Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron. He is the editor of the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press, where he was the director for a number of years. Some of his previous poetry collections include Pelican Tracks and Winter Amnesties. He has received the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council.

Other poems by Elton Glaser in Verse Daily:
August 1, 2005:   "Half-Numb from Winter, on a Morning Almost Warm" "Go for wisdom to the iris, beard..."
March 31, 2004:  "Interior Lighting" "In leaps and staggers, in the beaten-down..."
July 22, 2003:  "The Runes, the Brute Remedies" "Leaves down, and day down, and mercury..."
July 27, 2002:  "Heroic Roses" "Heroic they'd have to be, the way / I let them struggle...."

About Here and Hereafter:

"Here and Hereafter is a sly guidebook to the intricacies and mysteries of human existence. Glaser blends the charm and wit of a Southern storyteller with the ironic gaze of an Ohio suburbanite to create 'a pickled idiom / For the slow torment of the middle class.' A poet of place, Glaser's unique and often hilarious perspective comes in handy in Spain and Italy, where a speaker wonders if the Virgin Mary ever had the postpartum blues. Glaser is a poet you want to travel with—his vivid, eloquent lines are full of surprise and adventure."
—Denise Duhamel

"A Louisiana wise guy living in the heart of the heart of the country, Elton Glaser in these poems celebrates available joys. In addition to his domestic axis of Ohio and his native Louisiana, here are trips to Italy and Spain, and poems that survey the darker face of American religiosity, peoms in praise of gardens and food and other simple joys, poems about Bonnard and Roman household gods. As always, his language is exact and surprising. For wit, and for the precision of right words in the right order, few of his contemporaries can equal this poet."
—Ed Ochester