David Linebarger teaches Interdisciplinary Humanities and Comparative Religions at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. His poems have appeared in over 20 journals, including The Bitter Oleander, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Slipstream, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. Bed of Light is his second collection of poems.

Books by David Linebarger:

About Bed of Light:

"After a hand injury meant he could no longer play classical guitar, David Linebarger needed 'something to replace the loss.' As you read these small lyric gems full of music, youu will understand his discovery in powerful couplets and tercets which startle and delight. 'Whose tongue will be next to whirl the stars?' Linebarger asks. His own intense answers include a fine villanelle about getting his car tuned up, and in 'Searching,' my favorite, his depiction of the bond between mother and son."
—Alice Derry

"Linebarger's poems are a study in contrasts: lost rural roads and city freeways; day to day relationships and philosophical divinations. A richness stemming, perhaps, from his knowledge of the humanities, informs his work. Before we reach the end of the collection, we realize that this poet's thread of astonishing yet inevitable connections will hold us in a Bed of Light long after we have read his last lines."
—Joan Isom

"David Linebarger's Bed of Light juxtaposes images of the mundane and the transcendent, of violence and love in tight poems that reveal lines like 'Fingers buried in the snow,/miniature red mittens.' Such poetry expects something of its readers: a mind open to imaginative leaps, to seeing connections revealed by eye and ear. It also expects a tolerance for both insiders and outsiders. In the poem 'Winos,' Linebarger asks 'Whose tongue will be next to whirl the stars?,' a question that reveals his consciousness of literary and visual precursors like 'Li Po,' 'Picasso and Paul Klee,' luminaries who find themselves in the company of winos on streets that 'wobble' with their inebriation. At the same time, the direct language of 'do not tell/what I have told you/it explains the distance/ between fathers and sons,' from the poem 'Fathers and Sons' reveals a control over what might be called plain style that evokes the tautness of Creeley. Readers of Bed of Light will find poems that inspire, trouble, and move them, couched in precise, usually imagistic language that speaks immediately yet rewards repeated readings."
—Mary Moore