Rick Mulkey

Rick Mulkey is the author of six poetry collections, including All These Hungers, Ravenous: New & Selected Poems, Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, and Bluefield Breakdown. Individual poems and essays have appeared in a variety of periodicals such as Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review, and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II, and A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, and been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. He has received a Hawthornden Fellowship and The Literary Review's Charles Angoff Award, and the Gearhart Poetry Prize from Southeast Review. Mulkey is director and co-founder of the Converse Low Residency MFA.

About Rick Mulkey's books:

About All These Hungers, Spencer Reece writes: “Turn my hungers. Feed, hungers, in the meadows of sounds,” wrote our crazed surrealist French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, over one hundred years ago. Talented, candid, intellectually nimble, neither crazed nor surreal, Rick Mulkey turns on his hungers, turns Rimbaud into something American, small town scrappy, transparent and musky: these memorable poems land on the tongue and in the brain and center on the stomach. Whisky, beans, peppered pork belly bacon, lemonade, unclean scrambled eggs, very cold sweet tea, onions, beets, tomatoes, wine, beer — the poems overflow with juice. These poems celebrate sex – “the salty taste of the body’s hidden flesh” and excrement – “there’s the kind beetles roll into balls across the savannah.” These Rabelaisian poems have a nose for the ground that smells “like dusty clocks.” More Roethke than Whitman, more Hogarth than Gainsborough, this book honors what many lost in the world’s worst pandemic: taste and smell.”

Gary Jackson writes: “In ALL THESE HUNGERS, Rick Mulkey reminds us “how memory opens / on the tongue and nose” through rich poems that catalog and name the pleasures and pains of consuming. Whether it’s the best damn bacon on the east coast or the unique artificiality of Velveeta cheese, these hungers are legion, glorious, and unclean, and not simply limited to human consumption: the “Rite Aid store / boarded and smothered in kudzu” and the oleander that “refuses / to be tamed, refuses to hide in shadow” illustrate this shared truth: what better way to celebrate this brief existence than by taking in everything we possibly can before it’s over? “How quickly the world comes to terms with endings, / flies already swarming the table scraps.” There’s no time to waste. Let’s eat.”

Denise Duhamel writes: "Rick Mulkey's Ravenous: New & Selected Poems is as beautiful an exploration you'll ever encounter about "that empty hole/ we live our lives filling." Populated with the cosmos and the red velvet mite, with the present day South and nineteenth-century Berlin, Mulkey's poems hunger for big truths, little truths, love and justice. Ravenous offers readers over two decades worth of Mulkey's work in one volume, the more recent poems echoing and complicating the mysteries of earlier ones, all infused with the inscrutability of our existence. Mulkey's irresistible American vernacular, visceral wisdom, and lyrical honesty make him one of the most authentic poetic voices of his generation."

Albert Goldbarth writes: "With each new book, Rick Mulkey's poems have become richer and deeper...Now he takes us to that middle ground between the phantasmal (miracles, psychics, alternative worlds, ghosts, UFOs: 'Some days I know my entire life / is an attempt to break the laws of physics') and the solid, textured evidence of the everyday: a sorghum field, a '73 Chevy, a child's turtle-shaped pool, the clasped hands of parental love. He takes us, I mean to say, to our own lives. And he allows us to reconsider them in language that's by turns luminous, wry, elegiac, celebratory, and sometimes just plain old luscious."

Kathryn Stripling Byer writes "The presence of a vanishing landscape is everywhere in this work, the Appalachian country that poet Rick Mulkey calls home. These poems make manifest the belief that a spiritual landscape exists within the physical one, and at times of intense poetic inquiry, as in such poems as "Bluefield Breakdown" that landscape reveals itself in all its power and pathos."

Susan Ludvigson writes "In Rick Mulkey's deft circling of circumstance and subtle shifts in and out of light and shadow, the daily, the sacramental, and the imaginative beautifully merge. His is a world that appears, disappears, and reappears in new guises. Our own lives will be illuminated by these fine, perceptive poems."