Derek Mong is the author of four poetry collections, including When the Earth Flies into the Sun (Saturnalia Books, 2024). Individual poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely: the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, and the New England Review. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (White Pine Press); they also co-edit the literary journal At Length. He currently lives in Indiana, where he chairs the English Department at Wabash College. He's a contributing editor at Zócalo Public Square.

Other poems by Derek Mong in Verse Daily:
May 25, 2023:   "To Assemble This Poem Properly" "begin from above. The first line wrote itself..."
November 12, 2018:   "We Live Our Lives through Other People's Bodies" "till we' re no more than campfires..."
April 4, 2018:   "Heliotrope, Or Man's Mind Angles Inevitably Toward God" "No sliver of self    held in reserve, no..."
June 15, 2011:   "Speculation" "Have I cornered you, my self, again..."
March 14, 2007:   "Blackout" "Little blue bolt on a split wire..."

Other poems on the web by Derek Mong :
Two poems
"To the First Speaker"
"Colloquy with St. Mary of Egypt"
"The Air"
Four poems
"The Sun"
"The White Wash On"
"Old Tyme with a Y"

Derek Mong's Website.

Derek Mong on Twitter.

About When the Earth Flies into the Sun:

"When the Earth Flies into the Sun is a surprisingly genial read, but don't be fooled: that creature has claws in it. There is much here about parenting, and travel, and art (as in the wonderful poem about Lucian Freud that is the volume's fulcrum). But this is clearly a book of the 21st century; all the poisons we have collectively created, and all the dangers nature expresses, seep through. Mong can soar, and he can rhyme, but he can also talk to us human to human, straight on. The family that makes continual appearances—two parents and a child—is wonderfully appealing and terrifyingly fragile. Where will they all be when the century ends, if we make it that far? 'Thank god for kids,' the narrator muses. 'Kids don't loathe the species they're extending.'"
—T.R. Hummer

"I love Derek Mong's When the Earth Flies into the Sun because it reflects on the questions I can't stop asking myself these days: What does it mean to be both a parent and an artist? How do we balance a life of love and care with our own desires to make? Even more urgent: How do we celebrate beginnings amid our fragility, our catastrophes, our inevitable endings? Through carefully crafted lines, Mong demonstrates not only his eye for imagery and ear for gorgeous rhyme and musicality; these beautiful poems also invite the reader to ponder how we live in this world and what we leave behind."
—Marianne Chan

"When the Earth Flies into the Sun synthesizes satire, empathy, and ruthlessness toward 'a dawn of lost receipts and dial tones.' When Derek Mong writes, 'My days are lit like Emmy statuettes'; or, 'earthquakes whispered up their trees'; or, of fog, 'indecision recast'—I could go on—he lets me in on mysteries that I seem to have always known. In his effortless music, these candid poems declare rhyme and ambition like an open secret: the play serious, the heart paroxysmal."
—Randall Mann