Joshua McKinney is the author of three previous books of poetry: Mad Cursive (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2012), The Novice Mourner (Bear Star Press, 2005), and Saunter (University of Georgia, 2002). He is a recipient of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, the Dickinson Prize, the Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is coeditor of the online ecopoetry zine, Clade Song, and teaches at California State University Sacramento.

Other poems by Joshua McKinney in Verse Daily:
June 8, 2015:   "Thou" "While I stood there, bewildered..."
December 16, 2012:   "[Yes, I studied. Oftentimes, death]" "Yes, I studied. Oftentimes, death..."
May 7, 2003:  "In Earnest" "Fall's gold is gone. The American..."

Books by Joshua McKinney:

Other poems on the web by Joshua McKinney:
Four poems
Three poems
Three poems
"Novum"
"Glory"
"Vestige"
"March Ghazal"

About Small Sillion:

"Joshua McKinney is a poet of keenest attunement. In Small Sillion he plows furrows in unattended, taken-for-granted scapes of land and mind to discover the wonder of 'something/sacred something wholly/mundane.' This poet's tensile attention balances at the boundary of language and witness, grappling with the ways that language is incommensurate with experience. McKinney's poetry nonetheless ventures farther, both sensuous and otherworldly: his is a lyricism 'aware as the nerve current sang in its flesh' that tenderly, gracefully pursues fulfillment 'without knowing the nature of what it points to."
—Elizabeth Robinson

"Its every line worked into shine by the poet's meticulous ear, Joshua McKinney's Small Sillion is devotion enacted: a vow to make the work of words matter, to make words into matter, by attending to the world with acute attention and tender care. Like the singular singing of Gerard Manley Hopkins, these meticulously sculpted poems attempt to render visible the invisible by enfleshing the word with 'the phenomenon of pungent sound,' limning the inscapes suggested by encounters with birds and trees and other emissaries of life outside of human language and consciousness. To truly encounter the otherness alive outside us and to write of it, to persist in such endeavors—these are acts whose faith is born of an unusual openness, the poet 'aware as the nerve current sang in its flesh.' How quickly the mundane opens out onto otherwise in these loving lyrics that bring 'each creature//inside the soul//of our own flesh.'"
—Brian Teare

"In his luminous fourth collection, Joshua McKinney harvests the threads of his affection to loving fruition. Via poems indebted to the ground—that increasingly denuded and over ploughed place we call the earth—the poet tenderly graphs the region of our ultimate dispossession and somehow makes it feel like home. Both rooted and rootless, and always in the midst of what can be seen or sung, these poems seek 'Something joyful, something woeful as the oldest sound. . . .' Small Sillion is the Book of Psalms for the 21st century."
—Claudia Keelan