Gary Stein
Poet
Bio
Gary Stein has published more than 50 poems in distinguished journals including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Commonweal, JAMA, America, Poet Lore and The Atlanta Review. Several of his individual published poems have been nominated by the editors for a “Pushcart” award.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Stein is the author of three books of original poetry. He has also served as a Book Review Editor for Poet Lore, co-edited the poetry anthology Cabin Fever (Word Works, 2004) and taught poetry writing in colleges and universities.
Books
Stein’s latest chapbook, Getting To Heaven (And Other Miracles) was published by Finishing Line Press in March 2023.
Praise for Getting to Heaven:
These deceptively plainspoken, accessible poems explore doubt and belief, flesh and spirit, science and faith. Stein, lawyer as well as poet, writes of the certainties and mysteries of mortality in a voice tender, wise, and wry. His poetry of lived experience gently confronts unanswerable questions. “Death must be the last surprise,” but the miracle here is life.
–Ellen Prentiss Campbell, author of Frieda’s Song and The Bowl with Gold Seams
In this rich volume, Stein offers the reader the chance to confront and appreciate the intricacy and beauty to be found in the ordinary experiences of everyday — lost glasses, wanting a dog, the death of a parent, fishing. The intense focus and detailed imagery are compelling. These poems challenge us not only to examine the mystery of all that is offered to us in this life but also to engage with it, to enjoy and find humor in it, to hold it up to the light and marvel.
–Lori Shpunt, Ph.D., author of 4 poetry chapbooks including Moving Expenses and Closing Arguments
Stein's first full-length collection, Touring The Shadow Factory won the Brick Road Poetry Press’ national competition and was published in 2019.
Praise for Touring the Shadow Factory:
Gary Stein’s Touring the Shadow Factory is a meditation on time, memory, and loss—from the ghosts of the past to “the soft blur of [the] future.” In poems both precise and masterfully understated, Stein explores the human condition of being in many times at once, carrying our childhoods with us as we age, expectant about what might be coming: “Each night the next miracle.”
—Maggie Smith, author of The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison and Good Bones
What tours, what shadows in what factory are here, in these haunting poems of memory, love, and legend? Stein's poems focus on the father, now a shade, a gifted, patient carver and craftsman who "knew the soul of wood" and long ago brought his young son into his workshop. The poet-son, now grown, pursues the craft of words, of story-making, of would not wood, with kindred, altered skills. And wonders and blesses, in his turn, what shadows and what skills, what callings, his own now-grown sons will now pursue.
—Judith McCombs, author of The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New
Gary Stein is a poet in the spirit of Blake, Frost, and William Carlos Williams. In Stein’s poetry, the ideas are always in little things that touch larger things, and the world is revealed in a squirrel dying, a car being washed, a clock falling from a wall. To read poems such as “The Cremationist’s Day Off,” “Travels in Time,” and “On My 50th Birthday” is to know you are in the presence of a poet who is a master of language., and who can use it to express the home truths of existence. Touring the Shadow Factory is a magnificent book.
—Miles David Moore, author of The Bears of Paris and Rollercoaster
Stein's first chapbook, Between Worlds, (Finishing Line Press 2014), was a finalist in the publisher's national competition. It contains 25 poems, many previously unpublished.
Praise for Between Worlds:
“While ‘Ghosts spy on parents/from every corner of the house,’ Gary Stein unflinchingly accepts that human life is finite. But words, his words in BETWEEN WORLDS ‘have more lives/than skin.’ Join him in these carefully crafted family portraits where he unfolds thoughtful miracles.” –Karren Lalonde Alenier, author of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles
News
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The poems A Bough Falls and Flight were recently published in Commonweal. Crossing El Rio San Pedro, Puebla, Mexico was recently published in America. Why a Worm Rises to Rain was recently published in Asheville Poetry Review.
PENDING PUBLICATIONS
The poem "Watering the Crops" will be published in Friends Journal in 2024.
Contact
If you'd like to discuss my poems or yours, send me a note at henderson.stein@verizon.net.