James Haug's previous poetry collections include Legend of the Recent Past, Walking Liberty, and The Stolen Car, as well as the chapbooks Scratch and Why I Like Chapbooks. He is a Visiting Lecturer in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and serves as an editor for UMass Press's Juniper Poetry Prize.

Other poems by James Haug in Verse Daily:
November 16, 2016:   "Ian's House" "The bouncer at Ian's house has it pretty easy. The people who..."
June 9, 2016:   "A Box of Records" "Someone placed a box of records by the curb..."
September 25, 2012:   "Geologic Time" "And sometimes I'm just going..."
October 24, 2011:   "North of North" "When I passed on the road a stranger..."
June 11, 2009:   "Idiot Means Good Luck" "Too bad the storm cellar could fit all of us..."
January 25, 2008:   "Root Beer" "We found new combinations of interiors...."
February 20, 2006:   "How It Came to Be Connecticut" " Local weather followed her everywhere...."

Books by James Haug:

Other poems on the web by James Haug:
Two poems
"Eightball"
Three poems
"Hidden Things"
Four poems
Two poems

About Riverain:

"In James Haug's Riverain 'the fact of the matter [is] not a matter of fact.' These gorgeous prose poems are pinwheels viewed through prisms, flipbooks that transmute on each thumb-through, as in 'The house was playing house as we played house inside it...' and 'A house of driftwood is opposed to its nature. Unlike driftwood, houses prefer to stay put.' It's astonishingly unmooring to encounter this brilliantly baffled brain: 'My thought shifted in a big meaningful way, like a parking officer opening his ticket pad.'"
—Matthea Harvey

"In Riverain, James Haug maps a town that is both particular and many, just as the river within it manages to appear constant despite the perpetual flux of its body. In wonderful, understatedly fantastic prose, Haug lets each poem follow its train of thought with a calm assertiveness, pushing its logic forward like a talky Vasko Popa. These poems grabbed my brain warmly, and I was a glad visitor to their timeless small town America, where 'It's a fine thing to be helped, to climb a ladder during a full moon.'"
—Christopher DeWeese

"Riverain gifts us an atlas of an unnamed valley situated around a curious river. By curious, I mean this river thinks, wonders, reverses course, and covers itself with snow, and yet is more reliable than any of the townspeople perambulating along its banks. Be they playful or profound, these poems surprise and delight. As one of Riverain's narrators confides, 'It was the end of our beliefs, the beginning of our wanderings.' Haug is a master at making the mundane magical and the mystical common. His plainspoken encounters with the denizens of the river valley never succumb to the burden of expectations, for they, like the river, are joyfully unpredictable and alive."
—William Waltz