About My Instagram Account...

My Instagram account was hacked by some crypto loser on May 19. If we are friends on there, please report @jameshduncan, but don’t block it or you won’t get to see my new account. The hacker is STILL using my old account and Instagram has done NOTHING to help me despite dozens and dozens of reports by myself and others. My new account is @that_poet_james_duncan. Please only use this one to contact me. Thanks!

One Perfect Episode in Drunk Monkeys

The new Pop Culture Spectacular! issue of Drunk Monkeys is now live! Inside you’ll find my One Perfect Episode essay about the fantastic UK sitcom Peep Show, specifically about their “Nether Zone” episode, which I think is one of the best of all time. By condensing the show down to what works best, trapping the two “odd couple” main characters with each other and letting them riff. It’s staggeringly hilarious and I can’t encourage you enough to go find it and watch it.

The rest of the Drunk Monkeys issue is packed with poetry, fiction, essays, movie reviews, and more, all drenched with pop culture references from a huge variety of writers and voices. My thanks to the editors for taking another piece of mine, and for putting together a truly epic issue.

Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line

Now available from Gutter Snob Books! Order from the publisher or order from my Big Cartel shop!

“The work we do, all of us, this whole universe of spreadsheets and emails and wrenches and lesson plans and bus routes, this work we do is just to keep us from thinking of Love.”

When our value is judged by our productivity, when we’re seen more as cogs in a machine than human beings, when the warnings of a world on fire are ignored by CEOs and politicians cashing in at every turn—doom is inevitable. These poems explore the grinding, churning world of the working class waiting in line for their turn in the slaughterhouse, and when the world begins to fall apart after years of dour warnings, we’re still expected to come in and punch the time-clock as the bombs fall, the water dries up, the toxins spread, and the end comes for each of us. But the boss is throwing a pizza party at 4 p.m., so don’t punch out too soon!

“James Duncan shows his work. He is thorough and true. There is a cadence to these poems that goes beyond the poems themselves. The entire book moves like a train. Duncan uses language as a vehicle in which the reader truly travels. There are depots and little worlds along the journey. There are tiny poems inside each poem itself. His poems are crafted like stories told between friends, stories too painful to tell, stories written in real time and reflection, stories that are windows and stories that are lessons learned through the grinding grief and unpredictable joy that define nearly every life ever lived. Duncan reminds us that our lives are large, real and precious, but so much is lost in the paperwork and the phone call and the everyday business of our lives. This book is a catalog of the glory and the desperation of being alive in a world that challenges decency. These poems fight to deny that challenge, to disregard it even as we live it and see it out the windows of our brains, our bargains with ourselves and as we bump along the tracks of our lives. Duncan reminds us that "if you’re going to die, die with decency.” — Dena Rash Guzman, author of Joseph and Life Cycle

“James Duncan's new collection of poems punch me square in the teeth. Most of us work a job we hate just so we can survive in a world that would rather see us exhausted than in love, that would rather see us depressed than creative, that would have us put our heads down and live among the meaningless than to look up and discover awful truths. These are poems in the vein of Carver, Bukowski, and James Wright. Workers, fighters, and people with little hope, trapped in a system they cannot beat, but sometimes can beat late at night during the exhausted hours. These poems take the everyday mundane existence we are force fed eight hours a day and show us there is hope, but only if we are willing to open the doors of the slaughterhouse.” — Frank Reardon, author of Loud Love on the Sevens and Elevens, Blood Music and others

“With Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line, James H. Duncan does a superb job of showing us our humanity exactly as we are living it, the pain, the struggle, the sickness and all the manifestations of any joys we can find to keep ourselves grounded. Duncan’s poems are both heartbreaking and equal parts exuberant within the expression of the simplest speck of human minutiae. This book of poetry exposes our very soul.” — John Grochalski, author of Eating a Cheeseburger During the End Times and P-Town Forever

So I've Had a Little Luck With Some Poems...

Over the last few months I’ve had more than a little good luck when it came to placing new poems into some great journals, some of which are old favorites and others are brand spankin’ new, literally the first issue ever in one case. There are a bunch more poetry publications coming soon, but I’ve added the more recent releases below and included links when applicable. The editors of these journals have my deepest thanks. It’s always an honor when someone else grabs your work out of a bustling inbox and says, “This is the one!” Or two, for that matter! And of course, my thanks to you for reading!

