I’m happy to announce that Cordite Publishing Inc., through its poetry imprint Cordite Books, will publish my third full-length collection, Transition Vamps, in 2026.

Transition Vamps follows in the footsteps of my two earlier collections: Leaves of Glass (2013) and We Will Disappear (2007).

Given that I lived in Sweden for eleven years, it’s probably no surprise that a fair number of the poems in Transition Vamps were written there.

But the contents of Transition Vamps also span three decades of transitions in my writing life: from the mid-to-late 2000s in Melbourne, Seoul, Den Haag and Amsterdam, to the 2010s in Karlskrona, Stockholm and Gustavsberg, and the early 2020s in Paris and Fryslân.

Nevertheless, it was in Sweden that I returned to self-publishing after a long break, putting together a chapbook of poems, entitled Övergången [The Transition] in 2011 in English and Swedish.

Övergången was followed by several digital-only chapbooks whose contents were also heavily focused on my experience living in Sweden, including Tjugotvå (2012) and Fem Kronor (2013).

As for the ‘vamps’ of the book’s title, well, I’m not actually sure what they have to do with anything, to be honest. But I have been listening to a lot of jazz-vamp instrumentals lately, and they certainly make for very nice writing background music.

I’m looking forward to launching Transition Vamps in person and will of course share further details as they come to hand.

I’m also toying with the idea of previewing a form of “live” poetry video to build pre-launch excitement levels that might just tear a hole in the space-time continuum.

In the meantime, check out the poem that may well have started it all: Övergången [The Transition], written shortly after moving to Sweden for what I thought would be one year but turned into over a decade.