Stephen Gibson
Stephen Gibson is the author of several poetry collections: The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, West Chester University), Paradise (University of Arkansas Press, 2011), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize, 2009), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/Intuit House book prize, 2006), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen, 2001). His most recent is Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (University of Arkansas Press, 2017).
Reading List
At Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston
The Death’s Head turned into an angel over time, its crossbones into wings— side-by-side, you see it with this girl. “Here lyes buried the body of Rachel” (her headstone used for a crayon rubbing), the Death’s Head turned into an …
Cotton
I’m at Cotton Mather’s tomb in Boston— it’s part of the burial ground on Copp’s Hill: there’re more Death’s Heads here than men or women. The woman with the stroller waits for her husband, moving from headstone to headstone, to …
Ophelia
You would think the drowning girl would save herself but she’s not drowning in Millais’s bath water— she’s a twenty-two-year-old model posing as Ophelia in winter, and has put all of her worries on a shelf to float in his …
Craigslist Killer Noir
He hid their panties in the back of his closet, trophies of his attacks (which he didn’t think of as attacks), replayed in his head how everything went down, not as he planned (nothing ever went as planned), but had …
Manhattan Noir
She played in a philharmonic; he was a handyman. She was trained how to hold a cello by the neck and draw a bow across its strings so that sound made listeners leave this world and find themselves in another …
Presences
After their ER visit, there’s really nothing to say. Now, they no longer need the mattress or the crib. Nebraska’s 1958 teen killers questioned by police; still to be discovered, another dress in a corn crib. Analogy used at the …