David Daniel

David Daniel is the author of Seven-Star Bird, which won the Levis Reading Prize. Poetry editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade, he founded and produces WAMFEST: The Words and Music Festival, which has brought together many of the most celebrated artists for unique collaborative performances: Bruce Springsteen with Robert Pinsky, Rosanne Cash with C. D. Wright, Talib Kweli with Quincy Troupe, and dozens of others. He’s been a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Daniel lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ornaments

By David Daniel

A reverent jag of irreverence, tilting forward to arresting moments of beauty, astonishment, confusion, and grief, the poems in David Daniel’s Ornaments find their myths in history and pop culture; they take their truths, but just as much their doubts, from the fallibility of what we remember and the desperation with which we struggle to assemble it. Surreal, lyrical, madcap, they bring a faith, above all, in poetry. Which means in people and their bewildered hearts.