david Keplinger Poetry: updates and reviews
May 20, 2024: Lindsey Stewart reviews Ice in Poetry International
“Keplinger’s eighth book begins with the title poem, in which the speaker draws connections between the head of an ancient wolf, preserved in snow, and the desire to have a child. “You wanted a child,” he writes, “I don’t know / where that question got buried in my body.” The poem carries ache; it begs the reader to share in the grief that the speaker cannot manage to hold alone. The speaker in “Ice” has discovered something in their research, something specific, and become unmoored. The poems in this collection beg: Stay with me…To read David Keplinger’s Ice, is indeed to look at yourself in a mirror, hold your gaze, and say aloud, Be with me. Stay with me.”
January 25, 2024: Leonora Simonovis reviews Ice in EcoTheo Collective
“Reading Ice is like crossing a threshold into timelessness as we navigate the intersections of history, science, literature, and spirituality. Keplinger’s masterful craft connects past and presence while deftly underlining the relationship between loss and astonishment. It’s like the poet says when looking at two horses who seem to be embracing each other in a field: ‘I want to love/the world like this.’ Keplinger has written a timely, noteworthy collection. A must read.”
January 19, 2024: Rebecca Patrascu reviews Ice in Adroit Journal
“Within each poem in Ice lies the silhouette of something waiting to be perceived in wonder, even when the feeling is tempered by sorrow over the object’s original loss or the circumstances of its discovery. This is most explicit in “Reading the Light Surrounding the Lark.” The bird in the poem is over 40,000 years old; having been chiseled by toothbrush from the permafrost, Keplinger tells us, it “fell upward to our world,” and he suggests we apply this same method for self-discovery: “imagine // you have chiseled part / of you away,” to find “a succession / of your childhood bodies.” He calls us to fall upward, like the lark, out of previous iterations of ourselves and into understanding.”
December 2023: Karren Alenier reviews Ice in Scene4
December 2023: David’s essay “On Overwhelm” featured at Poetry International Online
“What do we do when we can do nothing? A dear friend, a poet now approaching ninety, said to me once at dinner, speaking of the powerlessness she feels in the mire of world events, ‘What is an aging person to do but know these things?’ She was speaking of the responsibility she felt to follow the news, but also of the depth of her sorrow in knowing what she knows. Research is mourning. We seek to know and know, and the attendant overwhelm exhausts our ability to be compassionate within the moment. Pema Chödrön advises we train in compassion by starting small—focusing on small opportunities within our grasp, every day, in traffic, or at the grocery store, or just holding open doors—and to put our attention on the other person rather than how they treat you in return or whether they even see your effort unfolding. I would add a third way, which connects me back to Milton’s sentiment. It is a matter of trust that others, though they don’t make the news, are joining these efforts along with me. And there are still others who simply do no harm: ‘They also serve who only sit and wait.’”
December 7 2023: Watch David’s and Grace Cavalieri’s round-robin reading at MLK Library
October 2023: “On Overwhelm” on Poetry and War in Poetry International
“The morning of 9/11/01, my 33rd birthday, I was living in Colorado having just completed my first year of teaching at my first tenure-track job. On my way into the building where I was to hold my class on Hamlet, a colleague of mine, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the metal door, told me the news in a rather emotionless voice. Inside, everyone was listening to reports on the radio and CNN, watching the footage over and over, but even then, it hadn’t sunk in. After a while, I walked to my class, where everyone had shown up on time. We sat in a circle and spoke about what was happening, just as it was happening, and then, as if in a trance, we turned our attention to Hamlet’s madness. Maybe that dramatized madness was a salve against a real madness changing everything outside; things would never be the same again. But I’m still surprised, these 22 years later, that the students and I shared a similar reaction. By God, we ought to do something, if only to pretend that everything was going to go forward as planned. In the wake of the trauma, we would come to our senses: classes were canceled, flights grounded. We would have to learn to stand and wait.”
