Amorak Huey

@amorak

Loyola grad’s dad. BGSU dad. Poet. BGSU prof/director of creative writing. Proud union member. Co-founding editor @riverriverbooks.bsky.social. Auburn fan. Dodgers fan. I like board games & ttrpg. He/him. It's pronounced uh-MOR-ack.

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Amorak Huey@amorak· 1d

Got one of last week’s Wordle in 2 but to be fair I have some disciplinary knowledge—

Screenshot of a Wordle solved in two guesses. The first attempt is poets. The second, correct attempt is gripe.

Amorak Huey@amorak· 4d

Frank O'Hara poets.org/poem/why-i-a...

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

Amorak Huey@amorak· 5d

So excited about this book I (apparently) preordered it twice.

Two copies of the novel Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett

Amorak Huey@amorak· 10d

Oh one of thinking.
Oh one of desiring.
Oh one of making and of doing.
This madness of love and madness of thinking and thinking of love and loving of thinking and loving of maddening and thinking of maddening.
This is the lovely part of it.
This the way we learn to thinking.
This is the way.
It is ours to keep.
It is ours.
So it might matter.

Amorak Huey@amorak· 10d

The book of poems titled Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You

By Juliana Spahr

Amorak Huey@amorak· 10d

Juliana Spahr—

In the hotel room we are different.

One of us is lighter, one is darker, one is paunchy, one is thin, one is wrinkled, one is resilient, one is hairy, one is smooth.

These characteristics are combined on each of us in a way.

We run our hands along each other's bodies and have one person with one leg on one person's shoulder and the other stretched out or twined around the other person in the hotel room.

This position is difficult.

It is not an easy position for our bodies, our desires.

This is interaction.

This impossible position.

This position that does not even give the most pleasure.

And yet we place all our hope in this touching.

As touching, gathering, happens in the most difficult places at the most difficult times.

Amorak Huey@amorak· 12d

Feels like I’m doing something right as a poetry teacher when a past student is texting me because the moon is amazing tonight.

The moon, full and close and turning the night sky around it orange.

Amorak Huey@amorak· Jul 6

Goddamn, Juliana Spahr

The reasons why there are thousands of representations of buffalo hunts in state museums
and none of a bison on its back making the wallow probably have to do with how Buffalo Bill Cody killed over four thousand bison in eighteen months.
He shot sixty-eight in an eight-hour period.
The railroad and the gun.
There is human ingenuity again, failing us.
And here is human ingenuity trying to pick up the pieces, hundreds of years later.
Still, that Remington.
It is hard not to think there is art again, failing us.

Amorak Huey@amorak· Jun 18

I go where I love and where I am loved, into the snow;
I go to the things I love with no thought of duty or pity;
I go where I belong, inexorably, as the rain that has lain long
in the furrow; I have given or would have given
life to the grain;
but if it will not grow or ripen
with the rain of beauty,
the rain will return to the cloud;

Amorak Huey@amorak· Jun 18

[23]
Take me home where canals
flow between iris-banks:
where the heron has her nest:
where the mantis prays on the river-reed:
where the grasshopper says
Amen, Amen, Amen.
[24]
Or anywhere

Amorak Huey@amorak· Jun 18

H.D. —

Chance

Chance says,
come here,
chance says,
can you bear

to part?
chance says,
sweetheart,
we haven't loved

for almost a year,
can you bear
this loneliness?
I can't;

apart from you,
I fear
wind,
bird,

sea,
wave,
low places
and the high air;

I hear dire threat everywhere;
I start
at wind in sycamores, I can't bear anything
further;
chance says, dear,
I'm here,
don't you want me any more?

Amorak Huey@amorak· Jun 16

Poem after poem, line after line. Just incredible.

VI
I had thought myself frail, a petal with light equal on leaf and under-leaf.
I had thought myself frail; a lamp,
shell, ivory or crust of pearl, about to fall shattered, with flame spent.
I cried:
"I must perish,
I am deserted in this darkness, an outcast, desperate,"
such fire rent me with Hesperus, Then the day broke.

Amorak Huey@amorak· Jun 15

Serbian poet Vasko Popa tr Charles Simic

IV. Under the Earth
Muscle of darkness muscle of flesh
It's all the same
What do we do now
We'll summon the bones of all ages
We'll climb all way to the sun
What then
Then we'll grow pure
And keep growing as we please
What will we do after
Nothing we'll roam here and there We'll be deathless beings of bone
Just wait for the earth to yawn
-

Amorak Huey@amorak· Jun 15

from Charles Simic’s introduction to his selected translations of Sebian poet Vasko Popa

Once asked about the meaning of his poems, he got angry and wrote, "Why don't they ask an apple tree what does its fruit mean? If it could talk, the apple tree would most likely tell them: Bite into an apple and you'll see what it means!"
-Charles Simic

Amorak Huey@amorak· Jun 12

“I want to think the starting place is only one location on a curve that we can follow to another end.”

The book of poems Blade by Blade, written by Danusha Laméris

What Begins

What begins in beauty ends in beauty.
What begins in sorrow ends in sorrow.
The seed once planted, soon in full bloom.
If grief, then grief. If anger, anger. They say the first week of any love affair reveals its end.
Give me the child at seven, and so forth.
The world itself began with a bang. Hard to argue for another truth. But I have seen a heart worn thin take to small repairs, have watched a blue jay born wild eat out of a woman's hand.
And even we began as tadpoles, curled and gilled.
I want to think the starting place is only one location on a curve that we can follow to another end. And then, begin again.

