CHASE TWICHELL
Poet & Teacher
Books
Available on and
Things as It Is
Copper Canyon Press, 2018
ROADKILL
I want to see things as they are
without me. Why, I don’t know.
As a kid I always looked
at roadkill close up, and poked
a stick into it. I want to look at death
with eyes like my own baby eyes,
not yet blinded by knowledge.
I told this to my friend the monk,
and he said, Want, want, want.
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Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been:
New and Selected Poems.
Copper Canyon Press, 2010
Bloodaxe Books in the UK
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Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University
Winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize
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“Chase Twichell’s poems are among my favorites ever written. Often brash, always vivid, smart, and lyrical, pointing toward essential things—this is a marvelous and rich body of work.” —Tony Hoagland
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Dog Language
Copper Canyon Press, 2005
Bloodaxe Books in the UK
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“Suppose you had Sappho’s passion, the intelligence and perspicacity of Curie, and Dickinson’s sweet wit, all mixed into a brilliantly shifting connectivity of ideas, scenes, creatures, phantoms, moods, and suspicions, and set her in the life we know we live. Then you would have the poems of Chase Twichell, which are so splendid and astonishing that they actually console her readers in the parlors of Pompeii”. —Hayden Carruth
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The Lover of God by Rabindranath Tagore
Co-translation, with Tony K. Stewart
Copper Canyon Press, 2003
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“This little book is a gem, a firework, a trompe l’oeil, a jeu d’esprit, a subterfuge, a complete delight.”
—Rupert Snell, Director, Hindi Urdu Flagship, U. of Texas, Austin
The Snow Watcher
Ontario Review Press, 1998
Bloodaxe Books in the UK
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“Meditating on the act and struggle of meditation, Twichell bridges nature and the mind, the child self and the adult self or selves, the facts of doubt and distraction and the promise of illumination. Again and again despite everything, illumination rises, with its wisdom: Poetry’s not window-cleaning. / It breaks the glass.” —Alicia Ostriker
The Ghost of Eden
Ontario Review Press, 1995
Faber & Faber in the UK
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“In this impressive fourth collection, Twichell investigates human destruction of the natural world. She conveys the enormity of the subject with unflinching intelligence . . . . This ambitious, compelling collection
establishes Twichell as a major voice in contemporary poetry.”
—Publishers Weekly
The Practice of Poetry:
Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach
Co-edited with Robin Behn
HarperCollins, 1992
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In print for 25 years!
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“I consider The Practice of Poetry one of the two primary instruments in my poetry toolbox. Nothing short of essential. Do yourself—and your poetry—a favor and get your own copy.” —Choriamb: Poetry News & Reviews
Perdido
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991
Faber & Faber in the UK
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“A poet with a dazzling and profound imagination.” —Library Journal
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"W.B. Yeats said, that in the end poetry had only two subjects—sex and death. This volume from the American poet Chase Twichell underwrites the Yeatsian prescription, at once subtly and directly. The poems move with ease, between land and sea, present and past, imagination and reality."
—Poetry London
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The Odds
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986
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"Chase Twichell has that rare combination of technical fastidiousness and imaginative recklessness that marks for us poets who intend fully to test their powers, and remind us of ours.” —William Matthews
Northern Spy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981
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"The publication of Chase Twichell's Northern Spy marks the debut of an American poet unusual in her power to surprise and to clarify. There is a rich and strange language in this book that is the mark of a poet in sure control of her subjects, and a rare intelligence which time and time again delivers unexpected but just observations of experience."