“A Splinter” now appears in Trampoline

“Picturesque” now appears in Viva Brevis

“Saint Michael” now appears in Book of Matches

“Both Ways Home” now appears in San Pedro River Review

“Ode to Madison Avenue at 6:15 PM" and "Topo-Chico” now appear in Day Job Journal

“And the party never ends” and “Riverwalk” now appear in The Rye Whiskey Review

“Wednesday Night South Main Avenue” and “May the Moon Shine On” now appear in Roadside Raven Review

New Poetry Collection Coming Soon from Gutter Snob Books

Later this year, probably late summer or early autumn, Gutter Snob Books is planning to release my next poetry collection, Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line. It’s a chapbook focusing on work life and the office “grind” culture in modern America and how destructive it is, and as the poems go on the story evolves into a tale of our impending apocalyptic end as a human society and how even down to the very last minutes on the punch clock, the corporate machine churns on and spits us out like used cogs, replaced by bones and nuclear winter. So yeah, cheery uplifting stuff! But I’m thrilled editor Michele McDannold selected the collection for the Gutter Snob Books 2022 lineup, and I’ll post more details and the cover when it all comes together. Thanks very much, and stay tuned for even more publication news soon!

Poets on Craft: James H Duncan and Rebecca Schumejda

Poets on Craft is an educational series of essays by poets about how they each approach their artistic craft and writing process from a practical standpoint, and I’m very happy to have my own essay appear alongside one by the incredible Rebecca Schumejda. My essay focuses on how narrative can play a role in poetry, even if it’s hidden behind layered metaphors and alternating styles/POVs. Having started out as a fiction writer, the ability to tell a story has remained vital even as I have shifted into poetry. Our essays are posted over at Cultural Daily, and they were compiled by another great poet and educator, Bunkong Tuon. There’s a lot there for young poets to explore, so I encourage you to take a look and explore the site! Thanks for all the support!

New Poem in Black Poppy Review

My poem “Creatures Who Survived” now appears at the delightfully grim Black Poppy Review, which describes itself as a journal focusing on “dilapidated, mossy grounds…hidden paths and nooks which lead to words that linger and haunt--poems of abandonment, flora & fauna, folklore, ghosts, memories, nature, night, solitude, weathering, wonder, and the otherwise forgotten.” My piece certainly fits into that mold. It’s one of the post-apocalyptic poems I wrote pre-pandemic that I’m working into a future chapbook of similar pieces, so stay tuned for that. Thanks to Sandy Benitez for accepting this piece and for publishing such a cool review!

Strange Gods of the Prairie Anthology

The Gasconade Review puts out an annual poetry anthology (among many other individual collections) and this year they titled their anthology after one of the three poems of mine they selected for inclusion, “Strange Gods of the Prairie.” The other two poems they accepted are “A Dying Orchid on Fire” and “Two Chairs on the Front Patio,” and I’m thrilled to be included alongside the likes of John Dorsey, Linnet Phoenix, William Taylor Jr, Shawn Pavey, Zara Lisbon, Tim Heerdink, Holly Day, Ace Bogges, and many others. The cover art is pretty cool and you can find copies online for $15. It’s a big one so it’s worth your money. My thanks to the editors and congrats to all who made it into the anthology!

"Umbra" Now Appears in Pine Hills Review

My poem “Umbra” now appears in the always fantastic Pine Hills Review, the literary magazine of The College of Saint Rose, a small liberal arts college in my hometown of Albany, NY, and located just a few blocks away from where I’m typing this now. They’ve published a poem of mine before (“How to Watch John Ashbury Read Poetry”) and it’s always an honor. This new poem is from a series I wrote based on some of my favorite words and the connotations that come to mind with each, and they also have an audio version of the poem that I recorded for their site. I hope you enjoy!

Poetry Audiobooks Now Available at Bandcamp

Three of my poetry collections are now available in audiobook form at Bandcamp, including We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine, Feral Kingdom, and my half of the split-collection Vacancy (the great Kevin Ridgeway wrote the other half). The files are available to stream for free at the site or on the Bandcamp app, and they’re only a few dollars each if you wish to download them. In the coming months I’ll be working to create and post more poetry audiobooks, then turn to my short story collections, and eventually longer fiction if people are interested in that too. Thanks for all of your support, and as always, signed copies of the books are always available. Just drop me a line!

