Joshua McKinney's fifth book of poetry, i, won the inaugural John Ridland Poetry Prize and was recently published by Gunpowder Press. His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. His other awards include the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online ecopoetics zine, Clade Song.

Other poems by Joshua McKinney in Verse Daily:
October 15, 2019:   "Morphology" "The wind taught me that I am not a hawk..."
June 8 2015:   "Thou" "While I stood there, bewildered..."
December 16, 2012:   "[Yes, I studied. Oftentimes, death]" "Yes, I studied. Oftentimes, death..."
May 7, 2003: 

Other poems on the web by Joshua McKinney:
Three poems
Two poems
"Camp"
"Copula"
"How I Lost My Voice"
"Patriotism"

About Sad Animal:

"Joshua McKinney is a visionary of the intervals and of the interstices. His eye magnifies those last, fleeting splendors of our perishing earth and perishing republic with genuine love and with the grace notes of regret. In Sad Animal, clarity becomes consolation and candor a true companionship. I'm not quite sure that we deserve these beautiful poems, but I am infinitely grateful for them."
—Donald Revell

"A citizen of our perplexed world and its 'brightest dark revelation, ' Joshua McKinney opens to all that he encounters-whether grief, environmental devastation, love, or even the absurdity of a faculty meeting-with a steadfast attention leavened with humor and, yes, sometimes irreverence."
—Elizabeth Robinson

"Talking is what the human does, but all of nature must be part of our conversation, and it is very much our turn to listen, even to the corpse flower, even to the white silence drifting to the eaves of houses. Even as the human is the saddest of animals, we are, as is this book, capable of hope and laughter and pleasure in this world. In fact, a lesson of this book is that it is our duty to feel pleasure, hopeful and devoured."
—Bin Ramke

"'Emphatic / breathing in all sound makes / a vatic wail.' Channeling Gerard Manley Hopkins, McKinney turns the agonistic questions of faith from the inside to the outside: devotions in the day, the small graces of sunlight, 'shook foil,' on not only the texture of the landscape, but the hide of memory. 'The shadow casts the man.' Yet attention matters, makes things prayer. Ekphrastic, intertextual, formally precise, McKinney's Sad Animal finds its deep measure in the imbricated organ of our times, 'where plume-sheen / dazzles in last light / and my ravening, / parched heart leaps // into the air.'"
—Matthew Cooperman