https://www.phaentompoet.com/writing daily 0.75 2026-02-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/59e1772e-ad94-4cac-99d5-70aa31b0a7f8/Adams+County+Poet+Laureate+Event+Nikki+A+Rae+2.05.2026-34.jpg Writing - here, in the poem. May I, the same, grow here. -from Silver Prayer published in DEAR Poetry Journal, June 2021 https://www.phaentompoet.com/interviews-media daily 0.75 2024-08-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/3d2d53c4-3ddb-4edd-87bd-8bbf8527133f/aerik-48.jpg Interviews & Media - I’ve perfected my fluid Dynamics. You’ll never know My time. Shutter. Sync. Frame rate. You only see Water Motion blur. The tip Of my iceberg, liquid, Melted. I keep Flowing & shifting. You keep looking at Water Me, just the same. –from _Stasis: Laminar Flow_ published in wildness, Fall 2020 -photo credit: Sydónne Blake https://www.phaentompoet.com/about daily 0.75 2026-02-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/d084a426-58bd-4e9c-a179-82187679c6e2/_dsc7906-enhanced-nr_55061689397_o.jpg About - What keeps me going with poetry: the way poems always seem to nourish, and the way poetry communities ardently support each other. -from July 2021 Shoutout Colorado interview https://www.phaentompoet.com/contact daily 0.75 2026-02-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/47eeae51-f430-4404-b58f-9ba3c2fe415f/aerik-34.jpg Contact - Available for bookings: Poetry performances Poetry workshop facilitation Poetry editing consultations For bookings and inquiries, contact Aerik Francis via email at phaentompoet@gmail.com For official Adams County Poet Laureate bookings and inquiries, please contact Joe Murray with Adams County at JMurray@adamscountyco.gov https://www.phaentompoet.com/events daily 0.75 2026-02-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/0ffede78-ec31-49ae-91ca-666e23e56119/IMG_7846.JPG Events - what are sweat & tears but drops of pin? but salt circles? but clepsydra water clocks? And us but vessels who keep losing our ways, only finding fresh And intimate questions – from _Growing & Positioning Systems (GPS)_ published in Borderlands: Texas Review, Spring 2020 https://www.phaentompoet.com/audio-projects daily 0.75 2026-02-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/f552ff9b-d103-41ad-b6d9-8d0f79135188/PRXPAGANDA+cover.PNG Audio Projects - PRXPAGANDA- out May 2025 PRXPAGANDA is a 15 song/15 poem project of ~political~ poems that pull the threads of state language and policy to their logical conclusions. Genre (??): Some fusion of spoken word / poetry / rap / dance / electronic / darkwave / hip hop Features two visuals for the poem-songs “Mutual Constitution” and “Count the Cameras” viewable on YouTube. W.E.B. DuBois wrote in “Criteria of Negro Art,” from The Crisis (where he served as editor) (1926): “All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” Live performance of poemsong “Left to Fend” from Sacred Voices performance on June 13, 2025 (full footage of 20 minute set here) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/20877af5-cd91-4026-b9fb-2517c45da258/Screen+Shot+2023-11-15+at+10.31.08+AM.png Audio Projects - AERIAL VECTORS (a visual EP) - out November 2023 AERIAL VECTORS is a visual EP or a short film made with the endeavor, simply, of looking up. All footage self-collected over the course of months and the course of travels across the country looking up at the sky. All audio self-produced. Historically, freedom dreams are of flight, of the aerial realm, the air. In these times where skies are polluted, clouds are created and destroyed, where people look up and see white phosphorus or smoke or drones or letters warning of impending strike– it is crucial to continue to look up and bear witness. Watch/Listen/Experience on Vimeo or Youtube. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/f2c83a1b-8c5c-4d1c-9924-75ebd96a5b1b/BE_Cover-Image.png Audio Projects - BODYELECTRONIC (audiobook) - out Feburary 2023 BODYELECTRONIC (audiobook) creates a glitchy soundscape for the words of their first poetry chapbook BODYELECTRONIC (Trouble Department, April 2022) to exist & expand. Poems are given audio backdrops of uncanny computer noises and autotune. The malfunctioning of the lyric “I” is on full display alongside the slipping subjectivity of the speaker who slides into generated text-to-speech voices or flangered and distorted pitches. The hope is for this audiobook to compliment the reading and provide a more interactive and experimental experience for readers/listeners. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/88524307-e23a-4d79-91b2-09c016fa85cd/SYZYGYcover.png Audio Projects - S Y Z Y G Y EP - out February 2022 S Y Z Y G Y EP is a poetry-music project made by phaentom[poet]. The project started as divination poems written from oracle card readings before the passing of my father. These poems spoke to me and asked me to stretch their form. Music arrived, visuals arrived. This EP is the result of an ongoing conversation with the universe/spirit. Features two visuals for the poem-songs “Sacrificial” and “Cosmologic” viewable on YouTube. