Christopher Salerno is the author of five books of poetry. His forthcoming book, "The Man Grave," won the Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books and is available for preorder now. Previous books include "Sun & Urn"(UGA Poetry Prize),"ATM" (Georgetown Poetry Prize),"Minimum Heroic" (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize), and "Whirligig." "How To Write Poetry: A Guided Journal," was published by Calisto Media in 2020. His poetry has received the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, The Founders Prize from RHINO Magazine, the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Award, the Laurel Review Chapbook Prize, and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship. His poems have appeared in New York Times Magazine, New Republic, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Jubilat, and elsewhere. He teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey where he serves as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum.

Other poems by Christopher Salerno in Verse Daily:
April 12, 2017:   "Black Holes" "No stars now..."
September 16, 2011:   "Halloween" "You were a white cocoon shot through with gravel...."

Books by Christopher Salerno:

Other poems on the web by Christopher Salerno:
"The Double Image"
Four poems
Two poems
"Portrait Mode"
Two poems
"In Vitro"
"Scary"
"Documentary"
"Cowboying"

Christopher Salerno's Website.

Christopher Salerno on Twitter.

About Deathbed Sext:

"In the title poem, Christopher Salerno writes, 'I want to waltz with you away from what// once was monstrously male/ about me and I also/ want to survive.' The and here is crucial, and emblematic of the collection, which poem after poem says yes, and. Yes, high and low culture. Yes, both sext and ghost as nouns 'you can verb.' Yes, loving and leaving. Yes, familiar and strange; dead serious and absurd. 'Everything is a piece of something else,' Salerno writes, and everything gets to stay, because these deftly crafted poems are elastic enough to hold it all."
—Maggie Smith

"The title nabbed me, the sext trope hooked me, but the poems—the poems—far exceed the nab and the hook. Numinous, masterfully crafted, rife with allusion, Salerno's lines mark the page with a surgical precision and delicacy. He pins back the flaps of masculinity, its privilege and its vulnerability, its lewdness and its fear, the unarticulated wound of it, 'how some bruises/flower, spread like steam on the mirror/blurring all beauty.' Without false heroics or glibness, Salerno enacts his own sexted desire: 'May we become/to bravery what saying is to the sentence.'"
—Diane Seuss