A Review of Curtiz at Drunk Monkeys

Like many people, Casablanca is my favorite movie, but the story behind the film has just as much intrigue and suspense as the movie itself. The Hungarian film Curtiz (in English and available on Netflix) highlights the director Michael Curtiz and his struggle to get the movie made, and made correctly, while wresting his career and family from the grips of hyper-Americanism at home and fascism overseas. My 100 word review is now over at the fantastic film and literary website Drunk Monkeys, and you’ll find a few more of my reviews there too, mostly focusing on film noir. I hope you enjoy the review, and the film as well. Thanks!

New Poem in The Mantle, Issue 14

My poem “Fugue” now appears in The Mantle, Issue 14, alongside the works of Emily Scudder, Elise Houcek, Blue Nguyen, and other writers who are definitely worth checking out. It’s a small lineup but editor James Croal Jackson picked a great slate of folks, and I feel very fortune to appear alongside them. The poem itself is about the cyclical nature of life and fate, and what is lost will be found again, only to fade back into the night. I hope you enjoy!

Mason (from Nights Without Rain)

This short story appeared in my book, Nights Without Rain, and is a fictionalized account of my trip to Mason, Texas to explore the remote Hill Country town where my great-grandfather once lived.

Mason 

He stood in the cemetery west of Mason, where sun-bleached headstones and granite crosses punctured through the tall yellow grass in irregular rows. Stunted oak trees stood together and reached upward like the twisted legs of dried-up dead spiders. He turned in place and surmised the landscape with a disappointed eye, a man in a place out of time offering little but dust and wind and the chittering whine of locust in the summer heat. Texas in June, wet blanket waves of swelter, the kind that made mere breathing a discomfort. He fanned his collar and conceded the fact that his great-grandad was not in this place. His name was not among the strangers long forgotten and blanched by time and the relentless stoicism of weather generations heartless. It seemed to the man they had both come all this way for nothing.

Crickets and pale lime Katydids sprang from his path as he cut through the grass to his truck, a small thing in a state of behemoth vehicles in both form and function. The once cool interior had quickly changed to stifling, and he let the air conditioning run with the windows down for a few minutes as he again surveyed the landscape of the cemetery, including the abandoned well house just beyond, a decayed stone and stucco square with a wooden water tank resting atop like a bloated sleeping monolith waiting for night to fall before wrenching free its moorings, stretching limbs over the cemetery audience, and launching into the expanse. The man had poked his head inside the fallen wall of the old well house and jerked away from the writhing assemblage of brown recluse spiders that scattered at his presence. That had been his last pass through the cemetery, looking one last time over the stones for the name he knew by then would not be there. Let the spiders have their roost, he though as he rolled the windows back up. There was nothing he wanted less than another moment in that place.

Mason did not contain multitudes. The gathering knot of five or six disparate roads leading into the one central square belied the otherwise geometric mediocrity of the town’s construction, with small neighborhoods surrounding the square laid out north and south and east and west in streets as flush to one another as cinder blocks in a prison wall. The small homes of brick and clapboard stood identical to each other save for the fact that some owners cared for the green grass that came with attentive watering and pruning, while others condoned the yellow and brown colors of the surrounding hill country, a mix of grasslands and dried arroyos cluttered by oaks and knotted tinder-brush. But for the most part the placid neighborhoods resisted the wilds on all sides. He glanced at each passing house while moving toward that central square, the taller oaks there providing shade and respite, a space somehow cooler and almost gentrified with benches, sidewalks, lampposts. He parked his truck along one of the many open parallel parking spots on the square’s south side and stepped forth into the high heat of the day.

Surrounding the square he saw a pharmacy and general store, a men’s clothier, a large café, a newspaper office, a closed real estate office, assorted empty storefronts, a stone jailhouse fenced off with a historical marker out front, about three banks, and at the far end was a small movie house called The Odeon. With letters askew and in various faded shades of red the marquee above The Odeon’s unlit neon sign read, “There Will Be Blood,” a film that had been out for nearly six months. The man wondered if it was simply a second-run theater now, or if The Odeon had gone under since the grim drama’s final showing the winter prior. He walked the length of the square for a closer look and found the doors bolted and dusty, the interior difficult to parse through the dark glass.  

An assortment of scrambling children turned the corner and halted before him, surprised to contend with an adult in their chosen journey. Half the gathering cackled with wondrous guilt and sped away down the sidewalk clutching small plastic water pistols, shooting one another. Three children remained, and one asked the man what he was doing.

“Ain’t no more movie there no more,” a boy of about six told him.

“I can tell. Any of you know anyone with the last name Thurmond?”

