Utah State Poetry Society (2026)

15/05/2026

My new book of poetry, The Borrowed Lives of Ghosts, has been published. The book consists of 130 pages of poetry. You can see the cover of the front of the book below.

The Borrowed Lives of Ghosts is a three-part collection of poetry that explores the lived experience of a man who has endured and learned to navigate the persistent presence of back pain and a near-death encounter. Read about the physical and emotional terrain of pain and suffering and the haunting erosion of identity, the longing for a former self, and the quiet endurance of ongoing pain. Follow the narrator as he traces the deeper anchors that keep a soul tethered and discover with him the acceptance and ever-present mystery of being, and his sense of reality and meaning. This is not just a record of suffering. It is a chronicle of endurance, rediscovery, and the ways a life remakes itself, even when haunted by the broken ghosts of the past.

When the publisher prints copies of the book, it will be available to purchase on Amazon and the publisher's website, Kelsay Books.

If you are interested in reading some quotes from the cover of the book by fellow poets about the book, then here they are:

Reading The Borrowed Lives of Ghosts by Michael Parker was a pivotal event for me. In it, he opens myriad views into his mind and his life that are deep, clear, and resonant—each poem intriguing and powerful. This book is like sitting at the feet of a master.
— Joyce Webb Kohler. Poet of the poetry book, Like Water, Like Bread

Michael Parker’s The Borrowed Lives of Ghosts begins in grief and ends in hope, and in between is a rich exploration of a life that brings into its embrace grackles and Greek mythology, Virgil and Dante, family traditions, pain, endurance, and an appreciation for “Time’s massive house.” Parker is a master of noticing and a wizard of introspection. One poem confesses, “I believe in the incantation of words,” and indeed, each gorgeous poem powerfully delivers just that.
—Sunni Brown Wilkinson, author, Rodeo

Who are we, these poems inquire. Though Parker’s answers vary — “borrowed particles on temporary loan,” and “faces that pass through glass,” — he makes clear that there is always compensatory beauty in our transience. We may be strangers in a strange land, but something holds us together beyond this paltry now. These are unflinching meditations on how we go on.
—Lance Larsen, author, Making a Kingdom of It

Like the Psalms before them, these poems cry out, “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.” They stare wide-eyed at pain, but the effect is not despair. Praise predominates on each page of this collection, praise and the solace of speech, of letting pain be spoken. In locating the heavenly in the quotidian, these poems teach us to say yes to life. They teach us how to love the world.
—Michael Lavers, author, The Inextinguishable

This book meditates on being and presence, on mortality and annihilation: in one poem, the speaker notes “times / someone ... saw you / and you almost believed / you were real.” And in “On Hannibal and the Downfall of One’s Hubris”: “Still, I go on breathing / as if I am not made of ancient ruins.” The poems celebrate how words announce the vivid world, and also register “when language is peeled back / to raw roars.” In such multiplicities, these fine poems guide us in ceremonies of living. —Lisa Bickmore, Poet Laureate of Utah, 2024–2025

07/05/2026

Has anyone published their poetry collection with Pegasus Publishers? If so, what was your experience? Thank you!

14/09/2025

POETRY
By Richard Siken

When I was in the Secret Service I would talk to my wrist. It was
part of my job and I was very good at it. I said Breaker breaker. I said
The Jackal is on the move. During the day, I kept everyone safe. At
night, I dreamed of standing very quietly next to doors. To work
at the White House one must be sophisticated and intense. One
must be dedicated to turning the k***s and lifting the pens that
make the laws. One must anticipate, relentlessly, the unanticipated.
Sometimes, to avoid suspicion, I would pretend to be a robot and
I would sing—like this: Beep boop. An impeccable camouflage.
Once, in a submarine, at the end of a long shift, in the terrible dark
beneath a terrible storm, in the blub and swell of it, sunk and fast-
stuck in a trench and far from home, cold-soaked and lost in the
plush of a velvet suit—an octopus costume, elaborately constructed,
with droopy arms spangled with buttons for suckers—I escaped
discovery several times. If I was undercover now I wouldn’t say.
Until tomorrow. I tell you this because I love you. I might be doing
it all wrong.
~
From I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) by Richard Siken.

Richard Siken (born February 15, 1967) is an American poet, painter, and filmmaker. He is the author of the collection Crush (Yale University Press, 2005), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 2004. His second book of poems, War of the Foxes, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015.

Siken was born in New York City. He studied at and received a B.A. in psychology and later a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of Arizona.

In 2001, Siken co-founded Spork Press, where he continues to work as an editor.

