Charles Rafferty has a new collection of prose poems from BOA Editions — A Cluster of Noisy Planets. His latest story collection is Somebody Who Knows Somebody (Gold Wake). His novel, Moscodelphia, was published by Woodhall Press. Currently, he co-directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at the Westport Writers' Workshop.

Other poems by Charles Rafferty in Verse Daily:
July 2, 2018:   "Jesus's Brother" "It was difficult living..."
December 25, 2017:   "Forecast" "Famous people have been dying all week and the Christmas tree just..."
January 16, 2016:   "Jesus's Brother" "It was difficult living..."
November 10, 2014:   "The Man With a Missing Dog" "One evening, while searching for a dog..."
June 27, 2011:   Two poems "It is cloudless and moonless and breezeless..."
November 7, 2006:   "Landslide" " Suddenly what loomed..."

Books by Charles Rafferty:

Other poems on the web by Charles Rafferty:
"Poetry"
Three poems
"The Man With a Shirt of Fire"
Three poems
"Ship Inside a Bottle"
"Insomnolence"
Five poems
Two poems
"After Seeing on Google Earth..."
"On Being Asked if I'd Ever Been To Georgia"
"Persistence"
Two poems
Four poems

Charles Rafferty's Website.

Charles Rafferty on Twitter.

About A Cluster of Noisy Planets:

"Inasmuch as Rafferty writes in a hybrid form—the prose poem—one is obliged to be mindful of those canonical precursors that he engages in the traditional Bloomian agon. Such a contest is akin to Jacob wrestling with the Lord's angel in the book of Genesis, feeling those terrible sinews tremble like the strains of some unearthly music. One immediately calls to mind not only Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, but also Georg Trakl, Francis Ponge, and Jean Follain."
—Floyd Collins

"The prose poems in Charles Rafferty's A Cluster of Noisy Planets, precisely and with great authority, document a world that has fewer stars and more ruins. The poems are artifacts that make a case for us to take a journey down paths where 'swans are duplicating their grace' and remind us that the 'chain we forge is father to the rust.' That juxtaposition between the beauty which exists in nature and the impermanence of what human beings create, and won't last, is the nexus where the poems vibrate and reveal, ultimately conveying an urgent call to the reader to see the world and to appreciate what's left of its fragile beauty."
—Christopher Kennedy