The Operator's Reference Set is a tetralogy of hybrid poetry manuscripts. Each book borrows a documentary form and turns it toward what documentation cannot recover.
*Manuscripts are unpublished and actively being submitted individually*
Shrapnel: A Dictionary of Damages
Each of the eighty-six entries is formatted as an OED-style definition — bold headword, IPA pronunciation, etymology, numbered definitions, and prose poem body. The book opens with a field manual that establishes the governing conceit: words are ordnance, etymology is point of origin, and the operator assumes all risk. What follows is a vocabulary of damage, moving from Absentia to Zero, pressing the stability of definition against the instability of what was witnessed.
A Field Guide to Disappeared Things
A naturalist field guide that locates not birds or flora but disappeared things: childhood, the father, the body before injury. Field guide headers — date, time, precise location, weather, sensory detail — frame lyric pieces set along the California coast, the Chesapeake, and the Midwest prairies. The disappeared are not wounds but absences; things that left no mark, or one so small only the careful eye finds it.
The Technical Manual of the (Un)repaired
Each poem carries the four-element military technical manual structure: bold title block, Symptom, Cause, Remedy, and See Also lines, regulatory citation, and lyric body. The bureaucratic voice creates constant irony against the human content — war, family violence, PTSD, return. The gap between what the form promises to fix and what cannot be repaired is where the book lives.
The Encyclopedia of What Remains
An encyclopedia of aftermath. Each entry carries the full apparatus — headword, IPA, etymology, numbered definitions, prose poem body, and cross-references to the other three books. The encyclopedia is the tetralogy's final word: the attempt at synthesis, the claim that what was fragmented can be held in one place, and the honest reckoning with what that claim costs.