David Starkey served as Santa Barbara's 2009-2011 Poet Laureate. The Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College, he is currently Co-editor of Anacapa Review and The California Review of Books, and the Publisher and Co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty-five years, he has published eleven full-length collections of poetry with small presses—most recently Dance, You Monster, to My Soft Song, winner of the 2021 FutureCycle Press Poetry Book Award, Cutting It Loose, and What Just Happened: 210 Haiku Against the Trump Presidency. More than 500 of his poems have appeared in literary journals such as American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner and Southern Review. His textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2022), is in its fourth edition.

Other poems by David Starkey in Verse Daily:
September 11, 2021:   "Damascus" "Three women are gathered round..."
January 27, 2021:   "Auld Lang Syne" "Few will miss the Old Year..."
October 5, 2013:   "Circus Maximus" "Nothing now but grass..."

Books by David Starkey:

Other poems on the web by David Starkey:
"Between the First and Second Dose"
"Inauguration Day"
"The Sinking of the MV Sewol"
"Tomorrow’s Suicides"
"Song"
Six poems
Two poems
Two poems
Two poems

David Starkey's Website.

About Cutting It Loose:

"In the initial poems, Starkey strides through his Sacramento childhood, with ruminations about family, fishing, a dog named Samantha, high school angst, a plumber even, before the unexpected happens: the poet's geography greatly widens. His world experience becomes reflective, peopled with figures such as Klee and Vermeer, Coleridge and Shakespeare, a captain or two of industry. Europe and Asia are here, mythologies that require a dictionary, the occasional peek at the stars and the destinies they offer as in the exquisite "Intransigence of Stars." A friendly—yet learned—collection of poems."
—Gary Soto

"In the title poem of David Starkey's eleventh collection, Cutting It Loose, a boy's father instructs him in a ‘realist' version of catch and release, cutting the caught fish loose with the barb still snagged inside. From this child's dark paradise in 1970s Sacramento, we're cut loose and adrift into poems about the worlds of art and music, foreign cities with their own bloody waters, forward and back in time—to the prescient Greeks and seventeenth-century inventors, to an abandoned zoo in Cancun,to Inauguration Day 2020 and the renewal we were gifted by a poet "aflame" in a yellow coat, to another new year and snapshots of protest, the furious rest of a nursing home, and a gallery of poets past. And always, as we journey, we carry with us, sunk in our gullets, the barb that tugs us back home."
—Peter Grimes

"The poems in David Starkey's new book take us on remarkable travels, to far-off places, to childhood memories, to badland neighborhoods, to quiet moments and heartbreaking disasters, to love and joy and suffering and death--he shows us how, like the fish he cuts loose in the title poem, so many things in our own iridescent lives 'disappear downward into the passing darkness.'"
—Susan Kelly-DeWitt