David Baker is the author of five previous books of poems: The Truth about Small Towns, After the Reunion, Sweet Home, Saturday Night, Haunts, and Laws of the Land. His two books of criticism are Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement. Among his awards are fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Ohio Arts Council, Society of Midland Authors, Poetry Society of America, and the Pushcart Foundation. His poems and essays appear in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, DoubleTake, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and many others. He serves as poetry editor of The Kenyon Review and teaches at Denison University as well as in the M. F. A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College.

About Changeable Thunder:
"The poems collected here are supple and capacious, revitalizing in their engagement with American consciousness and American vernaculars . . . . Baker writes with the distilled, distinguished attentiveness only the finest poets can reliably command."
—Linda Gregerson,author of Negative Capability: Essays on Contemporary American Poetry

"David Baker's eye on nature is unblinking, and his observations delicate and accurate, but his eye on human intimacies and interactions is just as clear. For me, he is the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright."
—Marilyn Hacker, author of Squares and Courtyards: Poems