Announcing Fellowship
I am overjoyed to announce that my new poetry collection Fellowship is available by clicking here. This is a collection that I know will reward your heart and mind each time you discover a new poem. In Fellowship, I try to get honest about a few important things. That’s why this new book means so much to me. I hope it will mean a lot to you, too.
The 59 poems contained in its 98 pages continue a story I began in News of Need in 2025 about the bittersweet wonder of life seen through experiences with sobriety and challenging questions of spirituality and faith. Some of these themes can be glimpsed in this excerpt from the poem “Please and Thank You”:
How can a man know
what he really needs
well enough to pray for it?
Please and thank you
require no great knowledge
beyond humility.
Rarely have I struggled to title a work as much as this book, but the answer was in front of me all along in the name of one of its most heartfelt poems. For me, fellowship is a state of communion with others that is hard to describe but unmistakeable when felt. Fellowship is the sense of wellbeing, belonging, mutual understanding, and deep love for others, the knowledge that unique experiences and interdependence bind us together, and a lightness in the heart from accepting our shortcomings. Fellowship is calling BS on each other and also sharing forgiveness.
From the title poem “Fellowship”:
Offer to take a young man’s hand.
If he proudly refuses, ask him if he will take yours to help you
become yourself after forty-five years of wandering.
Fellowship is also a deep form of appreciation and gratitude for those we love and need. My writing often features struggling heroes and rough places as characters that ask emotional, moral, and philosophical questions I can’t seem to put to rest. The characters in Fred’s halfway house in this excerpt from “The Skylight” are one example:
They dream of Fred shrouding them
in acknowledgement and acceptance
and most of all encouragement.
Twenty-, thirty-, fifty-year-old men.
Bachelors and grandfathers. Men
lie awake with feelings inside,
holding his hand in their mind,
saying what finally needs to be said.
And, at least in moments transcending judgement and fear, fellowship is a feeling that can extend to everyone, as in the poem “Circle Up”:
What accounts for loving
a room full of strangers
where the one guy sobs
and the other rants forever?
Someone cops to a murder
while another man shakes,
withdrawing and having
heard not a word.
The gentlest conclusion
says they are not strangers
whom we invite into ourselves.
I hope feelings of fellowship pervade this book for readers and help it be of service. If loneliness can kill, then fellowship can save lives and souls. That has been my experience. I have sought to capture my own hopes and fears and those of characters trying to live fuller lives in service to each other and their conception of a higher calling. Many of the poems offer encouragement to anyone who may be in need of it.
From the poem “Day of”:
Arrangements bring life into arrangement.
Maybe he shares inspirational quotes online
and is resented out of jealousy that he has learned
how to be brought still in prayers of gratitude
by a plate of powdered eggs from the commissary.
“Do not be embarrassed by attempting to be better,”
a guy whispers, entering a bear hug. Men unstack
chairs, give up their seats, and unstack more chairs,
until the room is filled thigh to thigh.
The poem “Among the Nurseries”, excerpted below, took years to finish (if it even is finished today). I needed time to feel comfortable saying what I truly meant after an evening when I had a profound encounter while out riding my motorcycle north of Kalamazoo:
Witnessing their determination, their laughter
is almost too much to bear. My God,
there is no other way to say it:
I pray for these boys.
I pray from my very bones.
I pray they have good men in their lives
to initiate and guide them,
to challenge and encourage their best instincts.
Like Trample & Sew and News of Need before it, Fellowship has been over a decade in the making. Some poems were written in the last several years while others were begun in 2015 and needed a decade of rest and constant work to become something worth sharing. Some of my writing takes a very long time to complete because writing is a process of discovering what my unconscious is trying to grapple with and reveal.
From the book section titled “Faith,” this excerpt of the poem “For Want of a Better Word” gets at some of the wonder I am trying to talk about:
Were you blessed
(we’ll say blessed)
with a summer evening,
one winter morning,
a day
in springtime
when you did see
after all?
Finally, nothing can express what Fellowship is better than the poems themselves. I hope that you will take a moment to order a book and consider adding News of Need and Trample & Sew as well. In the coming weeks, I will be announcing public performances and artist talks throughout Michigan. If you would like me to join your book group or other fellowship organization to perform poems and talk about my craft, please reach out with the contact form below. No group is too small or too large. I am profoundly grateful for every reader and listener. And I am grateful that you support independent authors and artists such as me.
Sincerely,
Steve
P.S. My deepest thanks go to Dunes Review for including “The Betsie at Lake Michigan” in their winter 2026 print edition, Celery City Review for including “Still Home” and “Halo” in their 2026 winter edition, and The Void for including “Circle Up” in their winter 2026 zine.
