John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Anticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008) and Lives of Water (2003), both titles from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The Florida Review, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Barrow Street, The Laurel Review, Tar River Poetry, 5 AM, and Waccamaw, the anthologies Chance of a Ghost (Helicon Nine Editions), Blooming through the Ashes (Rutgers UP), September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (Etruscan), and Poetry Calendar (Alhambra Publishing), Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State University of New York Press) and elsewhere. With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays and interviews on the work of Jean Valentine. He served as Poetry Editor for Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art for eleven years, and he now curates Guestbook: A Poetry Congeries, a monthly feature of Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. For nine years, he served as Personal Assistant to Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Toni Morrison. He has taught and lectured on creative writing at West Virginia University, Manhattanville College, the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, the Chautauqua Institution, the Writers at the Beach Conference, and elsewhere, and he is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University.

Here is one of his Poems,

Tree House

Take a walk down your block at three

in the morning. Listen to things

obscured by white noise in daytime:

gargle of a gutter at the end

of Limestone Lane; mild groans

from your neighbor’s tree house;

two maples daring just a little

closer to heaven. Vast orchards

of planets spin away into kilter.

Climb the rope ladder hanging there.

Sit in that far corner where high

moons filter through leaves

& over grass clippings, weekend roses

rot on the compost pile. Flickering

bats can barely be glimpsed dipping

darkness. It will be hard to leave

if you do it right. It will be awful

to stand down again on earth.

from Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008