David Keplinger

David Keplinger's work is sacred algebra. It comes from source, from joy, from healing. Spirit in language is a kind of system, where words do more than report feelings: David's poetry is made out of light and love, from the wealth of consciousness. —Grace Cavalieri

DAVID KEPLINGER is the author of eight collections of poetry and six works in translation.His recent poetry books include Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Rilke Prize, The World to Come (Conduit, 2021), winner of the Minds on Fire Prize, and Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023), which received the 2024 Ellen Anderson Award. His newest collaborations in translation from the German are The Art of Topiary by Jan Wagner (Milkweed Editions 2017) and Wisp by Jan Wagner (Milkweed Editions, 2026).His work with Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen most recently produced Forty-One Objects (BOP, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 National Translation Award and Miniatures (Plamen Press, 2025). He is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Award, the Colorado Book Award, The Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.

SASSOFERRATO

In Sassoferrato it is the ultramarine that holds the idea of Mary, looking down at her hands, that captures the spirit of her prayer. It is a painting about the sea in love with the mountain crest, just as the mountain crest grasps how it will never know itself like the sea knows it. The sea at Carmel was similar, it surrounded the glass windows, and at night I heard colors like a musician does.My mother was dying. She was more pain than body then. And when the body receded, and then the pain, just after, slowly, what was left was pure crystal,blue salt: It was Sassoferrato who associated this color with the mother, the force of love that cradles and crashes over the thing, until it is the thing.

FOX

I count my blessings like a fox does. I skulk like the stoles of my grandmother. In Harleysville on High Street, deep in my Catholic years, her stoles lay silent on the beds at parties, in the houses she said were too rich for her. I’m the slow reader who must say the words out loud. I hold every word in my mouth like an egg. I come from the guild of the thieves. I loathe and long for what won’t have me. The way my grandmother threw the fox head, wide-eyed, over her shoulder, as she left in a huff.

TUSK

Each name is called up to the blackboard. Each child holds the chalk against the mouth, a miniature tusk that has just broken through. It is a little painful,learning how to think about such things. The teacher will wait as long as necessary, until even the slowest is finished, and each comes away with an identical sum.

CHEKHOV

The snap of a harp string can signal the end of a society. A man begins to walk for no reason like an ape. Life becomes a succession of instructive monologues performed in dim light. Woodsmen chop away the only forest using axes from the early Holocene. Tragic, that the dreamers of the city never leave the provinces. Comic, that the provinces are just where they belong. No one plays the violin too well. The professor is frequently wrong about things. When the doctor arrives, it’s always the wrong daughter who runs to fetch him to the hall.

THE TRANSLATOR

A translator of the Bible has won a literary prize. The translator, who died in Constance in 1415, will not present at the ceremony. Guests include his silent God, some heads of elk looking down from the walls, and the panel of old judges. Now it is the dinner: fish is served. You can barely hear the wet, polite grinding of the jaws. Little is as it was on Lake Constance. There are some shuttered houses he might have recognized, sky like a deceptive cognate, or a few last holdouts in the patterns of the birds, the grammar of the trees, along the road where he was taken to the stake and made invisible.

SKELETON

When I saw the harp Sir Leonard Woolley made, who excavated Ur, finally I understood the human skeleton. Here he stands with his pick by the cave of the suicide Queen, Pu-Abi, the colonizer stabbing into sacred ground. Like my parents did with my own skeleton, Woolley misassembled two harps into one.This harp is a boat with the head of a bull. If you play this, you have to turn it backwards, the bull’s head butting awkwardly into your chest. And with the other hand, plucking, you must try to make something intrinsically broken come off beautiful.