Mark Cox teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and in the Vermont College MFA Program. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, the 1999 Oklahoma Book Award, and the 1999 Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the Kansas Arts Commission, the Vermont Council on the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He has served as Poetry Editor of both Passages North and of Cimarron Review, and as Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina. His book Knowing is forthcoming in 2024.
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Barbells of the GodsPoemsFrom"Running My Fingers Through My Beard On Bolton Road"
Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you
in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look
for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.
Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that
we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened
between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let
the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,
to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to
make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth
and yell across the lawns to her.
Barbells of the Gods:Poems -
Barbells of the GodsPoemsFrom"Horizontals"
I think I came to understand there’s only one storm,
it just keeps circling the earth till it gets to us again,
and that the pounding I felt even in my hair the first
time you innocently brushed it back
was just two ordinary clouds boiling over that edge
where what we can’t see stops and starts
and slamming into each other
with an inevitability we’d eventually have to imitate.
Barbells of the Gods:Poems -
Barbells of the GodsPoemsFrom"Poem For the Name Mary"
Like smoke in a bottle, like
hunger, sometimes light fits,
wraps itself around a person
or thing and doesn’t let go.
The light becomes a name,
and that name becomes a voice
through which light speaks to us.
Maybe this is what a friend means
when she says there is a pair of lips
in the air, maybe this is desire
and need too. Or maybe
this is just how to love a potato,
how to see what the potato sees,
the childish, white arms that reach out
through its eyes into the dark of our cabinets
to bless them.
Barbells of the Gods:Poems
“Vivid memory intertwines with a rigorously envisioned present and future. Cox has touched on these matters in earlier books, but not so consistently or with such uncanny thematic force. He speaks across a huge range of subject and feeling, from layered fury to astringent violence to lamentation, from guarded hopefulness to affirmations at once quiet and stirring. It is, altogether, an astonishing and moving tour de force.” —Tar River Poetry [on Natural Causes]
"[Mark Cox's] latest work showcas[es] a broad range of poetic talents—from narrative to didactic musings to a sure-handed facility with familiar conceits . . .” —The Witchita Eagle [on Thirty-Seven Years From the Stone]
"The poems of Cox's latest volume are inventive and intelligent without forsaking accessibility." —American Poet [on Thirty-Seven Years From the Stone]
"These poems are alive with people getting by, loving, failing, making the gestures which define them. In this confident, large-hearted and enormously readable book, Cox demonstrates what might seem to be impossible: how a voice can be at once tender and toughminded, passionate and casually down-to-earth, disillusioned and thoroughly glad to be alive. Here's a surprising, unmistakable poet offering some of the most generous and compassionate of contemporary lyrics." —Mark Doty [on Thirty-Seven Years From the Stone]
Selected Works