Siken received a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his book Crush was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for "Gay Men's Poetry" in 2005, and the Thom Gunn Award from Publishing Triangle. The 1990 death of his boyfriend influenced his writing of the book.

Siken's book War of the Foxes became a recipient of two residencies with the Lannan Residency Program, and a Lannan Literary Selection.

On March 19, 2019, Siken reported on his Facebook that he had recently suffered a stroke. On December 4, 2020, he published his first post-stroke poem, "Real Estate" on poets.org after announcing it on his Facebook the day prior.

On July 9, 2023, he announced his new book I Do Know Some Things, set to be published April 29, 2025. Siken described the new publication on Twitter as "77 prose poems about what I can remember about my life. It is autobiographical. A backstage pass."

Siken is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Siken currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.

(Excerpts of Siken's bio were taken from Wikipedia. His photograph was taken from Commonplace.)

10/09/2025

CATALOGUE OF HAPPINESS
By Nathalie Handal

To forget where I came from

To be silent in all the languages I speak
To give up the different dialects
mingled in my mind

To give up the desire to leave
a far-away street
before I feel what’s missing

To give up the man
who didn’t realize
when we made love
it would be impossible to hurt me

To give up all my maps
on Via della Conciliazione
where my lover held his foreign name
between his teeth

To give up my breath
to let the world bend
in my lungs like a branch

To give up my eyes
like scarred marble
to see an entire life in a window
releasing the heaviness of the fog

To give up traveling
to let an old sea reach a new sea

To forget all I gave up
to remember where I come from

to make it speak
~
Copyright © 2024 by Nathalie Handal. This poem was first printed in The Irish Times (February 10, 2024).

Nathalie Handal(born 29 July 1969) is a poet, writer and professor, described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” A New Yorker and a quintessential global citizen, she has published 10 prize-winning books, including Life in a Country Album.

Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet and writer, born in Haiti to a Mediterranean Palestinian family from Bethlehem. She has lived in France, Italy, the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Arab world. After earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College, Vermont and an MPhil in English and Drama at the University of London, Handal began writing and translating global literature in the 1990s. She currently resides in New York City, Rome and Paris and teaches at New York University.

Her work has been translated into over fifteen languages. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN Foundation, Pen International Croatia, Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Africa Institute, was honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and featured at the United Nations for Outstanding Contributors in literature, among others. Her work has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Irish Times, World Literature Today, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry New Zealand, Guernica Magazine, and The Nation.

(Excerpts of Handal's bio were taken from Wikipedia. Her photograph was taken from the Poetry Foundation.)

06/09/2025

GOODBYE
By Geoffrey Brock
after Akhmadulina

Some things you don’t come back from.
The body carries on. Of late
it even travels, basks in light.
But knock and there’s no one home.

(How did I love you? "With the taste
of iron on my tongue." Try again.
How did I love you? "Like a man
destroying what he tries to save.")

The head still does light labor.
But often both the hands fall slack,
and all five senses, in a flock,
go south to weather winter.

Copyright © 2025 by Geoffrey Brock. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 29, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

Geoffrey Brock (born October 19, 1964) is an American poet and translator. Since 2006 he has taught creative writing and literary translation at the University of Arkansas, where he is Distinguished Professor of English.

Brock is the son of poets Van K. Brock and Frances Brock. Born in Atlanta, he grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, and as an adult he has lived in Philadelphia, Gainesville (Florida), Washington DC, San Francisco, Tucson, Dallas, London, England, and Florence, Italy. He now lives with his wife, the novelist Padma Viswanathan, in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Florida State University in 1986 and a Masters of Fine Arts degree from the University of Florida in 1998. He also holds an MA and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.

Brock is the author of three books of poetry, the translator of numerous volumes of poetry, prose, and comics, mostly from Italian. His poems and translations have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The New Republic, Paris Review, Yale Review, PN Review, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and Best American Poetry.

Brock has received numerous honors for both his translations and his own poetry. In 2005, his first book of poems, Weighing Light, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize, judged by David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, and Charles Martin. In 2014, his second book of poems, Voices Bright Flags, received the Anthony Hecht Prize, judged by Heather McHugh. He has also been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship in poetry from Stanford University, and a Cullman Fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His poems have been included in The Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthologies.

(Excerpts of Brock's bio were taken from Wikipedia. His photograph was taken from the National Book Award.)

01/09/2025

SUMMER
By Robin Coste Lewis

Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being post-modern now, I pretended as if I did not see them, nor understand what I knew to be circling inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance, His gall—to still expect our devotion after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins so he could know, too, what it feels like when something shows up at your door—twice—telling you what you already know.
~
Copyright © 2015 by Robin Coste Lewis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 31, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

Robin Coste Lewis (born 1964) is an American poet, artist, and scholar. Poet Laureate Emeritus of Los Angeles, Lewis's debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974.

