About

Mark Halliday has a BA and an MA from Brown University, and a PhD in English Literature from Brandeis University. Since 1996, he has taught poetry at Ohio University, where he was named Distinguished Professor in 2012.

He has published seven books of poetry (Little Star, 1987; Tasker Street, 1992; Selfwolf, 1999; Jab, 2002; Keep This Forever, 2008; Thresherphobe, 2013; Losers Dream On, 2018), and numerous essays on contemporary and canonical poets. His poetry is known for its colloquial wit, ironic turns, and its search for profundity in the everyday. His critical book Stevens and the Interpersonal was published in 1991 by Princeton University Press.

On his latest book Losers Dream On

“And you try to be awake,” growls Mark Halliday. These poems are fully awake, practicing vivisection on their own delusions, complacencies, and sublimities, carving into the tissue of language. Song here sounds more like invoice than voice. Yet its wit reveals the timeless: sorrow for a dying father, a lost wife, and the core recognition of our “dustitude.” A remarkable book.

Rosanna Warren

Reading Losers Dream On is like listening in on the constantly shifting, uncomfortable thoughts of a mind brilliantly attuned to the world of memory and to its own intricate (often hilarious) processes. These poems take place in landscapes that seem familiar at first—snow-covered parking lots, an empty Mexican restaurant, airport gates crowded with travelers—but, under Mark Halliday’s gaze, they become dazzling and strange, filled with troublesome knowledge and the possibility of mortality and transcendence. Witty, exciting, and wide-awake, Halliday is one of the best poets at work in America today.

Kevin Prufer

Mark Halliday is one of our foremost technicians of the American vernacular. In Halliday’s poems, James Joyce, Leave It To Beaver, and Sir Walter Raleigh all get their turn at the microphone. I admire Halliday’s dedication to coherence, self-interrogation, and endless verbal playfulness. His voice is one of the most reliable, hilarious, effervescent, and moody pleasures in the contemporary canon. His rich new collection, Losers Dream On, holds its own with the high standard of his best work.

Tony Hoagland