Peter Jay Shippy is the author of Thieves Latin, winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize, Alphaville (BlazeVox, 2006), and How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic (Rose Metal Press, 2007). He has been awarded writing fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005 he received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry. He teaches writing at Emerson College.

Books by Peter Jay Shippy:

Other poems on the web by Peter Jay Shippy:
Two poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Self-Portrait & Other Calculations"
"Arf"
Two poems
Two poems
Four poems
"Egghead"
Two poems
Two poems
"Soul"
"The Tragic Conversion of Keith Richards"
"Futurism Today"
Three poems

Peter Jay Shippy's Website.

About A Spell of Songs:

"One day, not so long ago, Meter Oppenheim walked past Edward Hopper in Paris, and an electric current passed between, and from that current was born Peter Jay Shippy, who, as a child, 'rescued fly mummies from the spider's mandala.' Shippy's narratives are all twists and turns, never going where you might expect, which is their ravishing, dizzying wonder. 'A mouth raises its meat slipper, a pink flag, no surrender.' Reading Shippys A spell of songs is better than channeling Walt Whitman while ingesting psilocybin and purple gumdrops. For one thing, you can't go wrong."
—John Yau

"Against incessant pressure from the plethora of fundamentalists and fundamentalisms to confine us all to (and make us all confess just) one world, Peter Jay Shippy's A spell of songs pushes back, by presenting (and inviting us into) many, some familiar, some haunted, some luminous. Who would not join an exodus into such promised lands as these, led by a prophet such as this, found as an infant not among bulrushes but 'in frozen foods, stretched out / in the cephalopod case rowing the air, / praising the canned corn moon'?"
—H. L. Hix