Stephen Massimilla is a poet, painter, photographer, and author, recently of the award-winning Frank Dark (Barrow Street Press, 2022) and the 2022 award-winning coedited social justice poetry anthology, Stronger Than Fear. His multi-genre Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo Press, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Award and many others. Earlier books and honors include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (SFASU Press Poetry Prize); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera Prize, CUNY); The Grolier Poetry Prize; the Van Rensselaer Prize, selected by Kenneth Koch; a study of myth in poetry; award-winning translations; and many others. Recent work appears in publications such as AGNI, the Chicago Tribune, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, HuffPost, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, The National Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and hundreds of others. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches there and at The New School.

Other poems by Stephen Massimilla in Verse Daily:
May 26, 2019:   "Misdirection: A Poem" "A genius said that without God, people would believe..."
December 4, 2016:   "Celeriac" "Artery-twisted..."
October 14, 2014:   "Entering Vacant Stagehands" "Once she goes to sleep in my script, it is 2:00 A.M...."
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
"Misdirection: A Poem"
Two poems
Two poems
"Aurora"
Three poems
"Lost Quest"
"Wounded"
Four poems
"Secret Agent"
"Plum Summer"
"Specter of August"
"November Attempt at Emptiness"
"I Love Her"
"The Man Whose Brain Wouldn't Die"
"The United Food Company"
"When We Fell In Love"
Three poems

Stephen Massimilla's Website.

Stephen Massimilla on Twitter.

About Frank Dark:

"In FRANK DARK, Stephen Massimilla offers us visions of light breaking through, even as 'winter's darkness closes in behind our backs.' The poet exults in the runic power of words to wrest luminosity from the veiled surface, to chart the 'heart's weather,' and to bear epiphanic witness to the 'doe browsing in spun mist.' Thus, we are compelled to follow Massimilla, a siren of language, an intoxicator, into his realm of beauty and sadness by a brilliance of thought and a radiance of emotion--at once sensual, playful, spacious, compassionate, heartbreaking. These stunning poems, these daring visions, dazzle."
—Emily Fragos

"In his new collection, FRANK DARK, Massimilla pens stark and striking landscapes whose very presence seems enchanting and impossible. Here, Massimilla lavishes attention not only on harbors and harvests, but also on details as fine as the 'gasping ragman of shadow hovered / memory-thin between magnesium lamps.' A superb collection."
—Kyle Mccord

"In FRANK DARK, we are granted sudden and sustained access to the intimate conversation of Earth with History. Frond and fish, heron and horizon all account for themselves in lucent encounter with humanness and with the troubled human record. Stephen Massimilla moves far beyond social discourse, into a deeper, communal understanding of language and its fate. That love may be a portion of that fate is a hope these poems cherish beyond words."
—Donald Revell

"In his astonishing new collection, FRANK DARK, Stephen Massimilla graphs...shifting phantasmagoria, investigating how and whether the 'self' might cohere.... By turns winking and melancholic, modernist in ambition but radically contemporary in sensibility... suggesting reading and writing alike as exercises in scripting ourselves.... One hears Stevens here, or Rimbaud, ...but more than this, one hears Massimilla, a master of associative fabulism, darkly frank, finely registering, across this collection, that tide-like flux of impressions in which, as he insistently reminds us, we 'haven't gone under yet.' This is a marvelous book."
—Christopher Kempf