Jeff Simpson was born and raised in southwest Oklahoma and received his MFA from Oklahoma State University. In 2010 he was selected as a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, BLIP, Copper Nickel, Harpur, Poet Lore, H_NGM_N, and elsewhere. He is also the founding editor of The Fiddleback, an online arts & literature journal.

Books by Jeff Simpson:

Other poems on the web by Jeff Simpson:
Three poems

Jeff Simpson's Home Page.

Jeff Simpson on Twitter.

About Vertical Hold:

"This amazing first book--part sprinter, part long distance runner, part song, part sly wit, part visionary, part historian, part sophisticate, part roughneck--smokes like a grass fire across the Oklahoma landscape right into the whole world. There's not much Jeff Simpson hasn't observed and thought through in these big, gorgeously crafted poems, and I know I'll read Vertical Hold many times without exhausting its energy and romance.
—Lisa Lewis

"Jeff Simpson is a poetic omnivore, devouring America right down to its bones, which may in fact resemble Mountain Dew bottles melted into emeralds. His poems find their inspiration in the cultural detritus of an American childhood, transforming those 'beauteous forms' into poems of geniality, wit and democratic accessibility. 'You could read Wordsworth or the back of a Kix cereal box/ and find beauty and truth,' he asserts, and by the end of Vertical Hold I am ready to believe him. What choice do we have in a world in which Tintern Abbey has been supplanted by Miami Vice, Led Zeppelin, and Highlander 2: The Quickening?"
—Campbell McGrath