John Repp is a widely published poet, fiction writer, and essayist, and the author of Thirst Like This (University of Missouri Press, 1990), which won the Devins Award in Poetry, and The Fertile Crescent, winner of the 2003 Lyre Prize from Cherry Grove Collections, as well as four limited-edition chapbooks. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and Residency Fellowships from Yaddo, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, he teaches writing and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, works in the Arts-in-Education Program of the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, and lives in Erie with his wife, Katherine Knupp, and their son, Dylan.

Other poems by John Repp in Verse Daily:
June 27, 2004:  "Mulberry" "Despite millennia jammed with the impossible..."

About Gratitude:

"Desire is relentless in the company of ego and intellect, sorrows and loves in John Repp’s Gratitude. Ready or not, desire releases our difficult and luscious perceptions, so that, with wild eyes, we are able to see many worlds colliding simultaneously. Stark visual effects, often revealed with great tenderness, invite us to look more closely at our labors, losses, and renewals that arrive hard-won. Come near, these poems sing, and see the skin of the elephant of Margate: ‘a mossy glade/or close enough’ and grow the basil, drink the wine, bless the child and the lover, work and read the wild life long."
—Judith Vollmer

"I’ve just finished John Repp’s splendid new volume with, yes, gratitude. These are poems that find a passionate inward music, sometimes quiet, as in the beautiful ‘Claiming Territory,’ sometimes incantatory, as in ‘I Want to Buy This House.’ Everywhere in these pages the reader will discover a firm mastery of the art of poetry, with links to the past, with forays into the present and future of the genre. The language throughout is tough, concrete, and personal: a long-meditated diction, expertly culled, gathered into verse, lifted into song."
—Jay Parini