®

Today's poem is "On Touching My Dog's Cold and Perfect Teeth"
from Stray

Lithic Press

Adam Houle's poems have appeared in journals such as Agni, Shenandoah, Guernica, Barrow Street, Post Road, Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Hayden's Ferry Review, and his fiction has appeared in Cimarron Review. Claudia Emerson selected his work for, Best New Poets 2010. Nominated for both a Pushcart and for Best of the Net, he was also a semi-finalist for the Boston Review/Discovery Prize, and a finalist for the Art & Letters Prize in Poetry. He earned a PhD from Texas Tech, an MA from Northern Michigan University, and a BA from UW-Green Bay. At work on his second collection, the tentatively titled, Urbi et Orbi, Adam lives in rural South Carolina with writer and editor Landon Houle.

Books by Adam Houle:

Other poems on the web by Adam Houle:
"Plain Cotton Panties"
"Cook Takes Stock after the Ice Road Fails"
Two poems
Two poems
"How I Imagine the Seasons on a Walk with My Dog"
Three poems
"The Horseshoe"
"Third Street"
"Somniloquence on the High Plains"
"If There's Nothing You Need"
"The Vine Knife"
"In Lieu of Flowers"

*Adam Houle's Website.

*Adam Houle on Twitter.

Adam Houle on Facebook.

About Stray:

"Subtle and musical, Houle's lines have, for me, deftly 'rearranged the known world's face.' His compassion is many-layered and extends to both the wild and tame, to dogs and wasps and worms, to the most vulnerable people as well as those who only seem not to need it. His images are stunning. Consider these, describing a well-digger drinking from his hands: 'From the side,/ it looks like prayer. From behind,/ like his chest hitches, like he's sobbing.' You, reader, may trust Adam Houle to deepen your desire for what truly matters in our lives, while simultaneously satisfying this thirst for meaning."
—Connie Wanek

"It seems you could hold these poems in your hands and feel the heft of night air and snow and chisels and living, in all its hardship and splendor. The wonderfully varied compositions circle and expand: a sequence of couplets, lightly cadenced narratives, and then suddenly verses of gorgeous, heavy wrought stresses. (The pecan boughs in 'We in the Republic,' for instance, 'stretched and heavy with the hard fruit, stitch shade across the tended plot.') Houle has a gift for slowing down already singular moments, offering us the last hanging drop of childhood innocence in 'We'd Learn Later Her Husband Left' and the hard end of a hard work day in 'Work/Work Balance.' Revealing deep moods and masculinities and finely punctuated with the indifferent wisdom of bees, dogs, wasps, and flies, Stray exploits every possible meaning of its title—dog, child, what is misplaced or roaming—and settles at last on the imperative."
—?Martha Serpas



Support Verse Daily
Sponsor Verse Daily!

Home 
Archives  Web Weekly Features  About Verse Daily  FAQs  Submit to Verse Daily  Follow Verse Daily on Twitter

Copyright © 2002-2017 Verse Daily All Rights Reserved




Expert Canine