Essays
Living Name: Essays on American Poets
LSU Press, 2025
“For two decades now, I have considered Mark Halliday to be not merely a first-rate poet, but also perhaps the best writer about contemporary poetry that we have in this country. His prose is graceful, elegant, and inviting. His opinions, whether one agrees or not, are invariably invigorating and intelligent. He writes with the attention of someone who has made a lifetime’s study not just of the craft of poetry but of its sources, purposes, and value to us.”
—Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears
Other Recent Essays
Dean Young, Prince of Our Lostness | Copper Nickel 36, Spring 2023
Poetry in the Shadow (on Tony Hoagland’s Turn Up the Ocean) | The Laurel Review 55/2
Managing Our Fears (on poems by Jaswinder Bolina) | The Hopkins Review, Winter 2023
Jack Gilbert Looking Back on Long Life | Literary Imagination, Fall 2022
Tangled Persistence (on Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere) | The Hopkins Review, Winter 2022
Dean Young and the Madding Flood | The Hopkins Review, Fall 2021
Kenneth Fearing and Human Lifetimes | Literary Imagination 23/3, 2021
Stuck in Desire: The Poetry of Kim Addonizio | The Hopkins Review, Summer 2020
Relentless Whoosh: The Poetry of Ongoingness | The Hopkins Review, Spring 2020