About

About Sean Singer

“Sean Singer’s is a wholly original, unsettling and outright uncanny imagination.” —Tracy. K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States (2017-2019)

Sean Singer is the author, most recently, of Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. His earlier collections are Honey and Smoke (Eyewear Publishing,  2015), and Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Sean holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark, and has been awarded fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He shares daily poetry curations and weekly essays on craft at his substack, The Sharpener.

PRAISE FOR SEAN SINGER

Sean Singer is a poet. The inventiveness, the singularity and apparent newness of his language are recognizable through all the variations of subject, form, tone. It is what conveys his projected representation of the obsession that is his theme: its sweetness, its momentum, its solitude, its terrors. It provides the consistent, disturbing authority of poem after poem. —W. S. Merwin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971 and 2009; and the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005

Sean Singer’s Honey & Smoke is made of life’s raw lyrical energy, where jazz becomes a spiritual compass. The poet’s satirical wit drives each poem toward intimacy. There’s a buoyancy in this urgent collection, where the real world and the internal world converge. —Yusef Komunyakaa, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Sean is a poet. When you meet him, you might not immediately recognize that that’s what he is, but you know he’s an artist—and not the flaky, posing kind of artist. He’s on some other kind of plane of the imaginary that’s different from the rest of us. It’s an intense space and it manifests in his work, his dedication to poetry. The combination of that intensity and his depth of his work are his posture in the world.—Adrian Matejka, editor of Poetry Magazine