Stephen Massimilla is a poet, critic, professor, and painter. The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat was selected in the Stephen F. Austin State University Press Poetry Series Prize Competition. Massimilla has received the Bordighera Poetry Prize for his book Forty Floors from Yesterday; the Grolier Prize for Later on Aiaia; a Van Rensselaer Award, selected by Kenneth Koch; an Academy of American Poets Prize; and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications. Massimilla holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia University and the New School.

Other poems by Stephen Massimilla in Verse Daily:
September 20, 2010:   "Etymology" "Out of yellow brain, out..."
November 3, 2007:   "Love Like Rocks" " Respect the rocks, the way they hold..."
September 28, 2005:   "Thinks Herself Precious at a Price" " Rounding the Cape Horn, you looked..."
March 16, 2003:  "Two in Tropic Twilight" "If I once quickened among the whips..."

Books by Stephen Massimilla:

Other poems on the web by Stephen Massimilla:
Two poems
"Night Owl"
Three poems
"Specter of August"
Two poems
Three poems
Nine poems
"Blood Orange"
"Missed Signs"

Stephen Massimilla's Website.

About The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat:

"Stephen Massimilla’s new collection is utterly lovely and entirely strange. Fixed in the exactitude of the Moment, these are poems that are ‘on their way to the next world.’ From the ‘basil-blue mornings’ of the here and now to the apocalyptic dusks of swans and neon talismans, the reader is ever included in a quick-step with the poet. Lucid and delicious, the work is riddled with sublime forms of play—word play, mind play, heart play. Many mythic characters enter these worlds: from Odysseus, Raskolnikov and Vallejo, to little LuLu and Madame La La, even one evanescent unicorn. Sublime, dead serious, wickedly funny, above all, this is a book that is a delight to partake of."
—Lucie Brock-Broido