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Steve Gehrke

Steve Gehrke’s third book, Michelangelo’s Seizure, was selected for the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. His second book, The Pyramids of Malpighi (Anhinga, 2004), won the Philip Levine Prize. His other awards include a grant from the NEA and a Pushcart Prize.

Author

Homecoming: Fourth of July

Gas-fumes, starlight, my car on Empty, all the stations closed. The talk on the radio’s of UFOs, nonbodily abductions, the consciousness extracted and replaced. Who could believe such things, even when they’re half- lost, stranded, parked o [...]

Michelangelo’s Seizure

Fall 2005 | Poetry

When it happened, finally, on the preparation bridge, where he had stood all morning grinding the pigments, grooming his brush-tips to a fine point so that he could thread Eve’s hair like a serpent down her back, his head rocked forward on the bell [...]

Goya at the Madhouse

Fall 2005 | Poetry

So this is where a love of the imagination leads,       Goya thinks, boarded up inside his deafness, quarantined, silence inside of him like embalming fluid,       the whole scene swirling around him [...]

Self-Portrait with Doctor

Fall 2005 | Poetry

after Goya              Heat-struck, bleached, a sucked pit rolling in the mouth of his fever, he lies there,        ready for the leech,    &nbs [...]