David Caplan is the author of six books of literary criticism and poetry, most recently, the poetry collection, Into My Garden. Maureen N. McLane praised the poems, "A searing, shimmering lucidity: among its many offerings, David Caplan's Into My Garden delicately, precisely, unforgettably tracks the fear and love informing Jewish study and longing." Stephanie Burt observed, "These remarkable poems blend spiritual unease with religious confidence, an investigator's fascinated spirit with a sense that the poet has almost—but not quite— come home." The Charles M. Weis Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University, Caplan twice served as a Fulbright lecturer in American literature and received the Virginia Quarterly Review's Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry and an Individual Excellence Award in Criticism from the Ohio Arts Council.

Books by David Caplan:

Other poems on the web by David Caplan:
"In a Hotel"
Three poems
Sixteen poems

David Caplan's Website.

David Caplan According to Wikipedia.

David Caplan on Twitter.

About Into My Garden:

"These remarkable poems blend spiritual unease with religious confidence, an investigator's fascinated spirit with a sense that the poet has almost—but not quite151;come home."
—Stephanie Burt

"A series of evocative poems that ask the big questions—about faith, doubt, love, yearning, and, most powerfully of all, the yearning for knowledge. Caplan also debates the basis of the big questions, asking 'To know/what you feel, not what you ought to feel, /is there anything harder?'"
—Denise Duhamel

"Yes, this is a book of yeshiva study, yeshiva days and nights, and of the avid, ardent, on-fire (and sometimes doubtful and conflicted) longing to understand God's Holy Words in a world of prayerful devotion where 'each syllable / [is] said corrected or repeated until it is.' But to consign these poems solely to the realm of 'religion' or 'theology' or 'scholarly exegesis' is to dismiss Rabbi Schneur Zalman's observation, 'We must live with the times.'"
—Albert Goldbarth

"A searing, shimmering lucidity: among its many offerings, David Caplan's Into My Garden delicately, precisely, unforgettably tracks the fear and love informing Jewish study and longing. One encounters here an unusual sensibility—profound, thoughtful, rigorous, tender. An assured, commanding book which has its sights on something far more important than the merely literary."
—Maureen N. McLane

"'I don't remember half / the prayers I've said, even saying them,' confides David Caplan, bringing American Confessionalism into the Chassidic tradition in this searching and luminous collection."
—Srikanth Reddy

"David Caplan's brilliant new collection takes us into a yeshiva, and into the searching, longing, and dedication of the student mind. As he writes in Into My Garden, 'The more/ you need them, the more words demand.' I close this book thinking deeply not only about faith but also about language—how, whether in poetry or in prayer, it carries us, guides us toward understanding."
—Maggie Smith