S. Giscombe lives in Berkeley, California. His most recent books are Negro Mountain (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and—in collaboration with the book artist Judith Margolis—Train Music (Omnidawn 2021). His work has won for him an American Book Award and the Carl Sandburg Prize. Books in progress include Railroad Sense and Medicine Book/The Book of Monsters. He is a long-distance cyclist.
Poetry
Fall 2025
East Line Train
For Barry McKinnon and Kent Sedgwick and Ranjit Gill (The East Line towns — Shelley, Willow River, Giscome, Newlands, Aleza Lake, Upper Fraser, Hansard, McGregor, Dewey, Sinclair Mills, Hutton, Longworth, and Penny — along […]
Poetry
Fall 2025
Wiscasset Train
Called, having been understood to be familiar with some characteristics of the territory, called from the state of Maine itself, and asked to comment on James Weldon Johnson’s death there — railroad […]
Poetry
Fall 2025
San Joaquin Train
Delta, my thoughts! Waterfowl, old ambivalent eye, babe — on the Amtrak, such a dictum! Issue came up in conversation between the usual engineer and the new man she was guiding (she […]
Nonfiction
Winter 2012
Precarious Creatures
In the weeks that led up to the date of my prostate biopsy and in the eight days it took for the verdict (cancer) to be delivered to me by […]