About spoKe
The mission of spoKe is to advance a better understanding of the world through poetry and poetics. Founded in response to the Boston Marathon bombing, we are strong to advance:
An internationalist poetry that engages with or is from the world’s places, cultures, and literary traditions.
American poetry that sees the English language and literary tradition as important, but only one of many roots and paths for poetry.
A poetics that attempts to innovate idiom, language, and poetic form while maintaining a public audience.
Kevin Gallagher
Founder & Editor
Kevin Gallagher is a political economist, poet and publisher living in Greater Boston with his wife Kelly, their children Theo and Estelle, and Rexroth, the family’s German shepherd. Gallagher edits spoKe, a Boston-based annual of poetry and poetics, and works as a Professor of Global Development Policy at Boston University’s Pardee School for Global Studies.
Kevin Gallagher’s Books
Purchase here from MadHat Press.
In And Yet it Moves, the poet is an archeologist of mourning rediscovering that assaults on science and reason are not new phenomenon. Gallagher follows Petrarch, who spawns a new lyric in part inspired by lost texts, and who motivates ‘book hunters’ of the Renaissance to search for the buried as well. The world changed when Poggio Bracciolini discovered Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things in a Benedictine library….
Purchase here from Loom Press.
The Wild Goose was a hand-made magazine of verse written and edited by John Boyle O’Reilly aboard the Hougoumont, the last ship to transport British convicts to Australia. O’Reilly (1844-1890) was an Irish Fenian sentenced to life imprisonment for infiltrating the British army and attempted mutiny. O’Reilly escaped from Australia aboard a whaling ship and settled in Boston where he rose to become an editor of The Pilot, a noted poet, and abolitionist….
Purchase here from Red Fox Press.
A poem written during a stay in 2019 at the Heinrich Böll Cottage.
A facsimile of a collage of poems using a typewriter on white paper
and old photographs on a vintage blanc writer's journal from Folens.
Purchase here from Dos Madres Press.
These radio poems are ‘talking sonnets’ in the American grain. While they are ‘sonnets’ that echo the Italian and to a lesser extent the English versions of the form, they are more analogous to the ‘talking blues’ of John Lee Hooker, the Reverend Gary Davis, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan….
by Joseph DeRoche
Edited by Kevin Gallagher and Martha Collins
Purchase here from Červená Barva Press.
“With razor-sharp wit and élan, Joseph DeRoche's poems remind us that revelation is never easy-that it often comes at great cost as we "loat to Paradise / In a slaughter / Of small things."
Purchase here from MadHat Press.
Loom is concerned with the history of our divided country, a violent division preceding civil war and by now embedded in our cultural landscape. The non-sentimental poems are cool, clear and literal. They are narrated by white Americans who position themselves in relation to “slave power” and cotton as “lords of the loom” and “lords of the lash”….
Purchase here from Kelsay Books.
In Come Over and Help Us Gallagher takes us on a wild, timely and wonderful ride. Think of an afternoon with William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and John Wheelwright perhaps with a whiff of tea or whisky in the air!
“Kevin Gallagher is a poet and a rebel of the very best kind!” Kevin Bowen
Purchase here from Lulu.
“Kevin Gallagher's poetry is a rare synthesis of great poetic traditions that puts particular emphasis on the image and the lyric blended with a uniquely personalized iconoclasticism. His is a perpetual pursuit to make it new….
- Anastasios Kozaitis
Purchase here from Cy Gist Press.
These poems are a variation sequence evoking the painting “La Cuidad de Mexico, 1949” by Juan O’Gorman, an Irish-Mexican painter who lived in Mexico (1905-1982). The painting, now at the Museo Arte de Moderno in Mexico City, is a bird’s eye view of Mexico City during its transformation into a modern city….
Purchase here from Červená Barva Press.
In William Carlos William's poem, 'To Elsie" he says
"It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off"
This first chapbook holds forty pages of 'isolate' poetry that hopefully gives.
Purchase here from Zephyr Press.
A celebration of writing from twelve years of the magazine compost, including work by: Connie Deanovich, Denise Duhamel, Marjorie Agosin, Victor Hernandez Cruz, James Laughlin, Rosmarie Waldrop, Rosanna Warren, Ed Bullins, William Corbett, Robert Pinsky, Martha Nussbaum, Sam Cornish, Eavan Boland, and Bei Dao.