Barbara Crooker is the author of ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series), which was long-listed for the Julie Suk award and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Radiance, her first book, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature; and The Book of Kells won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Writing by the Sea. Her writing has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and The Bedford Introduction to Literature. She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France, and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. Garrison Keillor has read her poems on The Writer's Almanac, and she has read her poetry all over the country, including The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Library of Congress.

Other poems by Barbara Crooker in Verse Daily:
May 18, 2021:   "A Villanelle for Kim" "If there was a poetry goddess, you were it..."
December 26, 2019:   "Personal History" "Tell me about the light you have lost...."
February 15, 2017:   "My Heart" "I want a new heart..."
August 24, 2013:   "Vaudeville" "Late October, and the sky is that clear blue scrim..."
August 8, 2006:   "Hummingbird" " He comes every day, in his crushed-emerald cape, flashing in front..."
July 11, 2004:  "Walking in Monet's Gardens at Giverny" "with my husband of eighteen years, down a path..."

Other poems on the web by Barbara Crooker:
Two poems
Four poems
"And Despite Everything,"
"Forsythia"
"Pentimento"
"Gratitude"
"Les Amoureux en Bleu"
"Listen"
"In the Middle"
Three poems
Two poems
"Poem with an Embedded Line by Susan Cohen"
"Surfer Girl"
"Bal du Moulin de la Galette"
"Late Painting: Path Under the Rose Arches"
"Grief"
"Reel"
"Hopper's Women"
"Frida Kahlo Speaks"
Five poems
Five poems
Three poems
Two poems
Two poems
Three poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Some October"
"Murmuration"
Two poems
"Solstice"
"Election Ghazal"
"Ode to Chocolate"

Barbara Crooker's Website.

Barbara Crooker on Twitter.

About Slow Wreckage:

"Barbara Crooker's previous poetry collections have gained her a wide readership with superbly crafted poems celebrating the daily joys of what she terms an ordinary life, but she has always written, too, about loss. In this, her tenth book, loss takes center stage as she considers aging, or, as her title brilliantly puts it, the "Slow Wreckage" time inflicts upon us all. In many of these poems, Crooker widens her focus to include the failures of our society, damages inflicted upon us and upon our Earth as a result of our blindness or our country's short-sighted policies. In one poem, addressing Walt Whitman, she asks: "It's the twenty-first century, in America. Can you still hear us singing?" Barbara Crooker wants us all to keep singing in the wreckage. The song she offers is one I hope will be with us for years to come."
—Marjorie Stelmach

"Barbara Crooker ushers us seamlessly into each moment, whether it happened last spring or fifty years ago. Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries and intense pain, in spite of those "delicious burdens" we must carry each day...Her expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the medicine we need to "love in these dangerous times.""
—James Crews

"For years I have been an admirer of Barbara Crooker's poems, her voice and intelligence, its truth and grounded vision offering such specific attention to the world. Slow Wreckage raises her poetic project to yet higher ground, integrating irony, wit, humor, and a metaphysical cast into the difficulties we all come to in age-the scope and range of this collection is remarkable. These poems take up loss as well as love, yet resonate ultimately with praise and thanks, singing authentically as all the best poetry does."
—Christopher Buckley