Barbara Crooker's first collection, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was also a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize. Her second book, Line Dance (Word Press, 2008) won The Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence. C & R Press published her third book, More, in 2010. Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press) came out in 2015; Les Fauves is her seventh full-length collection. Among her awards are the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the WB Yeats Society of NY Poetry Prize, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in literature, and writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; the Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France; and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan, Ireland. Her work is included in The Bedford Introduction to Literature and The Bedford Introduction to Poetry, and she has given readings all over the country, including The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, The Library of Congress, The Festival of Faith and Writing, and Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium.

Other poems by Barbara Crooker in Verse Daily:
August 24, 2013:   "Vaudeville" "Late October, and the sky is that clear blue scrim..."
August 8, 2006:   "Hummingbird" " He comes every day, in his crushed-emerald cape, flashing in front..."
July 11, 2004:  "Walking in Monet's Gardens at Giverny" "with my husband of eighteen years, down a path..."

Books by Barbara Crooker:

Other poems on the web by Barbara Crooker:
Five poems
Five poems
Three poems
Two poems
Two poems
Three poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Some October"
"Murmuration"
Two poems
"Solstice"
"Election Ghazal"
"Ode to Chocolate"

Barbara Crooker's Website.

About Les Fauves:

"Barbara Crooker's images, metaphors, and music are so enjoyable that we are shocked when she cuts close to the bone. And yet we knew she would, because she is a serious poet, detailing both time and space. Poetry lives in her. Here she focuses on Les Fauves, the 'wild beasts,' a group of painters in sync with one another. They did not just stand the test of time; they defined time. Crooker's extraordinary ability to write lines that float on air, examine the ekphrastic poem, and drift downstream on lily pads open for us that world, that glorious and exhilarating world. You will return to this book repeatedly because it is alive."
—Kelly Cherry

"Barbara Crooker's Les Fauves speaks for all of us who feel there's been a big mistake: we were meant to be born in Paris, to have grown up eating baguettes in the shadow of the book stalls on the Seine—yet somehow here we are in Cleveland or Duluth or Pittsburgh, eating cheeseburgers and watching Fox News. What went wrong? This sense of cosmic injustice fuels these beautiful meditations on food and art, language and love. But if her subject is France, in all its sensual splendor, her sensibility is pure Keatsian, passionately in love with 'this sweet, sweet world.' Barbara Crooker makes me believe—with gratitude—that if we live well and attentively our lives will grow even richer, even sweeter, as we age into our autumns."
—George Bilgere

"Because Barbara Crooker's poems read easily, it can be easy to overlook the masterly craft of her work. For example, in her latest volume Les Fauves, Crooker is a standout with the monorhyme ('Scrimshaw') and the abecediary ('Alpha/Omega: Double Helix,' 'This American Life'). She is like someone who has memorized a sonnet who can recite it nonchalantly at a moment's notice. Crooker also shares a sensibility with many of the artists she writes about, as in Vincent Van Gogh's 'The Flowering Orchard, 1888': 'I want to be bathed in this radiance, / live here in a corner of the picture, raise / my face to the glow like the overhead light / in my mother's kitchen, and never grow old.' Crooker's special gift is that she makes you fall in love with the world over and over again."
—Kim Bridgford