Talavera Sunsets is now available from Bottlecap Press! This is a 28-page, hand-bound chapbook of poetry about the last road trip I took as a teenager with my father and sister out to western Texas, the last real road trip we’d all take together. I’m so delighted that it found a home with the incredible Bottlecap Press as part of their Bottlecap Features series. Copies are available through them for just $10, and you cannot buy this on Amazon (thankfully!) so be sure to head to their shop. Here’s the back-cover text for the book and a sample.

More than a road trip, it became a pilgrimage and last goodbye. The poems in Talavera Sunsets serve as mile markers along dusty highways in west Texas, archiving James Duncan’s final teenage road trip with his father and sister in the 1990s before impending adulthood swept them all in different directions.

From motels in Del Rio and Alpine to old cavalry forts and the McDonald Observatory north of Big Bend, these poems explore the people, places, and magical landscapes of a region as old as time, yet always in flux with humanity’s never-ending migrations. The three of them never returned, and part of them never left.