Allison Joseph's most recent poetry collections are Lexicon (Red Hen Press), Professional Happiness (Backbone Press), The Last Human Heart (Diode Editions) and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press). She lives, writes, and teaches in Carbondale, Illinois, where she's part of the creative writing faculty at Southern Illinois University. She is the widow of Jon Tribble, the late poet and editor.

Other poems by Allison Joseph in Verse Daily:
September 30, 2020:   "To All the Clocks I've Killed" "Sorry little timepieces all in a row..."
March 4, 2019:   "To Sylvia" "Mistress of the miserable..."
September 22, 2018:   "The Liars" "How I admire their skills..."
March 30, 2018:   "Show Off" "Come flaunt your imperfections..."
October 14, 2016:   "Multitudes" "I'm a big city girl and a small town woman..."
December 4, 2015:   "Sidewalks" "Why should I be the one who walks afraid..."

Books by Allison Joseph:

Other poems on the web by Allison Joseph:
"Soul Train"
"Play"
"Little Epiphanies"
Six poems
Two poems
Four poems
Twenty poems
Two poems
"On Being Told I Don't Speak Like a Black Person"
"Running While Black"
Five poems

Allison Joseph's Website.

Allison Joseph on Twitter.

About Lexicon:

"Lexicon is an investigation of form rendered in a uniquely sensual, sensory exploration of language whose depth and breadth encompass a multitude of poetic, lyric, and linguistic traditions that reflect the dialects, cultures, and communities in which Allison Joseph is fluent. The iambic beat of the English language is at the heart of her verse whose fluidity and sonic play deliver a cornucopia of lines grounded in a meditation on embodiment, class, race, gender, sexuality, time, and place. Food metaphors abound in a sexy, sense-laden feast of images served with an exuberant yet intellectually meticulous command of forms such as villanelles and sestinas whose recursiveness mirrors the poet's relationship with time and memory. In Joseph's capable hands, the oft-maligned and often dusty ars poetica sings with a fresh music and emotional candor that marries formal and narrative lyrical poetry. In this remarkable collection, the poet is at the height of her powers."
—Wendy Chin-Tanner

"Allison Joseph's Lexicon is poetic celebration, elegy, and most of all, song. Exploiting tensions between content and form, body and body image, women and misogyny, race and stereotype, these are poems that thrum and churn within their own well-wrought urns—'bodies pushing words beyond the real'—frequently calling out the histories and hypocrisies of their own formal embodiments. The poems in Lexicon hum, croon, and belt out their refrains with heartbreaking candor, shimmer, and sashay—revealing a poet so deft with form that she can easily code-shift between violence and ecstasy, side-eye and wit, lyric torch song and funk. Allison Joseph is a poet whose skilled craft and remarkable voice combine to make a remarkable music, and this book is both powerhouse and pleasure."
—Lee Ann Roripaugh