Some Things I Found in the Shopping Plaza Parking Lot and the Woods Behind
A poetry chapbook.
Some Things I Found in the Shopping Plaza Parking Lot and the Woods Behind | 24 pages | Paperback | Saddle Stitch | December 2025
Hi everyone. If you aren’t aware, about a month ago I inaugurated a new experiment in literary self-distribution, publishing a chapbook simultaneously as a physical print-on-demand title and as a PDF that could be downloaded at no extra cost by those that have chosen to become paying subscribers to Garden Scenery (still way less per month than a pack of cigarettes, fwiw). You can read more about that here, if you’re interested:
In any case, the whole idea here is to publish work this way frequently and build up a robust catalogue of side projects, experiments, and one-off curiosities – the more the better, since for me it means I’m staying limber, creatively speaking, and for you it means your subscription gets you more writing. To that end, I have a new one to share with you today. It’s called Some Things I Found in the Shopping Plaza Parking Lot and the Woods Behind, and it combines my long-standing interest in the desolation of the American exurbs with my more recent interest in the possibilities of the List as a poetic form.
This is a very small-scale work (more than ten pages shorter than Surface Dwellers, although the actual word count, I believe, is larger), but I honestly believe it’s one of the stronger things I’ve written recently. It’s the kind of text that you can read in a lunch break, but which, I think, rewards sitting with and mulling over. One thing about lists that I find so interesting is that they’re capable of encoding information extremely densely – a few words can be enough to imply a whole pocket universe, a life story, the beginning or the end of an entire historical epoch, sometimes, if you really think about what it’s saying. I tried to leverage this capability as much as possible while composing these poems, and I think the end result has a lot of mystery to it, some spare beauty, and at least a little truth, which is all you can really hope for as a writer.
If this sounds like a book you’d like to have in your home, you can get it for less than a pack of cigarettes by clicking the link at the top of the page, and you can see what it will look like, more or less, in the pictures below. If you’d rather just read it on a screen, then you can get it for even less by hitting that “Subscribe now” button – or, if you’re already a paying subscriber, just scroll down. Your support means a great deal. In any case, thank you for taking the time to read this. Much more to come.
