AO | Books | Translations | Edited Works | Selected Publications
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Another Animal
Author: Anthony Opal
Booklet, 12 pp, 7 x 5.25 in
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-7375909-8-9
Published: April 3, 2023
The Economy Press, Chicago, IL
Purchase: $15
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Action
Author: Anthony Opal
Paperback, 72 pp, 8 x 5 in
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-692-33554-3
Published: December 7, 2014
Peanut Books, Brooklyn, NY
Purchase: $19
BOOKS
Another Animal
Author: Anthony Opal
Booklet, 12 pp, 7 x 5.25 in
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-7375909-8-9
Published: April 3, 2023
The Economy Press, Chicago, IL
Purchase: $15
Procession
Author: Anthony Opal
Booklet, 24 pp, 7 x 5.25 in
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-7356630-1-2
Published: August 26, 2020
The Economy Press, Chicago, IL
Purchase: $15
Author: Anthony Opal
Booklet, 24 pp, 7 x 5.25 in
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-7356630-1-2
Published: August 26, 2020
The Economy Press, Chicago, IL
Purchase: $15
The Roof Above Our Heads
Author: Anthony Opal
Booklet, 64 pp, 7 x 5.25 in
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-7375909-0-3
Published: July 10, 2021
The Economy Press, Chicago, IL
Purchase: $20
Author: Anthony Opal
Booklet, 64 pp, 7 x 5.25 in
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-7375909-0-3
Published: July 10, 2021
The Economy Press, Chicago, IL
Purchase: $20
Action
Author: Anthony Opal
Paperback, 72 pp, 8 x 5 in
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-692-33554-3
Published: December 7, 2014
Peanut Books, Brooklyn, NY
Purchase: $19
In these poems reverence and rebellion, desperation and control joust. Then they dance. Opal's lines are consistently surprising (if that's possible) and, more important, they make me believe them.
-RAE ARMANTROUT, author of Just Saying and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize
Opal’s eye mocks its own seeing. With a "strange mercy that pulls us inward,” these poems glint from the threads tethering private myth to a larger one. Taut with hope and balancing a heavy humor, this is language carved of a voice that wants to shout lullabies: “I want to sing / a song to myself in the silence of / myself.”
-EMILY KENDAL FREY, author of Sorrow Arrow and The Grief Performance
Anthony Opal’s keen and restless observations, flickering with medical and theological emergencies, Old Testament visitations, Jackson Pollock, hippos and bird wings, can’t help but remind me of the nature of opal itself, with its glittering internal structure that refracts light mediated by its elemental inclusions and substrates.
-ALLAN PETERSON, author of Fragile Acts and All the Lavish in Common
-RAE ARMANTROUT, author of Just Saying and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize
Opal’s eye mocks its own seeing. With a "strange mercy that pulls us inward,” these poems glint from the threads tethering private myth to a larger one. Taut with hope and balancing a heavy humor, this is language carved of a voice that wants to shout lullabies: “I want to sing / a song to myself in the silence of / myself.”
-EMILY KENDAL FREY, author of Sorrow Arrow and The Grief Performance
Anthony Opal’s keen and restless observations, flickering with medical and theological emergencies, Old Testament visitations, Jackson Pollock, hippos and bird wings, can’t help but remind me of the nature of opal itself, with its glittering internal structure that refracts light mediated by its elemental inclusions and substrates.
-ALLAN PETERSON, author of Fragile Acts and All the Lavish in Common
“I write sonnets empty of everything yet containing all things…” goes a visual and philosophical echo of the unutterable “G–d” ACTION interrogates, prods. Such slippery refrains drive this lively book’s composition and arguments. Birds fall throughout, echoing the rough descent of haloed, winged things; the speaker wrestles an angel by a river and, in a later poem, a father by a sink; prophets stumble about stripped of epic context, conscripted to a world of Doritos bags, iPhones, and prescription meds. Indeed, religion and the sacred’s place in the contemporary are on Opal’s mind. For as much as, say, “Out of the Whirlwind” might aver otherwise, these adroit and contemplative poems don’t only fuck with “ideas of the holy,” they seek them out.
-DOUGLAS KEARNEY, author of Patter and The Black Automaton
If you’ve ever opened the hood of a car and found a motor of flowers or opened a closet and out flew a flock of waxwings, monarchs and philosophers, you’ll be prepared for these poems. Otherwise, reader, get ready for the brilliant onslaught of these prayerful evocations, these rollercoaster sonnets, these radiant affirmations of life and art.
-DEAN YOUNG, author of Bender: New and Selected Poems
-DOUGLAS KEARNEY, author of Patter and The Black Automaton
If you’ve ever opened the hood of a car and found a motor of flowers or opened a closet and out flew a flock of waxwings, monarchs and philosophers, you’ll be prepared for these poems. Otherwise, reader, get ready for the brilliant onslaught of these prayerful evocations, these rollercoaster sonnets, these radiant affirmations of life and art.
-DEAN YOUNG, author of Bender: New and Selected Poems