Bending Light with Bare Hands: A Journal of Poems

Bending Light with Bare Hands is a direct response to Covid lockdown and all the insecurities and frustrations that accompanied compulsory isolation. The poems in this collection each begin with a singular event of nagging thought that gets woven into larger associative tapestries, a journal of verse addressing existence though personal experience.

Themes of apocalypse, of the battles of darkness and light, and of struggles with traditional/familial beliefs emerge from suburban landscapes and childhood memories of a rural upbringing. From the author's fear of losing his vision to cataracts, to his knowledge of the world through the superstitions of his ancestors, to his obsession with weather, these poems pull from the mundane and the supernal and the mystical in order to celebrate the world as a constant in our ever-changing lives.

David B. Prather's first collection, We Were Birds, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing in 2019. He has another full-length poetry collection, Shouting at an Empty House, forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. He served as a juror for Ohio State Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour's anthology, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices. He is a past president of West Virginia Writers, Inc., a statewide non-profit organization. He taught English Composition, American Literature, and Creative Writing at West Virginia University at Parkersburg and English Composition at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio. He also served as poetry editor for Confluence Literary Journal and for Tantra Press, and he hosted the Blennerhassett Reading Series. He currently serves as a reader for Suburbia Journal. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, and others. His work has also appeared in many anthologies, including Voices from the Fierce Intangible World (from South Florida Poetry Journal) and Endlessly Rocking: Poems in Honor of Walt Whitman's 200th Birthday (Unbound Content, Englewood, New Jersey). He studied acting at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York, and he appeared in a couple of local (West Virginia/Ohio) independent movies. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. And he lives in the town where he was born-Parkersburg, West Virginia.