David Keplinger
David Keplinger is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Clearing (2005) and The Prayers of Others (New Issues, 2006), which won the 2007 Colorado Book Award.He is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the SOROS Foundation, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2011 BOA, Ltd. published House Inspections, his translations of Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen, and in 2007 World Cut out with Crooked Scissors, Nielsen’s selected poems, appeared from New Issues Press.Keplinger directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C.
Also by David Keplinger
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The Most Natural Thing
 The Most Natural Thing
$15.00 paper | 90 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-930970-15-5
Publication Date: March 2013
Buy: Amazon.com | spdbooks.org | Barnes & Noble
A Green Rose Book
Praise for David Keplinger:
These poems enshrine the transcendental moment, but do so with a freshness of vision, by tracing its peripheries, by aiming for the undiscovered magic in scenes we’d normally overlook.
—Pleiades
The question is less whether Keplinger benefits from the prose poem than whether prose poetry benefits from Keplinger—a question The Prayers of Others answers with a resounding yes.
—The American Book Review
Imagine The Inferno reconfigured as a cross between one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes and a Rube Goldberg drawing: an infernal machine designed to produce the uncomfortable pleasures of wit’s disjunctions, gallows humor, wry nostalgias. And imagine that the guide’s voice has not yet outgrown or outworn the point of view, precocious and remarkably well read and almost always surprising, of a stranger in a stranger adult land whose consequences and mortalities can just be held at a distance, sympathetic or amused, as Dante’s mortal vision keeps the damned in their place…What’s consistent is the sustained invention of a tinkerer who takes his materials (so many of them fragile, easily discarded or mislaid) to heart even as he finds his humor, his consolation in the spirited play of their arrangements.
—The Antioch Review
Poem
The Sleepers
I am running under trees and clouds, this is how I see my
life. But sometimes I touch Anicka’s collarbone along the
fissure, an old accident. Two kilometers from Krasna, we
sleep like that, in her dead grandmother’s bed, my hand
resting softly on her once broken shoulder. It is the room her
mother made for us. Her parents, too, step into their massive
wooden beds. Then moon pours through the window on our
bones. Gardenias painted on the walls. Death's white
calmness. A room that has filled up with sheep.
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