“If we must crave and end, and if we must do it in this particular moment of human and geologic time—and, of course, we must—how lucky we are to have Mouth as our companion.”
Molly spencer
Cornerstone Press, 2026
Thank goodness that Amorak Huey understands our craving for skillful poems that are unafraid to be both sweet and rude. We need the mega-poem called “Bodies, in Concert,” the bawdy aubades, the lines that admit: “our greatest fear is morning comes / our greatest fear is mourning comes.” Threaded among the ironic odes and the concerns of mid-life commitments are quick, piercing considerations of mortality and ecological peril. — SANDRA BEASLEY
Bloomsbury Academic, 2nd ed, 2024
with W. Todd Kaneko
Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko, by stressing “practice rather than interpretation,” have made a poetry writing textbook that dances in the mind, even as it takes all of us back to the pleasure and hard work of our art.
KEITH TAYLOR, on the first edition
Fully revamped and expanded, this second edition offers a complete introduction to the art and craft of writing poetry. Mapping out 38 foundational elements of poetry Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko use these elements as starting points for discussion questions and writing prompts.
With a focus on contemporary poems, the anthology features a truly diverse and global line-up of poets and poems to illustrate the elements and craft discussed in the book. Featuring all-new chapters on traditional poetic forms, prosody, writing poems that engage the current moment, and the value and ethics of imitation, this is the ultimate companion to studying and practicing the craft of poetry.
Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy, the fourth collection from award-winning poet Amorak Huey, is an unflinching, humorous meditation on American masculinity and fatherhood. Drawing on fictional characters, cultural figures, and personal stories, Huey deftly weaves an intergenerational tale about coming of age as a boy in the twentieth century and becoming a father in the twenty-first. In a collection built around the narrative structure of a joke, the poems’ speakers reflect on the complex intersections of childhood, war, love, pop culture, and parenting.
Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy deconstructs the enduring notion of American patriarchy and explores the delineations between collective and individual memory. Playful and profound, nostalgic but not naïve, these poems trace a masterful journey of personal discovery and fatherly love.
Sundress Publications, 2021
“Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy is about more, of course, than dads, more than fathers and sons, though these poems are wonderfully full of them; it’s a deprogramming manual, dissecting and dismantling all the rusty tropes and tales of what it means to be a man or a boy in this modern world.” —AMBER SPARKS
Sundress Publications, 2019
“If poems are magic, then the poems of Boom Box are rife with the magic of childhood in guitar-solo riffs of splendor and nostalgia. Amidst sweeping narratives, the past stands as a monument to be worshipped instead of forgotten. The sorrow, the thrill, the sex, the music, and the awkwardness, are all captured as if in time capsules—these are poems of loss and marrow and place, of time and the wars it wields. They are profound in their honesty, bittersweet, heartbreaking, yet redemptive.”
— CHELSEA DINGMAN
Cloudbank Books, 2018
Cover photo by Justin Hamm
“All of the lines in these poems are my favorite lines. It breaks my heart a little to find out what happens in the next sentence, and that s exactly what I come to poetry for. Nothing else can range so quickly between the hundreds of things heroically trying to matter right now, and Amorak Huey s funny, necessary, generous, declarative poems are proof.”
— CATIE ROSEMURGY
Sundress Publications, 2015
“… a mash up of domestic life and celebrity culture—the beautiful monotony of marriage to a super model, heroic personas professing to their beloveds, a rock star’s immortal prowess shows signs of aging. These poems are insightful and funny, but best of all they are jubilant about all our small human failings adding up to love. … What rises in each manifestation of these love stories is the persistence of possibility in all its bright pulsing urgency.
— TRACI BRIMHALL
Chapbooks
Tram Editions, 2025
Cover paintings by Sheila Grant
“… hums with poems that play with heat (of love, of climate change), with epistemology (of climate change, of love), and with the kind of extreme brevity that reminds us how poems don’t need much at all to cut us down, or to the quick. … Small poem enthusiasts should be very grateful indeed that Amorak Huey is working his miniature magic at the same time we’re on this earth.” — TOM SNARSKY
Diode Editions, 2021
Diode Chapbook Prize winner
Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Short List
Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award 1st Runner-Up
These collaboratively written poems explore identity, masculinity, fame, and music. Partly a mythologized biography of heavy metal guitarist Slash, partly a fictionalized story of the complex relationship between Slash and his longtime bandmate Axl Rose.
from the End of Happy Hollow Road
Porkbelly Press, 2016
This collection investigates place and the things that memory and reflection have made of it. Poems are titled after locations specific to a farm where the speaker played as a child. It becomes a landscape of vivid details coalescing into a map of the self, an ever deepening investigation of recollection & the things we carry with us.
Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014 (out of print)
This handmade chapbook from Hyacinth Girl Press was Amorak Huey’s debut poetry collection. Each poem riffs on a punny title and explores the behind-the-scenes life of a different circus performer. These are poems of performance and persona, light and dark, public and private.