“Nope.”

The three remaining children stared at him until the tallest, a girl of about nine, tugged on the boy’s shoulder and they all turned and began to run. The boy paused and called over his shoulder, “Our daddy’s in the café yonder with Uncle Hugh. Ask them!”

After a few more seconds of call-and-answer laughter echoing back to him from around the corner, the man looked across the square toward the café. A red truck passed. Pairs and groups came and went through the door. He began that way accordingly.

The dull cowbell clattered against the heavy glass door and a waitress bumped into him, edging the man into three families waiting for a table. It was a long room full of cattle men, overalls, dirty Stetsons, and older women in plain blue or white dresses. Some bounced infants on their knees. Families and weekend laborers, a Saturday gathering before the next day’s holy deferment of chores. The waitress said she couldn’t spare a table for one but offered a spot at the small bar. It didn’t serve alcohol but had become a depot for knives and napkins, water glasses and round wooden food trays piled atop one another. He sat at the far end alone and studied the menu.

“You bein’ a stranger I’d suggest the chicken fried steak,” the waitress suggested as she set fork, knife, and spoon before him, and then a tall glass of water. “You want potatoes or coleslaw salad with that?”

He said potatoes and waited for his meal as families sat and ate and left and returned with only slightly adjusted faces and clothing, a seeming Rubik’s cube of rural humanity hungry for steak and salads and pies and sweet teas. He wondered if this café had been there when old Wash Thurmond had owned the filling station on the western edge of town, if he ate there, if he took his son and later his grandson to that very café, a place he was never able to take his infant great-grandson before passing away in a nursing home, horizons away from this place, only returning in a box. So he’d been told.

The waitress had been right. The chicken fried steak was fearsome in size and worth any wait, smothered in white pepper gravy tasting of that floury richness that accompanied so much southern food. Potatoes and two biscuits later he pushed the meal away and smiled at the waitress offering a hearty congratulation. She insisted on pie as well and asked him about the circumstance of their meeting. He told her about the family name, the filling station, a house he couldn’t find and a grave he could not reconnoiter despite all evidence and advice from his family back in San Antonio. She told him the name was unfamiliar but the filling station was something she knew, although it had been torn down a decade prior. She couldn’t recall anyone knowing the owner, however.

“Which is a mighty odd circumstance ‘round here. Everyone knows right about everyone, but not everyone, I s’pose.”

“I suppose not. Every place has its own social circles.”

“That’s one way of sayin’ it. You know who you know, and you can’t fit everyone inside.”

“Exactly. Thanks anyway.”

“Which cemetery? The one out the Dairy Queen or the one out 29?”

“There’s more than one? I did pass a Dairy Queen, heading west. I was told he’d be out that way.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You might want to check the one out 29, east of here. Go on east, take a left on the Old Pontiac Road, the second one, not the first one. There’s about three out that way, believe it or not. The second. If you hit the Starks farm you done gone too far east.”

“I’ll check that one. Thank you.”

“You do that. Hope you find yer grandaddy.”

He nodded and fished out the money for the meal, and the tip was the last of his cash. He had just a little bit more in the bank, and a tank of gas. He wished he had more for her though and stood up from the bar and waded through folks waiting by the door, which shunted him back to silence once it closed behind him. The sun was now angled to impact its heat directly into his eyes seemingly no matter where he looked and he walked into the shade of the square where he watched cars rounding the corners and pinwheel off east, south, north, all directions. It looked as if the town’s somnolence had stirred up the morning hibernation and the café was but one of many active corners visible from his sanctum beneath the trees of the square. It was a happy sight, but it also hurried him somehow, as if time began passing in ways no watch could portend.

The man restarted his truck and let the air conditioning come to life as he considered the day, the time, the drive home, and the people of the town of Mason walking the sidewalks and disappearing from view, reappearing. He thought of his great-grandad and the picture the man kept in his wallet of old Wash Thurmond standing beside his filling pump sometime in the late 1930s, sepia-toned and handsome, when he was young Washington J Thurmond.

He’d remain that way, a sepia-toned image in the mind of the man who turned the truck not east but southeast instead, down Route 87, the way he’d come that morning from San Antonio. While history was a thing resistant to change, memory was another matter. Sometimes you didn’t want it to change. Sometimes it was best to let sleeping memories lie. The man considered this as he passed the edge of town and did not feel any remorse in the knowing he may never return. Not in that life, at least.