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/905a1494-39b4-4552-a973-1cd813ae0ea3/SorrowSongsCover.png Audio Projects - Sorrow Songs EP - (June 2018) Sorrow Songs EP is a demo a cappella EP of original music made by phaentom[poet] with subpar equipment: an iphone, an iphone earbud set with attached microphone, the audio looping app Loopy, and vocal sounds. The project is named after the chapter of the same name from Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B DuBois, and the opening track is a selection of passages from the Sorrow Songs chapter in the book. https://www.phaentompoet.com/books daily 0.75 2026-02-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/e8da83b5-0fce-468e-9f39-9dfb48a2acc8/Francis_Cover_Front.jpg Books - BODYPOLITIC - Aerik Francis’s third chapbook, out March 2026 with Abode Press https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/841fd77d-d70e-46b3-bb2f-36171876ef1c/image+with+.025+bleed.png Books - MISEDUCATION - Aerik Francis’s second chapbook, out May 2023 with New Delta Review https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/0673b96a-b403-4cdd-8543-c04bcd84b659/Screen+Shot+2022-04-01+at+10.00.35+AM.jpg Books - BODYELECTRONIC - Aerik Francis’s debut chapbook, out April 20, 2022 with Trouble Department (out of print) Finalist for 2021 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize Texas Review Press "BODYELECTRONIC is an innovative dance with feelings and systems. Francis has written a smart and tender voice within a branded, electronic world: “am iAfraid?” This collection is visually interesting and thematically challenging, with formal and linguistic play that explores the sensory and sensual confusion of everyday life. These poems live in the actions which we double across our blurring virtual and physical realms: emptying the trash, opening a window, holding a dead mouse. Francis is a poet with keen observation and a big heart. “iRemember us like a queer holiday,” they write. BODYELECTRONIC is a book of the constantly shifting, complex portals between the realms in which we live and long to connect." —Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of Advantages of Being Evergreen "Through BODYELECTRONIC, the body becomes digitized, the digital becomes embodied, the accumulation of our many selves laid bare on the screen– and on the page… Playfully poignant, Francis’s poems read like code, like digital spellwork, once again revealing the messy overlaps between the corporeal and the artificial life giving gigabytes that drive connection forward … BODYELECTRONIC is one of those books the reader must return to time and time again. It is self reflective, emotive, complex. New meaning is articulated upon each read. Each poem title is a file, part of a rich archive of being that we are blessed to bear witness to their unearthing." —Review in The Winnow Magazine by Ashia Ajani "Francis’s BODYELECTRONIC so beautifully troubles and complicates the body’s relationship with other bodies and other devices. The lyric speaker and the lyric image are not merely forms of resistance to larger repetitive systems. These poems refute such binaries and refuse an equation with poems on one side and systems on another. Poems and systems are fused. They, like our bodies, are enmeshed together, inseparable both in oppression and in holiness. That’s precisely what makes these poems so exciting and thought-provoking. Aerik Francis challenges us in witty and devastating ways to consider how we, like poetry and our bodies, are already joined with the digital and electronic, much as Franny Choi does in Soft Science. As in the title, language shows the way there is no gap between the two– and also, simultaneously, finds all the space inside of the words to complicate that language." —Review in Prairie Schooner by Kelly Weber "A manically witty mapping of the intersections between digital life and the messiness of bodily existence, BODYELECTRONIC presents the kind of poetry reading experience that leaves the brain overclocked in the best possible way. Each of the chapbook’s 18 pieces will be worth coming back to again and again to feel out their many bends and subroutines. We feel like this will probably be timely subject matter for our cultural moment, but in these times a lot can happen in six months, so who knows? At least in the case of this chapbook, the uncertainty is part of the fun." —Trouble Department description BODYELECTRONIC is Francis’s debut poetry chapbook, forthcoming in late April of 2022 by small Colorado press, Trouble Department. In this compact collection of poems, lived experiences become embodied with technology, and the body itself becomes digitized. Every time there is an imagined physical realm, a politicized digitality coalesces among the possibilities, and vis-versa in their mutual composition. These poems are interested in the sensual intimacies of technologic relationships and their political and poetic consequences. Expanded BODYELECTRONIC projects: Electric Nobody: AI generated poem-remixes of BODYELECTRONIC (shutting down July 8, 2025) BODYELECTRONIC experimental audiobook (THIS IS CURRENTLY THE ONLY WAY TO EXPERIENCE BODYELECTRONIC) Reviews: “Book Review BodyElectronic by Aerik Francis" by Fall Down 7 Get Up 8 podcast (9/6/22) REVIEW: BODY ELECTRONIC BY AERIK FRANCIS in The Winnow Magazine by Ashia Ajani (5/27/22) REVIEW: BODYELECTRONIC BY Aerik Francis in Prairie Schooner Winter 2022 by Kelly Weber https://www.phaentompoet.com/home daily 1.0 2022-09-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f5bf660419ec3700bb0d25/e29b7464-4e3a-4fa9-b17b-c58223d6f941/aerik-32.jpg Home photo by Sydónne Blake