Eileen Cleary is the author of Child Ward of the Commonwealth (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize and 2 a.m. with Keats (Nixes Mate, 2021). In addition, she co-edited the anthology Voices Amidst the Virus, the featured text at the 2021 Michigan State University Filmetry Festival. Cleary is the founding editor of Lily Poetry Review Books.

Books by Eileen Cleary:

Other poems on the web by Eileen Cleary:
Two poems
Two poems
"The Only Other Option: Leave the Area"

Eileen Cleary's Website.

Eileen Cleary on Twitter.

About 2 a.m. with Keats:

"As I read Eileen Cleary's 2 a.m. with Keats, I felt breathless, suspended in a place of red keys, plum stones, cats, willows, and sphinxes. It would minimize the reach of this brilliant collection to call it an elegy or a eulogy, or even a love story to Lucie Brock-Broido or John Keats — though it is all of those things. Here, in this place where 'the elm says Grief and the oak, Grief,' the poems shine and scatter across the pages like 'a phantom of stars.' Cleary engages the rhythms of another world, of 'sweet music honeyed and unheard,' where 'Lucie reaches forty years back. . . .' Embracing the quirkiness of Brock-Broido's imagery and the love of Keats's line, Cleary creates a seance of astronomy, searching for the origins of human and poetic magic, where 'looking for signs means I've / once been broken.' I will return to 2 a.m. with Keats again and again, to remember Lucie and Keats, to inhale 'rose milk . . . mint.'"
—Jennifer Martelli