A Green Rose Book

“Each poem in David Keplinger’s The Prayers of Others is a world unto itself—and the whole of them crated for shipment to the wilds of the imagination, with stickers from Central Europe, where this poet once lived. There are treasures of mystical lucidity too, nestled with the rest, and upon opening these, one feels blessed, and in the presence of a poet who has entered the house of Max Jacob. What a wonderful gift to us all.”

         —Carolyn Forché

“In The Prayers of Others, David Keplinger presents a new Divine Comedy, a fierce, erotic apocalypse in which the dead, the lost, the sundered reach for the heavens only others can provide.”

         —Jake Adam York

"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 . . . That's the landscape and tone of Keplinger's collection of very short prose poems. "

         —Jordan Smith, The Antioch Review, Spring 2007

"At their best, poems like this one in The Prayers of Others achieve a clarity akin to that of photographs take on high contrast film. Keplinger's exacting attention to detail prospers in the prose poem, benefiting from the self-contained quality of the form."

         —Sarah J. Gardner, American Book Review, Nov-Dec 2007

Praise for The Clearing:

“These stark, uncompromising poems compress language to an essential flare of meaning in the face of the undeniable—the lyric impulse striking the hard flint of things.”

         —Eleanor Wilner

“An enormous heart lies in these risk-taking poems whose range, imagination and fresh language always seek precision and the more difficult confidence of a truth: ‘The house is a clearing for the human world.’”

         —Mark Irwin

Praise for The Rose Inside, Winner of the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize:

“[David Keplinger] is an exquisite translator of event and emotion . . . This is a wide book and a deep one, alive with marvelous composition and outcry. And yet, for all its zest of expression, it is real life and real feeling that is most honored.”

         —Mary Oliver

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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