David Starkey: poems On Caravaggio

David Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate. The Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College, he is currently Co-editor of The California Review of Books, and the Publisher and Co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty-five years, he has published ten full-length collections of poetry with small presses—most recently Dance, You Monster, to My Soft Song, winner of the 2021 FutureCycle Press Poetry Book Award, Cutting It Loose, and What Just Happened: 210 Haiku Against the Trump Presidency. More than 500 of his poems have appeared in literary journals such as American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner and Southern Review. His textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2022), is in its fourth edition. (davidstarkey.net)