John Hoppenthaler's first book of poems is Lives of Water (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003). His poetry appears in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Pleiades, 5 AM, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney's, Barrow Street, and elsewhere; his essays, interviews, and reviews in Arts&Letters, Southern Review, Chelsea, Bellingham Review, and the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry. The Poetry Editor of Kestrel, he teaches at East Carolina University in Greenville.

Other poems by John Hoppenthaler in Verse Daily:
October 20, 2002:  "Farm Sitting" "Christy throws a rock— / the barn splinters..."

Books by John Hoppenthaler: Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, Lives of Water

Other poems on the web by John Hoppenthaler:
"Mirage"
Four poems
Two poems
"Tommy's Earthbound Son Gets to Jump Center on Senior Night"
"December Settles In Over HaverStraw Bay"
"Tree House"

About Anticipate the Coming Reservoir:

"It the World is set on wounding us then where do we look to he healed, to find hope or solace or at least a balm for loneliness? Hoppenthaler answers this question kith a paradox we look back to chat wounded us, back to the world. and we do so with the sort of serious, affection that van Gogh described as central to true seeing, to recognizing the relief to he found in the ordinary . . . which which extraordinary "
—James Harms

"Hoppenthaler grounds an exploration of longing and loss in a firm sense of place. From Upstate New York to the Florida coast, to the landscapes that exist only in memory and dream, Hoppenthaler knows well the geographies he traverses, and he maps the lies of the people who inhabit these places with tenderness. This is his nostos."
—Natasha Trethewey

"The pressures are everywhere intense—from above and below—in John Hoppenthaler's Anticipate the Comming Reservoir these clear, good-natured poems are populated with buskers and Tiki bar patrons, rocked-out lovers and squirrelmeat-cooking yahoos, every last one of them scouring the earth for peace or at least a little comfort. They are explorers sailing 'hopeful against the current.' of our funky, suburbs, our big cities and wasted bottomlands: all our wounnded. belated psyches."
—David Baker