Voyage of the Sable Venus was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award, and the California Book Award. The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Buzz Feed, and Entropy Magazine all named Voyage one of the best poetry collections of the year.

Lewis's writing has appeared in various journals and anthologies, such as Time magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Transition, and Best American Poetry. Lewis was also the poet laureate for the City of Los Angeles from 2017 to 2020. She is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Ford Foundation "Art of Change" Fellowship, and a Cave Canem fellowship amongst others. In 2018, Lewis was named one of Los Angeles County's "Women of the Year".

Lewis received her BA from Hampshire College in creative writing and comparative literature; a Masters of Theological Studies degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University; an MFA in poetry at New York University; and a PhD from the University of Southern California's Creative Writing and Literature Program, where she was a Provost Fellow in poetry and visual studies.

Lewis has taught on the faculty of Wheaton College, Hunter College, and Hampshire College. Currently, she teaches in NYU's low-residency MFA in Paris, and is a Professor of English in the PhD program in Creative Writing at USC. She lives in Los Angeles.

Born in Compton, California, her family is from New Orleans.

From 2017 to 2021, Coste Lewis was the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. The following year, she earned the American Academy in Rome Prize, after which she was the Ford Foundation scholar in residence at the Museum of Modern Art.

(Excerpts of Lewis' bio were taken from Wikipedia. Her photograph was taken from The New Yorker.)

29/08/2025

THREE SONGS AT THE END OF SUMMER
By Jane Kenyon

A second crop of hay lies cut
and turned. Five gleaming crows
search and peck between the rows.
They make a low, companionable squawk,
and like midwives and undertakers
possess a weird authority.

Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Across the lake the campers have learned
to water-ski. They have, or they haven’t.
Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone
suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!”

Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,
fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.
The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod
brighten the margins of the woods.

Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;
water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.

*

The cicada’s dry monotony breaks
over me. The days are bright
and free, bright and free.

Then why did I cry today
for an hour, with my whole
body, the way babies cry?

*

A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket....
In my childhood
I stood under a dripping oak,
while autumnal fog eddied around my feet,
waiting for the school bus
with a dread that took my breath away.

The damp dirt road gave off
this same complex organic scent.

I had the new books—words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.
~
Jane Kenyon, "Three Songs at the End of Summer" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon.

Jane Kenyon was an American poet and translator. Her work is often characterized as simple, spare, and emotionally resonant. Kenyon was the second wife of poet, editor, and critic Donald Hall, who made her the subject of many of his poems.

Kenyon was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Ruele and Pauline, she grew up in the Midwest. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. She won a Hopwood Award at Michigan.

Four collections of Kenyon's poems were published during her lifetime: From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990) and Constance (1993); apart from the former being published through Alice James Books, all of her writing was released through Graywolf Press. She spent some years translating the poems of Anna Akhmatova from Russian into English, and she championed translation as an important art that every poet should try.

As a university student, Kenyon met poet Donald Hall; though he was some nineteen years her senior, she married him in 1972, and they moved to his ancestral home in Wilmot, New Hampshire.

Kenyon struggled with depression for most of her life.

Kenyon died on April 22, 1995, from leukemia.

In 1994, Kenyon was awarded the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate at the time of her death.

(Excerpts of Kenyon's bio were taken from Wikipedia. Her photograph was taken from Foster's Daily Democrat.)

26/08/2025

SHUTTLE
By Noah Warren

Sky answers lake with light and lake,
sky, with a white and blue light

that fountains up through itself, wild and still.
Trembling between origin and origin

thought sheds its language skin
and the old I thins

into blades of seeing. Now the air
grows tunneled, now the sky diminishes,

stones deepen on the shore, six birds
settle in the crowns of the cedars,

herons, their eyes like burned buildings, and evening
sifts from their long feathers. The empty ferry

travels forth and back across the lake.
Its work is its movement, and the groan

of that work settles in the lake, lengthens
to deep resonance. When it arrives

to a chime, the awaited news,
with chagrin, apologizes.

And so like a moment of professional hope
the afternoon’s gold findings recede

into the hills behind us. What I want from you tonight
is hard and strange, a touch containing history, a look to lift

my name away. I want to feel, when your nails score the skin
above my heart, our venal empire

dwindling to dust. I gasp and shiver
toward a dreaming wilderness; above us

great planets slip their arcs
as the small pale stars multiply,

defying the night, doubling it, and defining,
in the stillness their fixed motion makes, to end.
~
Copyright © 2025 by Noah Warren. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 14, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets

Noah Warren is a poet and critic. His books of poetry are The Complete Stories, published by Copper Canyon in 2021, and The Destroyer in the Glass, chosen by Carl Phillips for the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. His writing has been honored with major awards and fellowships from Yale, Stanford, and UC-Berkeley, where he received his PhD in English. A recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Warren is an associate professor and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

His poems appear in The Nation, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, among other venues.

