Runaway Goat Cart

Poetry. The spirits hovering around Thomas Devaney's new collection, RUNAWAY GOAT CART, "include Philip Whalen and Erik Satie, Thelonious Monk and James Madison—maybe they have something to do with the astringent buoyancy and 'essential tension' of these poems…"—Geoffrey O'Brien

Thomas Devaney is the author of five poetry collections: RUNAWAY GOAT CART (Hanging Loose Press, 2015), CALAMITY JANE (Furniture Press Books, 2014), The Picture that Remains (The Print Center, 2014), A SERIES OF SMALL BOXES (Fish Drum, 2007), and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999), and a nonfiction book, Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios, 2005). Devaney teaches creative writing at Haverford College where his collaborative projects with faculty and staff include the poetry tree tour "Under An Oak" and "INSIDE," a meditation on space and confinement. He is the editor of the e-journal ONandOnScreen. Devaney's poems have been included in several anthologies, including EMERGENCY INDEX (Ugly Duckling Presse), A BEST OF FENCE: THE FIRST NINE YEARS, VOLUME 1 (Fence Books), POEM: POETS ON (AN) EXCHANGE MISSION (Fish Drum/Double Change, bilingual French-English edition), Walt Whitman, Hom(m)age, 2005/1855 (Turtle Point Press and Editions Joca Seria), and American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon). From 2001 to 2005 he was program coordinator of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Projects with the Institute of Contemporary Art include "Tales from the 215" for "Philadelphia Freedom" with Zoe Strauss and the "The Empty House" at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site for "The Big Nothing." Other projects include poems written for "Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2009). Devaney earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, CUNY.