Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/ HarperCollins in 2008. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers' Award, Guest teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.

Other poems by Paul Guest in Verse Daily:
April 28, 2008:   "Preemptive Elegy" "Another future I don't want to believe in..."
September 11, 2007:   "Poem for the National Hobo Association Poetry Contest" " I will not be there with you but think..."
July 17, 2007:   "Seduction With Entropy" " If you think I'm honest, speak to me..."
May 23, 2007:   "My Nightmare" " My nightmare isn't falling or even falling..."
December 23, 2006:   "Questions for Silence" " In its first thin tide. In the place..."
October 18, 2006:   "The God of Neglect, Overheard" " O hearts fat with custard, and sweet..."
March 24, 2006:   "The Numbers are Not In" " The world is filled with those who want..."
May 12, 2003:  "Apogean" "All this floating is ridiculous, and the stars..."
April 10, 2003:  "The Flesh" "Walking to get medicine / for a pet, I am tempted..."
February 13, 2003:  "The Advent of Zero" "I know that someday you will tire of everything..."
August 15, 2002:  "The Last Words of Alice the Goon" "Understand me now: the light is lace..."

Books by Paul Guest:

Other poems on the web by Paul Guest:
Two poems
Four poems
Five poems
Two poems
Ten poems
"Donald Duck's Lament"
"Poem at Altitude"
"I Know"

Paul Guest According to Wikipedia.

Paul Guest on Twitter.

About Because Everything Is Terrible:

"With vital, pulsating, elegiac poems that puncture the world with their tenderness and awful truths, Guest has once again proven he's a brilliant poet raging both against and in defense of the world. Here are shiver-inducing poems that look steadily into our current destructive times and still manage to sing of love, desire, of something worth saving."
—Ada Limón

"This splendid new collection by Paul Guest begins with a trumpet blast—two blasts, actually, with the first poem describing a post-apocalyptic world from which words have disappeared and the second addressing America as Allen Ginsberg might, saying 'America, you know / the words; sing them with me.' Alternating between sound and silence, ecstasy and despair, Guest struggles as he takes on 'this emergency we call life,' yet he finds much more to praise than to lament. That doesn't mean that praise comes easily: 'It is terrifying / to unhinge my mouth,' he says, 'but I do.' The old Greeks would have called these passionate, noisy poems dithyrambs. I call them contemporary poetry at its very best."
—David Kirby

"As if all the dread and ruin and 'the world's congestive failures' were grafted — like skin, like a slip of a fruit tree — onto American movies, cartoons, and news, and then set on fire and then mourned in an exquisite, elegiac ritual — Paul Guest's poems read like this. They meditate, they hover, they extract the juice from the fractured self, they create a taxonomy of lost things. In place of art which Guest says he no longer enjoys comes this gorgeous work of art."
—Bruce Smith