Whether about the moon or hotel sex, politics or poppy seeds, Alan Michael Parker’s poems are always tender and eccentric and nuanced. In his eighth collection, with metaphysical fortitude the poet continues to deliberate—in all sorts of poems, some unpunctuated, some in prose, and some the first-person lyrics well loved by his longtime readers—upon what our daily lives mean. And how do we sing and praise and grieve all at once?

Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, Alan Michael Parker is a poet, novelist, and professor.
Alan Michael Parker has written three novels and eight collections of poems, including Long Division and The Ladder (Tupelo Press, 2012 and 2016). He served as Editor of The Imaginary Poets, and co-editor of two other volumes of scholarship. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among other magazines, and twice in The Best American Poetry annual; his prose has appeared in journals including The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. Alan Michael Parker has received numerous awards and fellowships, including three Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, the 2013 and the 2014 Randall Jarrell Award, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2012 North Carolina Book Award for Long Division; his 2011 novel, Whale Man, was shortlisted for the 2011 ForeWord Reviews’s “Book of the Year Award” in the category of Literary Fiction. His essay, “Beach House as Nostalgia Museum,” was named a Notable Essay by the editors of the 2013 Best American Essays. He has recently been called “a general beacon of brilliance” by Time Out, New York. Alan Michael Parker lives in Davidson, NC with his wife, the artist Felicia van Bork.