Poetry
Heart's Core is a journey through various settings, moods, memories and imaginings in search of a sense of belonging or "home."
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In these rich poems, the poet journeys through places, memories and ancestral musings on a quest for significance and self. These are poems of loss and retrieval, of finding your way.--Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, author of Imaginary Parents and Professor Emerita at Florida State University
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Heart's Core
Finishing Line Press, 2023
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​Winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award, The Deaf Island depicts the stages of loss of a father from Alzheimer's Disease.
Vast and intimate, direct and complex, [this volume] will fill you with awe at the price we pay to be human. --Dennis Nurkse, author of Love in the Last Days and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship
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Gardner, J. L. La Florida.
Omaha, Nebraska: The Backwaters Press. 2006.
The Deaf Island
Poetry Society of America, 2019
Winner of the Weldon Kees Chapbook Award, La Florida juxtaposes passages from DeSoto's 1539 Florida expedition with contemporary experience, suggesting a connection between present and past.
A lyric excavation of place, a history poignantly reconstructed and precisely beheld by one who has set out to write a world into being, this is an artful, polyphonic work of impressive historical imagination.--Carolyn Forche, American Book Award winner for In the Lateness of the World
La Florida
Backwaters Press, 2006