Catastrophizing in Catastrophe: Poems

The poems in Catastrophizing in Catastrophe had their genesis in a series of recent fundraisers for the English Department of Augsburg University in Minneapolis, where I taught for over 30 years. As an incentive to contribute, I offered to honor the donors by writing poems in various forms. You will find here haiku, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and sestinas, as well as free verse and idiosyncratic stanzaic poems. This project was an ongoing labor of love, as well as a delightful challenge. The poems were created not just to express my perceptions of the world as distilled through various lyrical conventions and forms but also to delight their intended audience. I hope they offer some pleasure to every reader.