In the aftermath of the 2024 election, I found myself unable to sleep and unable to look away from the horror that was unfolding in this country I love. By late March, I had sunk into a depression that felt both personal and collective. As a way forward, I began drawing from my own experience with narcissistic abuse to explore the national drama we found ourselves in. What emerged was Birds of the Capitol, a book of (mainly) prose poetry that confronts the fracturing of identity, belonging, and belief in America. The title of the collection is taken from the epigraph by Thomas Hobbes, in his dedicatory epistle to Leviathan: “I confine myself to crying out, as the birds of the Capitol did in the old days, at the noise of the assailants.” The book is, in many ways, a breakup letter to America. But it’s also a reckoning, an attempt to write my way through paralysis toward clarity.
After taking it through three developmental rounds of edits with Jeffrey Levine, founder and editor of Tupelo Press (one of the premier independent presses for poetry over the last twenty years), I’m currently shopping it around. The manuscript elicited this response from Levine:
“Sund has big gifts. He knows what he’s about. He wields a semi-surreal saber through his poems, and he has an engaging, often disarming, intimate voice, reaching into (god knows where) for surprising language and transportive imagery.”
This poem was a finalist for the 2025 Frontier Poetry Prize:
MADE IN AMERICA
Not long after the protestors had gone—their placards in the recycling bins—and after the spike in Taiwan-made American flags and Vietnam-made American flag t-shirts and Mexican-made American car flags and car flagpoles and Bangladesh-made Made in America pendants, you find yourself on the coast lacquering on the 30 SPF, patting your hair down over that bald spot, and pulling your shorts up to your belly button, over that embarrassing albino bulge. Kite-flying looks like fun. You turn to the lover or spouse you remember once loving and say, “I think it’s the sound I like best.” You mean that one American flag kite hovering there in its holding pattern of rippling rage. How quickly it turns. How quickly, almost sadly, it kamikazes for the sand. To throw its erratic shadows everywhere. As if tethered to nothing.
Some other sample poems:
1
Circa the morning after, you’re jamming a second body into your carry-on for the next flight out: an extra pair of legs for running to boarding gates and two more knees for how terrible a comrade you are, to drop to the floor, to beg for Lady Liberty’s mercy.A torso for holding your place in line. An auxiliary bladder for long bus rides through the countryside. Another doped-up brain. A second bloody change of heart. Your best look of distress, in SOS, for showcasing federal Gestapo agents and officers in riot gear. A second phallus is two, perhaps, too many. But yes to another fat foot for sticking in your mouth. An extra right hand for gesturing, a left to wave the flies aside. Fresh eyes for allergies, a tongue for all the wine, and spare vocal cords (the hope is yet) for harmony.
2
All day it rained and into the next day, and through the clouds, the sun appeared as lovely as a picture on a calendar with Bible verses. Somehow, the world was brighter than before, brashly so, flashing off the tarmac, lake-like, layover. When asked if he believed in God, Matisse said, “Yes, when I’m working.” There had been a time like that, and it was now. The lines flew out of you in perfect V formations, honking upriver. You didn’t know how else to stave off America but to work. Fracking the white tundra of this virtual page for the daily promise of black gold, in Georgia, 12-point font, double-spaced. And when the wind came up through the Muzak curated from “Born in the USA”—like the score to a beetle on its back with its legs flicking in its last gasping breath—you stood there, queued in the middle of the line, Terminal 2: a cherry tree throwing down its blossoms in full stop.
3
Dreaming of the calm before the Santa Anas fire-razed this town. All the bonny posts in the Way Before to fill your feed in perpetuity—in love with how in love she seemed with you. Lady Liberty, Milky Mama, pinging you in her daily dopamine drip. You will learn about trauma-bonding. At present, you’re franchising the American Dream. In the beginning, the oldest of origin stories, you fell in love with a shadowy splinter of your own broken self-image. Ignoring, of course, the tiny tintinnabulations. But look how gorgeous she is, a stone-cold ten, a real catch. You couldn’t disagree with this, nor with how she called you Comrade, an asset, a red proxy, a mole—friendly enough terms. (Except for that mole, maybe.) Occasionally, people went missing. But it was a pleasant enough place. With all the likes and hearts carved with sticks in the soppy asphalt and the rote comments in drifting ash.
4
Some days drone on like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in this overlong scribble of urban sprawl. With drenched brownstones in it and men waiting out the storm under tarpaulins whipping in the negative space of cracked asphalt and weeds behind the Chevron and McDonalds. Some days to make it through this Dark Night with the custodial service attendant running his vacuum like some Virgil near your airport seat is to hear the starlings first thing in the morning chattering through Für Elise. Some days, Lady Liberty is fisting you so far up the ass, the tip of her torch—the flame, gilded in gold leaf—is puppeteering your tongue against the inside of your plastic gums. America the Beautiful, she says. Love it or leave it. Her lips are quivering, but it’s your voice you’re hearing. I do love it. I love it, I do. You’re stage 4 addicted, true, to what a stretch of her consonants can do and the burning, sometimes horrifying, doping power of her vowels.
5
What wouldn’t you give her if she asks? She’s your West Virginia, your Mountain Mama. You’d sit her on your lap and shove forkfuls of your gray matter into her face—the strategies, corrupted files, bad thoughts. The doubt. More, she’d say with her mouth full. Then grip her fork and stab it at your chest—More!
The moon, if you could—you’d give her that. You’d give her the four cardinal directions, hoping that would do it, knowing it wouldn’t. Nothing doing. You’d give her language. You’d give her a phone. You’d give her thumbs. She’d text: What else can you give me? You’d send her a sun. She’d believe it was her. She’d burn hot and long. She’d scorch everything you loved. Icebergs, bees, cirrocumulus, Costco, take one leave one Little Free Libraries, finally the universe, and a priori herself, the Source of All Life. Hell, Sartre said, is other people. I’m sorry, but who can agree anymore? Sunflowers lift their faces to the sky, yes, but when no light source can be found, they turn to each other, as I turn to you. Wake. That’s all I mean. It’s time to open your eyes.