Mulkey, Rick

Rick Mulkey is the author of six collections, including Ravenous: New & Selected Poems, Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, and Bluefield Breakdown. His individual poems and essays have appeared in Poetry East, Georgia Review, Crab Orchard Review, and the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II, and A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, among others. In his new collection, All These Hungers: Poems (Brick Road Poetry Press, Inc.), Mulkey turns the Rimbaud of “Turn my hungers. Feed, hungers, in the meadows of sounds,” into something American, small-town scrappy, transparent, and musky. Of his hunger, Mulkey makes memorable poems that celebrate food and its flavors – whisky, beans, peppered pork belly bacon, lemonade, unclean scrambled eggs, cold sweet tea, onions, beets, tomatoes, wine, and beer. These poems overflow with juice. Poet Denise Duhamel – his co-editor on the new anthology Ice on a Hot Stove: A Decade of Converse MFA Poetry (Clemson University Press) – noted that “Mulkey’s poems hunger for big truths, little truths, love, and justice. His irresistible American vernacular, visceral wisdom, and lyrical honesty make him one of the most authentic poetic voices of his generation.”