Adam Tavel was born in Clinton, Maryland, and holds degrees from Lebanon Valley College, the University of Toledo, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of two previous poetry collections: The Fawn Abyss (Salmon Poetry, 2017) and Plash & Levitation (University of Alaska Press, 2015), which won the Permafrost Book Prize in Poetry.

Other poems by Adam Tavel in Verse Daily:
August 19, 2017:   "Against Elegy" "Mother told me when the snoozing drunk..."

Books by Adam Tavel:

Other poems on the web by Adam Tavel:
Four poems
"Cain"
Two poems
Three poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Room to Roome"
"The Rocket"
"Camp Loss"
"Letter to Schnell Written on Glovebox Napkins"
"Our Lady of Crabapple Hill"
"Sister Roberta's Lecture Notes on the Shroud of Turin"
"Letter to my Wife Written on the Walls of a Blanket Fort"
Two poems

Adam Tavel's Website.

Adam Tavel on Facebook.

About Catafalque:

"Is there anything Adam Tavel can't write about? In Catafalque, he gives us a book as wonderfully curious as its title. We ve got an ode to an expletive. Turkey buzzards talking about sonnets. A decapitated wind-up toy shepherd boy. Just in case that's not enough to make you read these poems, know this: with his deft use of form and keen eye for the unusual, Tavel tirelessly pursues perception. It's not enough to say that he creates images; rather, he engineers images in such a way that we, too, become makers, seeing something of reality in every stanza. Chances are, you haven't seen anything this way before."
—Erica Dawson

"In Catafalque, Adam Tavel makes iambs sizzle. The poems are formal but never confined by tradition; they're elevated and energized by meter and rhyme rather than slavish to it. Catafalque is steeped in elegy, with speakers as varied as Joan of Arc's executioner, an armless He-Man figure, and Eazy-E, whose imagined last letter to his children is both gritty and tender: 'Morphine dreams/ are Compton, August, you girls sweat-slick/ from double-dutch while I roll a pitbulled/ baseball for you boys to practice grounders.' Again and again, Tavel subverts our expectations, showing us how nimble and dynamic metrical poetry can be."
—Maggie Smith

"Adam Tavel's poems are at once worldly and intimate, ranging from tender and acutely rendered lyrics of parenthood and family history to historical monologues and quirky character studies. But this collection is no mere miscellany. It resonates thanks to a formal dexterity that is displayed whether the poet is working in free verse or offering precise and muscular sonnets. These finely shaped and heartfelt poems deserve to be read -- and, especially, to be re-read."
—David Wojahn