John Hoppenthaler's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, Bloomsbury Review, Connecticut Review, Tar River Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. His essays, reviews, and interviews appear regularly in such journals as Chelsea, Arts & Letters, Pleiades, Bellingham Review, and Kestral, where he is Poetry Editor. Hoppenthaler has edited a collection of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). He lives in Nyack, New York.

About Lives of Water:

"There is such measured composure and quiet wisdom to the poems of John Hoppenthaler's powerful debut collection, Lives of Water, that their resonance and beauty stay with us long after their reading. Reckoning with public and personal histories, he enlarges our vision of the world and both celebrates and honors a life's most difficult passages."
— David St. John

" '. . . the most pressing question / are naive ones,' Wislawa Szymborska insists in 'The Century's Decline,' and part of John Hoppenthaler's compelling charm in this debut collection is his willingness to present himself as a naif in asking those questions most pressing in America in the 21st century. 'I can picture our better selves, our / fictional & therefore malleable // selves, holding each other closer still,' Hoppenthaler attests, his traditional, romantic lyricism triggered even now by '[t]hat first blue glimpse of water. / To touch it.' Lives of Water offers those modest gestures that accumulate, poem by poem, toward the orchestral sweep of a low-fi New World symphony."
—Michael Waters