David Keplinger is a translator of event and emotion with poems that are lyrical, forceful, deeply feeling, and sometimes mysterious. Not everything in our lives is solvable, or knowable -- so much issues from a mere point, like moonlight in a prison cell, or a minnow being lifted from the bait pail to the hook, or a group of Polish soldiers who 'sleep quietly on one another's shoulders.'

The Rose Inside: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Keplinger, David

Poetry

Truman State Univ Pr

WINNER OF THE 2019 UNT RILKE PRIZE How does it feel to experience another city? To stand beneath tall buildings, among the countless faces of a crowd? To attempt to be heard above the din? The poems of Another City travel inward and outward at once: into moments of self-reproach and grace, and to those of disassociation and belonging. From experiences defined by an urban landscape―a thwarted customer at the door of a shuttered bookstore in Crete, a chance encounter with a might-have-been lover in Copenhagen―to the streets themselves, where “an alley was a comma in the agony’s grammar,” in David Keplinger’s hands startling images collide and mingle like bodies on a busy thoroughfare. Yet Another City deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. In these poems, our entry into the world is when “the wound, called loneliness, / opens,” and our voyage out of it is through a foreign but not entirely unfamiliar constellations of cities: Cherbourg, Manila, Port-au-Prince. A moving, haunting atlas to worlds both interior and exterior.

Another City: Poems

Genre Fiction

MILKWEED EDITIONS *

Selected from five books highlighting more than twenty years of work, The Long Answer marks the best of David Keplinger’s engagement with the lyric form from his first collection, chosen by Mary Oliver for the T.S. Eliot Prize, to his most recent, winner of the Rilke Prize in 2019. The collection also features over thirty pages of new material. Influenced by the French prose poet Max Jacob as well as by earlier voices—from Rilke, the French symbolists, William Blake, Dante, the medieval contemplatives, and the Anglo-Saxon riddles, Keplinger’s work may, on the one hand, serve as one poet’s long answer to a question of originality: what of the work belongs to tradition and what, if any part, stands alone? Metaphysically, these poems scour at the foundation of awareness, to ask a more primeval question out of childhood and myth: How am I singularly “one,” and also the result of those who came before me? Can art or contemplation break through the illusion of separateness? Keplinger’s project from the beginning has been concerned with remembering ourselves as part of, not apart from, the natural order. His career-to-date study of a problem, as he writes in his title poem, “so old, no one remembers/ what was asked for/in the first place,/and which leaves us,/...with only each other,” The Long Answer is poetry less concerned with explanations or discoveries than it is that we remember what we are. “Imagine The Inferno reconfigured as a cross between one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes and a Rube Goldberg drawing: an infernal machine designed to produce the uncomfortable pleasures of wit’s disjunctions, gallows humor, wry nostalgias…What’s consistent is the sustained invention of a tinkerer who takes his materials (so many of them fragile, easily discarded or mislaid) to heart even as he finds his humor, his consolation in the spirited play of their arrangements.” The Antioch Review “…The book’s meditations on mortality and wounded dissatisfaction are equally haunted by metaphysical longing and the vast otherworld in the near at hand. To arrive in a body, through the body of another, is to feel its suffering as the echo, however distant, of our own. In poems of such keen attentions and imaginative wit, the intimation of always another city registers both an awareness of our inevitable diminishment and the possibility of some vaster sphere, some landscape of domes and illuminations, to mitigate our loneliness and loss.” Judges’ citation, 2019 UNT Rilke Prize “His prose is so well-crafted and compact that you’d think they wrote themselves into the world—that they were born complete and right on their due date, with no complications …Keplinger’s collection is stunning and visceral.” -The Rumpus Keplinger's poems, by juxtaposing such disintegration or failure to an integrated aesthetic that does not fail…ultimately [succeed] at precisely those moments where they take the most risk….A tender, graceful, and profound meditation on the ways in which we experience our bodies in the world; shuttling expertly between the narrative and the lyric, the ordinary and the wild, the book asks us to envision the body as that lived intersection between, as Keplinger would have it, the natural and the natural.” -Triquarterly “The question is less whether Keplinger benefits from the prose poem than whether prose poetry benefits from Keplinger—a question [his poetry] answers with a resounding yes.” -The American Book Review

The Long Answer

Stephen F. Austin University Press

Ice: Poems

About the Author David Keplinger is the author of seven books of poetry, recently Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize, and The Long Answer: Selected and New Poems (Texas A&M, 2020). He was the 2020 recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a past recipient of the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Colorado Book Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His volumes of translations include the 2017 collection, The Art of Topiary by Jan Wagner, and FORTY-ONE OBJECTS by Carsten René Nielsen (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 National Translation Award. He lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at American University. Product Description Poetry. THE WORLD TO COME by David Keplinger, the author of seven books of poetry, is the winner of the third annual Minds on Fire Open Book Prize awarded by Conduit Books & Ephemera. A dazzling collection of prose poems THE WORLD TO COME imagines the future while honoring the prose poem's rich tradition.

The World to Come

Conduit Books & Ephemera

Winner of the 2007 Colorado Book Award for Poetry.

The Prayers of Others (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

New Issues Poetry and Prose

Poetry. THE MOST NATURAL THING is like a series of x-rays—symmetrical square boxes made of language, in which language is describing the anatomy of one body, and this body becomes a container of information about science, myth, memory, history, and dream. Think about a community of trees all sharing one clump of tangled roots underground, a kind of heart—though above ground they seem to be separate entities. The book looks at what is separate on the surface and tries throughout to find that tangled heart.

The Most Natural Thing (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Keplinger, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Keplinger, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Keplinger, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Rose Inside: Poems

The Rose Inside: Poems

Another City: Poems

The Long Answer

Ice: Poems

The World to Come

The Prayers of Others (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

The Most Natural Thing (New Issues Poetry & Prose)