Adam Tavel is the author of six books of poetry. His latest collections are Rubble Square and Green Regalia, both with Stephen F. Austin State University Press. His recent poems appear in North American Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, and Western Humanities Review, among others.

Other poems by Adam Tavel in Verse Daily:
October 28, 2022:   "Sleeping Quarters" "collapsed the alley's filthy trinity..."
September 1, 2022:   "Portrait / Self-Portrait" "First facts are dirt. I could hear it..."
August 24, 2022:   "Wetipquin Scarecrow" "wizened nightmare how you hang..."
October 27, 2021:   "Practice Room" "Inside this padded door the only sounds..."
September 6, 2021:   "Now We Come to Ticks and Tocks" "Totally giddy and grinning as I recall the fox we happened upon..."
May 19, 2021:   "Soul Reckoning" "I'm skimming through a book called Spook..."
April 24, 2020:   "Word Problem" by "One hundred eighty thousand bison skulls..."
January 31, 2020:   "Autumn Scene in Perry County" "Mennonite girls at sunset float..."
January 31, 2019:   "Still Life with Burn Barrel" "Slow rain cascades inside the hollow eyes..."
October 3, 2018:   "Halloween Vespers with Homemade Vader" "Bless the amber porch light that coronets..."
August 19, 2017:   "Against Elegy" "Mother told me when the snoozing drunk..."

Books by Adam Tavel:

Other poems on the web by Adam Tavel:
Two poems
"Triplets at a Ouija Board, 1951"
"A Grecian Child's Commode"
"Anthropocene"
Two poems
"My Grandfather's Light"
"An Engraving of a Woman Entering an Abortion Clinic"
"A Nursing Program's Simulation Lab on the Morning after Graduation"
"Orphan Lights"
"Faking It"
"Consecration"
"The Crisfield Winter Consumptives of 1908"
"An Abandoned Fort in the Woods"
Four poems
"Cain"
Two poems
Three poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Room to Roome"
"The Rocket"
"Camp Loss"
"Letter to Schnell Written on Glovebox Napkins"
"Our Lady of Crabapple Hill"
"Sister Roberta's Lecture Notes on the Shroud of Turin"
"Letter to my Wife Written on the Walls of a Blanket Fort"
Two poems

Adam Tavel's Website.

Adam Tavel on Twitter.

About Green Regalia:

"The personal and the persona, the historical and the present, the real and the surreal, the fragmented and the lucid all converge in Green Regalia as Adam Tavel guides us from poem to poem with lithe, logical leaps and surprising connections. Tavel masterfully creates a space of dark and disturbing beauty: 'My gift,' he tells us, 'is a small token wrapped hysterically with the obituary page.' Here, poems of absence and presence, grief, death, addiction, self-destruction, and family and societal violence reverberate off of, and augment, one another. Tavel's exquisite use of language and sensory-filled images invite us into empathy and the deeper meanings that are at the heart of this collection. Unflinching, at times visceral, these poems refuse to look away, and we are the richer for it."
—Nancy Chen Long

"Adam Tavel's new book, Green Regalia, charts childhood's rise and fall ('I ached to rise,' 'falling as he prayed') in a world of gorgeous surfaces ('papyral skins' and 'hymnal leather,' the 'rust-streaked cheeks' of a kestrel). This in a book of fathers and historical figures (Lowell, Coltrane, Lincoln) and a great tenderness towards children, the bruised breath of their sleep, nuggeted throughout with wonderful sonnets. Here is Tavel's “fallen nation” in which the sunflowers, rising, 'find the ground they've left' and bless it."
—Robert Gibb

"Adam Tavel has taught the English language tricks: every word sits on command, comes to heel. You'll want to read these poems out loud and let the music take your tongue, despite the subjects and their deep intimacy—fathers and sons, mistakes owned or denied, nightmares and redemption. From the first person to the persona poems, poems of nature or disrupted childhoods, these stories are recognizable yet brilliantly new, knife-sharp, unrelenting, a wonder of a collection."
—Karen Skolfield

"I love the private histories in Green Regalia by Adam Tavel: Jesse Owens, Napoleon, Robert Lowell, a crash test dummy, a nightie that's 'edamame green.' If the only thing a poet owes the world is attention, as Brenda Hillman writes, then I can't think of poems that see the world this clearly—that are this deft, this textured, this alive."
—Paul Guest