Kevin Stein has published eleven books of poetry, criticism, and anthology, including the recent collection Wrestling Li Po for the Remote (Fifth Star Press, 2013) and the essays Poetry’s Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age (U of Michigan, 2010). Poet Laureate of Illinois, Stein was awarded in 2016 The Order of Lincoln, the state’s highest honor for professional achievement and service. He teaches at Bradley University.
Nonfiction
Summer 2009
These Drafts and Castoffs: Mapping James Wright
Kevin Stein These Drafts and Castoffs: Mapping James Wright Outside Madrid’s Reine Sophia Museum, night’s pregnant belly spilling over the city’s belted horizon, I, too, was heavy with arrival. Picasso’s […]
Poetry
Winter 2005
Wishful Rhetoric
Finis. I love the oh-so-postmodern opening— the reversal of expectations intimating a fresh start, as does potty training or the pre-dinner after-dinner mint. After all, in this way the end’s […]
Poetry
Winter 2005
Upon Witnessing My Mother Impossibly Blossom above My Father’s Deathbed
Creek creek, the floor says, like water through oak woods. Creak creak, it says, little strokes fell great oaks. She leans to him as the red rose leans in sudden […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
Confessional
I loved the ritual of spiritual spot removal. I loved forgiveness, 0 cosmic delete key, your dewy screw-ups zapped to ether by fingering Sorry in a little holy water. I […]
Poetry
Spring 1991
Creatures Who Must Know Better Have Taken Me for a Blossom
This year Kennebec and Red Pontiac, last year’s russet and white cobblers done in by nematodes, flea beetles, early and late blight. Maybe it’s the one-fourth Irish blood that’s made […]
May/June 2017
National Geographic
1 To name a thing gives breath as smacking a newborn’s bottom precedes that big inhale and a lifetime’s crying over spilt milk, as I’ve craved my great-grandfather’s name, enthralled […]