In college, I studied poetry and poetry writing with Elizabeth Willis. After a hiatus from writing poetry while I earned my doctorate, I have returned to poetry composition in recent years and have been teaching creative writing workshops at Boston College. As a reader of poetry, I have a number of authors I follow religiously. I prefer to read contemporary poetry at the scale of the career, insofar as that is possible. I contribute reviews of new poetry books in venues such as Los Angeles Review of Books and Colorado Review. Whether reading or writing poetry, I am interested in poems that teach me something I didn’t already know about life; that help me feel the contemporaneity of the contemporary moment—a sensation otherwise unavailable from within the unfolding of historical time; and that push at the edges of what language can express. As Willis has written: “On the high and windy bridge between what can and can’t be said, the poem asks a question.” Some of my poetry writing incorporates translation from Middle English and Latin. I also write fiction.
books
Sisyphus the Completist. Sagging Meniscus, forthcoming.
Cycle of Dreams. North Haven, CT: punctum books, 2024. [PDF]
chapbooks
Chanties: An American Dream. Morongo Valley, CA: Bottlecap, 2023. [PDF]
- reviewed in Ocean Navigator Jan/Feb 2024: 7 [PDF]
Sharp Fish. Middletown, CT: Samizdat, 2008. [PDF]
poems (selected)
“The Final Poem in a Series of Final Poetry.” Cincinnati Review 23.2 (2026): 78-85.
seven poems: “Long Days of Your Own Wherewhithal,” “Untitled #56,” “Like Paper under Ink,” “Autobiographical Lullaby,” “Sisyphus the Completist,” “On a Ruin,” and “The Revelator.” Exacting Clam 20 (2026): 107-10. [PDF]
four poems: “Preferences,” “Barcarolle,” “Meditation,” and “Bob Dylan’s Voice.” Exacting Clam 18 (2025): 78-81. [PDF]
“Haul.” Quarter After Eight 30 (2024): 158. [PDF]
two poems: “Landfall” and “Epitaph.” Exacting Clam 14 (2024): 58. [PDF]
“Violaceous Euphonia.” Fence 41 (2024): 188.
“Nowheres and Elsewheres (Land-Lubber’s Chanty).” In Bodies: A Preservation of Land & Self (Beaver Magazine, 2023), 37. [PDF]
“Shore Leave from the USS Lineage.” Dusie 8 August 2023.
“Body as Eschaton.” Inverted Syntax 4 (2022): 20-22. [PDF]
“4:34.” 8 Poems 4.1 (2021). [PDF]
“Forecast.” Texas Review 41 (2021): 78. [PDF]
“Submit Seasonal Poems Two Months in Advance.” burntdistrict 2.2 (2013): 48.
three poems: “[the fifty thousand golden statues],” “The Mathematician Composes an Equation While Strolling Home in a Thunderstorm,” and “In the Early Days of Lexicography.” Paper Nautilus 1 (2011): 118. [PDF]
“[(the bluegrasss fingertips pink].” Versal 5 (2007): 20. [PDF]
“Quatrains.” rain dog 13 (2007): 45. [PDF]
“A Tag Tucked into a Fold.” Mudfish 15 (2007): 76. [PDF]
“The Shaman Who Sells Today.” Waterways 26.4 (2005): 13-14. [PDF]
short fiction
“Gulperati.” Conte 3 (2007).
translation
“A Bird in Bishopswood.” Poetry Foundation Poem of the Day 5 March 2024. [with translator’s note]
poetry book reviews
Prageeta Sharma, Onement Won (Seattle: Wave, 2025). Chicago Review online 13 April 2026.
“Epitaph for the American Idea” [Elizabeth Willis, Liontaming in America (New York: New Directions, 2024)]. Los Angeles Review of Books 29 October 2024.
“A Return to Form?” [Ben Lerner, The Lights (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2023)]. Exacting Clam 14 (2024): 93-8. [review essay]
Solmaz Sharif, Customs (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2022). Colorado Review online 6 April 2023.
“Victoria Chang’s Negative Elegy” [Victoria Chang, Obit (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2020)]. Jacket2 10 December 2020.
interview
“Interview with Victoria Chang on the Occasion of the Publication of Tree of Knowledge.” Cincinnati Review online 10 July 2026.
Eric Weiskott 
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