Dave Bonta is a writer, editor, and web publisher. He's perhaps most widely known as the publisher of Moving Poems, a daily compendium of poetry videos from around the web. His own videopoems have been screened in galleries and festivals in Buenos Aires, Athens, and Leicester, U.K. In 2010, Phoenicia Publishing brought out Odes to Tools, a small book of 25 poems that originally appeared at his literary blog Via Negativa. Another Via Negativa-derived collection, Breakdown: Banjo Poems, was selected by Sascha Feinstein as co-winner of the 2011 Keystone Chapbook Prize and published by Seven Kitchens Press. Ice Mountain is his first full-length print collection. Dave lives on a mountaintop in central Pennsylvania as well as on the internet. He serves on the board of the Juniata Valley Audubon Society, based in Altoona, PA., despite the fact that he says he's "not a real birdwatcher."

Other poems by Dave Bonta in Verse Daily:
June 12, 2010:   "Ode to a Wire Brush" "Never was walking..."

Books by Dave Bonta:

Other poems on the web by Dave Bonta:
"Out of Tune"
"Loggerhead"
Spoil: Selected Poems (Sixty-two poems)
"Leave-taking"

Dave Bonta on Twitter.

Dave Bonta on Facebook.

About Ice Mountain: An Elegy:

"In Bonta's close, daily observations we are instructed in what still remains and what has gone missing. With spare language and his instinctive use of metaphor, Bonta demonstrates a consciousness willing to do battle with those who have, as he writes, pinned down Ice Mountain 'with turbines / like a felled mammoth / the spears still quivering.' We should be thankful for such poems that remind us of the precious offering the world makes. I can't think of anything better to do this winter than to follow this poet's counsel and 'get a bowl of fresh snow / not to eat but just to admire / like cut flowers.'"
—Todd Davis

"Bonta's sparse lines mimic the stark realities of a season that tests the survival of its inhabitants, 'the opossum out at mid-day,' or the rhododendron leaves 'stripped /by starving deer.' This rich and complex forest is in direct contrast with the paucity of life on Ice Mountain under the turbines, which he aptly calls 'flowers for the dead.' Ice Mountain may be lost, but Bonta's poems provide inspiration to protect other mountains and their inhabitants."
—Laura Jackson