Since the poems span nearly three decades, what was the greatest challenge in making the collection feel like one coherent book rather than a personal archive?

To be honest, the ambition was to make Blaming Eve feel like one coherent book, but whether I fully accomplished that probably depends on whom you ask. Its soul, for better or worse, remains that of a personal archive.

The poems span nearly three decades, so the greatest challenge was not simply arranging them. It was deciding how much of their original character to preserve. They were written by different versions of me, at different stages of emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and artistic development. I could have revised them until they all sounded as though they had been written by the same person at the same moment, but that would have erased part of what made the collection meaningful to me.

Organizing the poems into sections was what finally gave me confidence in the structure. The sections allowed the poems to be grouped according to the questions they were wrestling with—women and relationships, identity, faith, social criticism, passion, accountability, and renewal—rather than according to when they were written. Once I could see those conversations taking place across the years, the book began to feel less like a miscellaneous gathering and more like a record of one mind returning to the same fundamental concerns from different angles.

I received a great deal of thoughtful feedback. Some readers suggested dividing the collection into several smaller books. Others proposed adding companion pieces or commentary to give each poem more personal and historical context. I have seriously considered both ideas and have not abandoned them.

At the time, however, the priority was getting the work into print. Tomorrow is not promised, and I wanted something I could hold in my hands—something my family and friends could find and read should they ever become curious about that part of my life.
There may eventually be a second edition that incorporates some of the feedback I have received. I would not add more poems. The collection is already complete as a record of that period. What I might add is commentary or companion writing that allows the reader to see more clearly what surrounded certain poems: who I was, what I was confronting, and what I understand differently now.

So perhaps the coherence of Blaming Eve does not come from uniformity. It comes from recurrence. Across thirty years, the language, confidence, and perspective change, but the underlying questions remain remarkably consistent.