September 21, 2023: David featured on Episode 96 of Emerging Form: listen to the podcast here
August 18, 2023: Ice and “Almost” featured in Washington Post Book World editor’s weekly Book Club:
“Ice… shifts gracefully from geological epochs to intimate moments. In the opening poem, locals are searching for a mammoth tusk. Later, we see a grandmother mending socks. Glaciers collapse in the warming climate, while far away a mother reads Emily Dickinson on her deathbed. What does it mean to live in these latter days when ‘we run false hope / as if it were a red light’?
August 6, 2023: Ice a featured new release in The New York Times Book Review:
"From Dante to Blake to Emily Dickinson, the poems in Keplinger's latest book summon literary history (and geological history, too) in an effort to understand modern life."
August 2023: David’s Ice reviewed in LitHub
“Keplinger’s Ice travels across time and space, both evoking the history of life on earth and focusing on personal losses, as in a portrait of a dying mother reading Dickinson– ‘My mother coughed again. / Little dashes in her sentences.’ There is an arresting intimacy to the icy breadth of this collection, a sense of something unvisited before.”
July 2023: David’s essay on “Rilke and the Five Aggregates” on the Agni blog
"We could say with Rilke that each of our parts is some—but not the sum—of who we are. And we could say that the point is to simply stay humble. Inevitably, in my belief, all serious writers come to wrestle with a creative ache, an initial point of exile that eludes and bewilders them. And then, every project becomes at best a translation of the great work inside of them, which they may never completely understand or find the words to reveal."
June 24, 2023: David curates opening and moderates gallery talk of “Blue and Gray: This Era of Exile”
March 2023: David featured on Innisfree Journal : 22 poems 2014-present
New collaborations with Bruce Bond in Four Way Quarterly and in translation with Jan Wagner in Plume
May 2022: American University names David 2022 Teacher-Scholar of the Year
"[For] outstanding and significant scholarly contributions to the university and discipline; exceptional teaching as documented by student evaluations or other assessment of teaching; a commitment to high standards within one's professional life; recognized concern for students and colleagues; and sensitivity to the mission of the university.”
April 2022: Sylvia Jones reviews The World to Come in Revolute
"There are many books written from the crumbling edge of the seemingly inevitable climate abyss. Not once does this book traffic in despair or indulge in jump-scares…Here, the site-specific is stacked against an image until a metaphor whistles out, an awakening from which several other awakenings are born."
Read David’s “Pomade” and “The Age of the Onion” in recent issues of Plume
October, 2021: An Interview with David in Rain Taxi
"Begin straight off with a disruption of routine, a disorientation, an unapologetic embrace of what seems impossible, let it be said up front as the old storyteller does: ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.’ ‘The Color Green,’ which has me visiting my parents upon the moment of my conception (and getting in the way, interrupting), comes at the beginning of the book. It wants to prepare the reader: such things are possible here."
August 20, 2021: “Astronomy” the featured poem on Verse Daily
August 10, 2021: “Basket” the featured poem on Poetry Daily
June 27, 2021: Reading and Q&A with Kim Addonizio and Gary Lemons at Politics and Prose, DC
May 15 2021: A review of The World to Come in Zzyzzyva: “The Beautiful in the Broken”
“As if we have all understood and accepted that everything in the world has resonance, that our lives have begun many times over, and that the land and its creatures tell stories, David Keplinger’s newest poetry collection pinpoints what follows that understanding and acceptance.”
April 21, 2021: Reading from The World to Come with Wayne Miller and Jenny Molberg, Café Muse
September 2, 2020: Forty-One Objects longlisted for the National Translation Award
April 7, 2020: The Long Answer: New and Selected Poems released
Spring 2020: Read David’s “The Puppet Tiger Masculinity Is” in The New Republic
September 2, 2019: Read David’s “The Seven Spheres” in The Missouri Review
February 2019: Another City wins the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize
Recognizes "a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision" for its "poems of such keen attentions and imaginative wit, [in which] the intimation of always another city registers both an awareness of our inevitable diminishment and the possibility of some vaster sphere, some landscape of domes and illuminations, to mitigate our loneliness and loss."