(Excerpts of Warren's bio were taken from the author's website and the Poetry Foundation. His photograph was taken from the Poetry Foundation.)

23/08/2025

THE FATES
By Christian Gullette

Propped on a pillow,
sprained and swollen, I press
an ice-filled Ziploc to my ankle,

wrap the bag in a tea towel.
My Swedish host insists;
ice might burn my skin,

laid up in a guest room
binge-watching a remake
of War and Peace.

A picture of their lost son
—poster-size—overlooks
my sickbed.

I’m here to translate poems
about him,
but I cannot move.

This mini-series finds
scant comfort in fate.
Even gods must obey

what’s drawn from Urd’s well,
one of three Norns
spinning life’s length.

My host’s son died in a tsunami.
His wife survived.
I’m reluctant to ask for help,

but after learning to wrap a bandage,
I worry about lost time,
I start to heal.
~
Copyright © 2025 by Christian Gullette. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 13, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

Christian Gullette’s debut poetry collection Coachella Elegy (July 1, 2024) won the Trio House Press Trio Award. And Coachella Elegy has been included in LitHub, Electric Lit, Alta Journal, and Debutiful lists of must-read poetry collections for 2024.

His poems have appeared in The Washington Post, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series (selected by Diane Seuss).

He is the recipient of a 2022 Bread Loaf scholarship. Christian also works as a professional Swedish-to-English translator. Recent teaching includes the poetry faculty for Kenyon Review Online Writers Workshops and a workshop for the Poetry Society of New York. He also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Cortland Review. Christian lives in San Francisco with his husband, Michael.

Christian received his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley where he was recently a lecturer teaching courses to graduate and undergraduate students in Scandinavian literature, translation theory, and Swedish language instruction. He earned his M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers, his M.Ed. from the George Washington University, and a B.A. in English from Bates College.

Christian’s translations from the Swedish include poetry by Kristofer Folkhammar in ASTRA, Asymptote Journal, Words Without Borders, and the Action Books Blog. His translations of work by poet Jonas Modig have appeared in the Colorado Review.

Christian’s academic research in Swedish literature and film focuses on intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and neoliberalism, spanning 19th-century authors such as August Strindberg to his recent dissertation entitled “Challenging Swedishness: Intersections of Neoliberalism, Race, and Queerness in the Works of Jonas Hassen Khemiri and Ruben Östlund” (2018).

In 2015, Christian was awarded the Aurora Borealis Prize for best graduate student presentation by the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS).

(Excerpts of Gullette's bio were taken from the author's website. His photograph was taken from Lunch Ticket Magazine.)

21/08/2025

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~
From Collected Poems (North Point Press), © 1985 Wendell Berry.

Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, since 2014, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

Berry was the first of four children to be born to John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and to***co farmer in Henry County, Kentucky, and Virginia Erdman Berry. The families of both parents had farmed in Henry County for at least five generations. Berry attended secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute and then earned a B.A. (1956) and M.A. (1957) in English at the University of Kentucky. In 1956, at the University of Kentucky he met another Kentucky writer-to-be, Gurney Norman. He completed his M.A. and married Tanya Amyx in 1957. In 1958, he attended Stanford University's creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

A Guggenheim Fellowship took Berry and his family to Italy and France in 1961. From 1962 to 1964, he taught English at New York University's University Heights campus in the Bronx. In 1964, he began teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky, from which he resigned in 1977.

On July 4, 1965, Berry, his wife, and his two children moved to Lane's Landing, a 12-acre farm that he had purchased, and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a homestead of about 117 acres. They bought their first flock of seven Border Cheviot sheep in 1978. Lane's Landing is in Henry County in north central Kentucky near Port Royal, and his parents' birthplaces, and is on the western bank of the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio River. Berry has farmed, resided, and written at Lane's Landing ever since.

From 1987 to 1993, he returned to the English Department of the University of Kentucky. Berry has written at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, twenty-four volumes of essays, and fifteen novels and short story collections. His writing is grounded in the notion that one's work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place.

(Excerpts of Berry's bio were taken from Wikipedia. His photograph was taken from The Christian Science Monitor.)

Utah State Poetry Society

15/05/2026

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