To celebrate the first birthday of my poetry collection, The Poet’s Garage, from Unsolicited Press, here’s a brief podcast of the title poem.

Based on a true story, the poem tells how we learned there was another Terry Tierney, a suspected felon, living in Lincoln, Nebraska when we moved there. My arrival aroused several official computers. The police and the social services department thought I lied about my quiet life as a graduate student supported by my tolerant, librarian wife.

Ironically, when I wasn’t distracted by writing poetry in Lincoln, I was working on my dissertation about William Makepeace Thackeray who casts his various protagonists as doubles of himself. Those doubles have much less contrast with one another than me and my apparent double.

The cover of The Poet’s Garage depicts the poem, complete with pools of grease where lines have spilled, the cardboard box of active verbs, and the files of proper nouns. As in the poem, the poet has eluded arrest, so far.

The Poet’s Garage is available from Unsolicited Press, Barnes and Noble, Amazon and other retailers. You can also support your local bookstore by searching for them on Indiebound.

To learn more about the Poet’s Garage, please check my poetry page.