and the winded waves
Searching for sea glass
Searching for a moment that’ll never fade
The past is a mountain range in your rear view
The feeling of flying away
Out at the edge of the west
Among the seagulls and the winded waves

CH
Hear the Sound
Here and now

V2
Driving the coast through fog
Looking for coffee and the words to write
To finish the poem I started
In my head up late last night
Goes, the future’s elusive, a vapor, a changer
A glimmering bottle of light
Driving the coast through fog
Looking for coffee and the words to write

V3
Watching the sun sink low beyond Olympus
And a silent sea
Call it a day, yeah,
Call it a suggestion of eternity
The moment’s a whisper half-heard on the water
A voice in the stillness between
Watching the sun sink low beyond Olympus
And a silent sea