John Hoppenthaler's books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P). His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, Blackbird, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks. He is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University.

Other poems by John Hoppenthaler in Verse Daily:
December 23, 2023:   "The Nature of Nature" "A bluebird shows itself, disappears..."
September 5, 2023:   "Bourbon, Cigarettes, Van Morrison" "The wind's picked up, rattling..."
April 24, 2015:   "The Gentleman Hunters Run Their Hounds" "Let's hasten through this early spring plague..."
February 17, 2008:   "College Town" "Dinner tonight is chili dogs with onion, pepperoni rolls..."
October 20, 2002:  "Farm Sitting" "Christy throws a rock / the barn splinters..."

Other poems on the web by John Hoppenthaler:
Five poems
Two poems
"Siple Dome"
Three poems
"domestic garden"
"Buffeted"
Four poems
"Nocturne"
"Eureka Springs"
"Anticipate the Coming Reservoir"
"Ice Jesus"

John Hoppenthaler on Twitter

About Night Wing over Metropolitan Area:

"In Night Wing over Metropolitan Area, we are given John Hoppenthaler's signature attention to beauty and ruin as they are woven into the natural world—as well as the complicated nature of the human heart. There is a dreamlike, haunting quality to many of these poems, as 'Ghost / notes sound the morning mist' and we are instructed to 'See it there, up in the branches, // something that looks human kicking until / it's only ghost nerves and evening wind.' These are poems of deep attention, fine and nuanced in their perceptions. They are meditations that spend 'the whole night // pointing at the moon,' with deftly crafted verses full of 'song and praise, haunted chants / the prayer house can't hold.'"
—Brian Turner

"I needed these poems from John Hoppenthaler. There is so much beauty in his poems, but no sentimentality. There is raw feeling, but it has purpose and provides service for our rattled hearts. There are 'scrimshaw clouds,' but they hover above a grieving woman in a house dress by the side of the road. There is 'remembered sunlight' and the 'currents of time,' and they flow through a child with OCD who might have been exorcised in past centuries, and through a father who collapses into a snowbank. Hoppenthaler's attention to the specifics of nature—hummingbirds, Japanese maples, snowfall—are like embroidery, stitched through and holding together the sharp memories and images of loss, longing, regret, and hope. These poems nurtured me."
—Rosanne Cash