Rob Carney is originally from Washington state. He is the author of four previous books, including 88 Maps (Lost Horse Press 2015), which was named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and Weather Report (Somondoco Press 2006), which won the Utah Book Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, Poecology, Sugar House Review, Terrain: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments, and dozens of other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for seven of the poems included in his forthcoming collection The Book of Sharks. He is a Professor of English and Literature at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City.

Other poems by Rob Carney in Verse Daily:
February 24, 2016:   "Every Place I've Ever Lived Is Gone:" "pecan groves outside of Lafayette..."
June 11, 2011:   "How Shedding Feathers Taught The Children to Make a Kite..." "A boy and a girl, then a dozen more..."
January 14, 2003:  "More Than Ashes to Ashes, Not Just Dust to Dust" " In the Old Songs about Washington, if a fisherman drowned..."

Books by Rob Carney:

Other poems on the web by Rob Carney:
"When's My Luck Gonna Change"
"The Mother of the Mountains"
Three poems
"You Dropped Your Horoscope"
"Tell Us One of Your Memories"
"Tell Us One of Your Proverbs"
Seven pages of poems
Two poems
Three poems
Four poems

About The Book of Sharks:

"The Book of Sharks is an accomplishment at the micro and macro level. Rob Carney has crafted lines that you'll want to save for your next tattoo inside of efficient poems that touch on creation myth, forgotten industries, and slices of life in villages he manufactures with a creator's divine spark. All of this works on its own inside of a larger, complex quilt that he has woven into an intricate pattern that revisits themes, finishes stories, and reminds you that The Book of Sharks is a larger poem that is greater than just its sharpened teeth."
—Jesse Parent

"In precise, sharp lines, Rob Carney's The Book of Sharks builds and interrogates myth and myth-makers, turning to sharks to also turn inward and outward, exploring one's purpose and place and the stories one tells to make meaning. Here, poems wash out and return like the tides they describe, inviting the reader to feel their weight, as if 'to disappear under the stories / as though they were waves.' In the end, whether in water, sky, or story, Carney invites us to consider the essential motivation of 'moving, arriving, being full,' what it means to seek."
—Callista Buchen

"'Some say sharks are the ocean's anger at us for being in its future,' writes Rob Carney. I say poems are sharks' way of forgiving us for the soup, the necklaces, the movies, and the mascots. And, let's not even mention climate change. Rob Carney's trenchant, probing poems circle around the self, not so much sensing blood but, perhaps even more dangerously, searching for understanding. Part confession, part documentation, part meditation, these smartly crafted lyrics explore how and why we have and have not allowed sharks (metaphors for so many things) to swim into our lives. This is a major effort from a talented poet."
—Dean Rader