Poet, playwright, and translator Sherod Santos is the author of plays that have been produced at The Side Project, Chicago; The Algonquin Theatre, New York City; The Royal Court Theatre, London; and The Flint Michigan Play Festival. Santos is the author of seven books of poetry, a book of essays, and a book of translations from the early Greek Lyric Poets. In 1999 he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Drama
May/June 2022
Silent Billy
Characters PAIGE, woman in her late thirties SONNY, PAIGE’s husband, slightly younger BILLY, PAIGE’s son, SONNY’s stepson, around seven years old Setting Night. Living room in modest, working-class home. Front […]
Poetry
Summer 1990
On the Liberation of Women
For some dark reason one could only imagine From the large bruise above the left Eyebrow, the broken bifocals, the purse-strap Snapped and clutched like a leash In her outstretched […]
Poetry
Fall 2014
Ilium
Viaduct blue with rainwater blue the streetlights shadowing the cafés from the dead-end alleyways tallow of sex and garbage everything blue and ripening blue the clarion carafe of ash black […]
Poetry
Fall 2014
Lunar Reddened (A Narrative)
1. Blood-pigmented ravelin overlooked within us the aura of an empire. What could we do but restore it in kind? Oh but we did don’t you remember the trussed-up ceremonial […]
Poetry
Fall 2012
Out of the World There Passed a Soul
The day of my mother's funeral I spent clearing out her overgrown flower beds, down on my knees in the leaf rot, nut shells, tiny grains of sandlot sand spilling […]
Poetry
Spring 2010
Life Study with Two Endings
1. Cardinal After driving all night through sleet and snow, a Formica tabletop warmed by sun in a coffee shop near Keene. Inch by inch, an ice panel slides from […]
Poetry
Winter 2003
A Moment
What I perceived is what I remember. I didn’t know her name. She was thirteen or fourteen, I was twelve, And we were somewhere in California. Her family had rented […]
Poetry
Winter 2003
Carousel
He’d just switched off the overhead light and stretched out Full-length on the sofa. An open window. A shade between The rose and ochres of a long twilight in mid-September […]
Poetry
Summer 2001
A Valley in the Shadow of North Hollywood
As if cued to the first peach prayer-call of sunrise, the scattered choir of radio alarm clocks summon the sleeping body from celestial time to a work-week morning in the […]
Poetry
Summer 2001
The Monument
Ten times Tamerlane's storied wall of blood and severed limbs, and even where they did not exist, even where they had never existed, we'd have had to kill them anyway, […]
Poetry
Summer 2001
The Book of Blessings
The reserved and slightly weary-eyed doctor in the ER who, having awakened him late, curled up in a blanket on the waiting room floor, said two times softly, "She'll be […]
Nonfiction
Winter 2000
Divine Hunger: A Poetics of Cannibalism
the teeth in love —Lucretius, De rerum natura You must sit down, sayes Lave, and taste my meat—George Herbert, Love [III] 1. “If a native falls from a tree. . […]
Poetry
Summer 1996
Siblings
A print of Audubon's ovenbirds hung above our parents' king-sized bed: the female, ornamental in her tawny crown, craned along a branch the male's banked off of like a fighter […]
Poetry
Summer 1996
Rocheport, Missouri, 1994
Like an old idea that's lost for years then taken up again against new claims, the waters swelled their failing banks to flood this little river town, whose fuel- oil […]
Orpheus. Descending.
Winter 1996
Orpheus in the Underworld
Special Section: Orpheus. Descending. Still jet lagged after a fourteen-hour transatlantic flight held over at Logan while the weather cleared, his night-long fitful tossing in the hotel has at […]
Orpheus. Descending.
Winter 1996
The Story of Poetry and Poets
for Charles Shepherdson A man and a women have fallen in love. On the day of their wedding the woman dies and is led away into the land of […]
Poetry
Summer 1990
Approaching Middle Age
Angled against each other After a late-night party On the East Side of town, we Cut across an abandoned Lot behind a car repair, A scatter of window glass Flung […]
Poetry
Summer 1990
The Morning the Doctor
a kind, tired man, and not in his way without worry, came back to your room and said, "I'm sorry, but we've lost the baby," there wasn't much more to […]