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Today's poem is "You're Back"
from Odd Evening

Waywiser Press

Eric McHenry is the poet laureate of Kansas. His previous collections include Potscrubber Lullabies, which received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Mommy Daddy Evan Sage, a book of children's poems illustrated by Nicholas Garland. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, Cincinnati Review, Field, Orion, The Guardian and Poetry Northwest, from whom he received the 2010 Theodore Roethke Prize. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and two children and teaches creative writing at Washburn University.

Books by Eric McHenry:

Other poems on the web by Eric McHenry:
Two poems
Nine poems
Two poems
"The Lovelier As They Fall (2)"
"Larkin at Sixty"

Eric McHenry According to Wikipedia.

Eric McHenry on Twitter.

About Odd Evening:

"Eric McHenry's poems are hilarious, dark, tender, and formal. But he's a formalist interested in the language of now and in the world we currently inhabit. And that turns his rhymes and meters into rock n roll. I love this book."
—Sherman Alexie

"To say that Eric McHenry is one of the best — and most delightful, most alive — poets of my generation isn't enough praise. His native sense of music in English, his tonal variation, and his generosity of spirit are extraordinary. McHenry can be playful and at the same time ecstatic and practical (‘I started saying whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. / I didn't drop what I was holding, though'). His play is movingly traditional, yes, but also utterly modern. For this is a poet who sets today's uncertainties and dualities to gorgeous music."
—Ilya Kaminsky

"At their brilliant outer limits, poetic form and ethical vision are indistinguishable, as Eric McHenry's masterful poems remind us. The unforgiving injunctions of rhyme and end-stopped line refuse to euphemize, and so are particularly good at conveying the unforgiving declensions of age and envy, physical abjection, personal and institutional indifference. And, of course, poetic form this sharply rendered is also an unparalleled instrument for satire: the only bow to wickedness in these pages is wicked fun. Eric McHenry sounds like no other poet working in America today. I thank our lucky stars for his white-hot independence."
—Linda Gregerson



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