Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry, including Les Fauves and The Book of Kells. Her first book, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature. Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

Other poems by Barbara Crooker in Verse Daily:
February 15, 2017:   "My Heart" "I want a new heart..."
August 24, 2013:   "Vaudeville" "Late October, and the sky is that clear blue scrim..."
August 8, 2006:   "Hummingbird" " He comes every day, in his crushed-emerald cape, flashing in front..."
July 11, 2004:  "Walking in Monet's Gardens at Giverny" "with my husband of eighteen years, down a path..."

Books by Barbara Crooker:

Other poems on the web by Barbara Crooker:
"Grief"
"Reel"
"Hopper's Women"
"Frida Kahlo Speaks"
Five poems
Five poems
Three poems
Two poems
Two poems
Three poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Some October"
"Murmuration"
Two poems
"Solstice"
"Election Ghazal"
"Ode to Chocolate"

Barbara Crooker's Website.

Barbara Crooker on Twitter.

About Some Glad Morning:

"'Darkness / will not overtake us,' insists Barbara Crooker, who writes poems of deep happiness. How untrendy! one might say. Where's the political? Where's grief? They're here too, underpinning these poems, but not allowed governance. 'O / day! You are the antidote / to the bitter news of the world.' If we have only one life, better to enjoy each glad morning, and some evenings too: 'So let me lean back in this red Adirondack / chair as dusk makes us all equal, happy for the blend / of herbs and gin, pure sapphire, the dividend of olive / at the end.' Like Edward Hopper, one of the artists whose work Crooker inhabits in these pages, her 'subject is light,' interior as well as exterior, and the birds and trees and humans who revel in it."
—Michael Waters

"Barbara Crooker's admiration and affection for visual art, as evidenced in numerous ekphrastic poems, is witnessed in the vividly descriptive—perhaps painterly—vocabulary she exhibits throughout Some Glad Morning. Indeed, she also frequently seems to 'speak in the tongues of flowers' with a lyrical language borrowed from elements of the physical world around her, especially when displaying human interaction with aspects of nature, food, music, and those others for whom we care and with whom we share these gifts. Consequently, Crooker's colorfully textured and sensitively expressive poetry always offers delight to readers' eyes and ears."
—Edward Byrne

"Barbara Crooker's poems invite us into her garden, into castles and museums, into the rich complexity of life. Using language full of passion and metaphor, Crooker paints each line, like an artist, with precision and beauty. She celebrates even the smallest moment showing us that time is slippery as a silver fish. Cheers to Crooker's dry martinis, to her wit and wisdom, to this remarkable collection."
—Carol Was