Amorak Huey@amorak· May 25

“the fragile connection between / what we name a thing / what it is” … in the Spring issue of Josephine Quarterly …https://www.josephinequarterly.com/amorak-huey

Can Take the Boy out of the South, Etc.

AMORAK HUEY

that big tree by the pond we called the cedar tree
it had another name
not even a cedar

took me so long to learn

the fragile connection between
what we name a thing
what it is

its shadow was where I fled to rest against rough bark
and read

quiet
except for the mosquitos
the peeper frogs

bite and song of that place
the welts after

when I tell you again the name of the road that raised me
you hear happy

what I’m saying is hollow

I know I talk about this farm a lot
I’m saying I don’t know how
else to talk about what I’ve learned of love

where it begins
that it ends

Amorak Huey@amorak· May 10

short poem in @havehashad.com yesterday --

Screenshot of a poem by Amorak Huey from HAD:

Invasive

our hands in dirt all afternoon
ridding the garden of bindweed

once, we named it morning glory

Amorak Huey is author of Mouth, freshly out in 2026 from Cornerstone Press, and four previous collections of poetry. Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Amorak Huey@amorak· May 5

This book, my lord

The book of poems titled Blade by Blade, by Danusha Laméris

Amorak Huey@amorak· May 3

Geese & sunset, Ohio

The silhouettes of two flying geese against sunset and under a darkening sky over suburban houses

Amorak Huey@amorak· Apr 1

"... Body is setting, not plot, whether burning or burned. It’s the farm you already bought, and now—field sown with salt and somehow blooming—you’ll have to live in it." -- @melissacrowe.bsky.social

IT'S NOT THE BODY'S FAULT

but yours is where the ache resides, site of a thousand delicate
harms—soft of a cheek on the soft of a cheek—and hers
a door upon which you try and try not to knock. Yes,
remembering hurts, though you won’t indict the jaw, skin
of the wrist, belly or its button, little hollow where the tongue
in your mind still dips, conjuring the ghost of a moan from
the mouth you have ceased to kiss for good. You don’t blame
the hands, not yours or hers, not the animal they made
when they touched, all sinew and heat. Type specimen
and endling. Precious, I’m saying, then extinct. The fault
is not the shoulder’s, warm or cold. The back is not the culprit,
even turned. Body is setting, not plot, whether burning or
burned. It’s the farm you already bought, and now—field sown
with salt and somehow blooming—you’ll have to live in it.

(Melissa Crowe)

Amorak Huey@amorak· Mar 29

U2, Soldier Field, 2017

The band U2 at Soldier Field. The stadium is bathed in red light and a giant red silhouette of the Joshua Tree glows against a yellow backdrop is at the back of the stage. The band is on an island in the middle of the crowd, connected to the stage by a runway that mirrors the tree.

Amorak Huey@amorak· Mar 23

"nothing we could not fix with stillness" One of my two poems in the new issue of @theshorepoetry.bsky.social (alongside poems by a ton of great poets!) -- www.theshorepoetry.org/issue-29

Aubade with Three Geese

this morning three geese make themselves at home in the water
laked at the edge of a vacant lot down the block

as if their relentless journey
was always going to bring them right here
into my day

enough to make me believe momentarily
maybe we deserve the beauty we get
I know how that sounds

I woke with your absence knotted in my body

I did not mean to fall asleep before you
I would blame the moon
a day past full and already disappearing

what’s wrong with me

nothing we could not fix with stillness
together even in temporary water

Amorak Huey@amorak· Mar 22

Carl Phillips—

Life Lessons from Art

for Evy

Leave every room its share of dark corners, its shelves of relics, or replicas of same, to cast additional shadow; always, the flesh—be it
the girl-student's lifted arm, the bit of neck escaping from the meister's lace cravat-
should be the primary source of light:
if there are windows,
they are only to show some emblem of the world you have chosen largely to ignore, a plow, or a ship with sails folded, griffins rising where the eye of the cartographer fails, skies doubling as the pasty brow of God.
As appropriate, paint yourself
into the grain of a half-eaten slice of orange,

the cameo holding the infant's baptismal gown together,

include your reflection
in the doorknob, the porcelain sconce, the tea service the newly married couple has already forgotten,

anywhere they'll think to look last.
With these exceptions, leave the bulk of your work unsigned.

Amorak Huey@amorak· Mar 22

Sunday morning read —

The poetry book In the Blood, by Carl Phillips

Reprinted edition of the poet’s 1992 debut

Amorak Huey@amorak· Mar 19

Today's Poem-A-Day -- 🍎🔥

Honeycrisp

January Gill O’Neil

My boyfriend will eat
an entire apple in one sitting.
Peel, pulp, core. Hands me
the stem when he’s done.
Seeds in his gut. The calyx
a dank star. An orchard grows
inside him. The tongue
that slicks the skin. Hands
perfumed with bruised sugar.
His kisses a tender lament.
The heart that glows. How he takes
everything the fruit offers
and leaves nothing
but the stem. I let my body
follow. Set my jaw soft.
Rapt, greedy, this devotion.
Tough armor. Red glow. Yellow
flesh. Every bite a fall
from grace.

Amorak Huey@amorak· Mar 11

Praise for Mouth
The voice of Mouth is confident in its moves, sometimes breath-stopping in its leaps, by turns despairing and lusty, deeply funny, and-always— restoratively human.
-Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode: Poems

Amorak Huey's Mouth is an exploration-sometimes gentle, sometimes raucous-of one of the fundamental forces of nature: desire.... If we must crave and end, and if we must do it in this particular moment of human and geologic time-and, of course, we must-how lucky we are to have Mouth as our companion.
-Molly Spencer, author of Invitatory

If it is possible to make a guitar amp for the soul, to hear what moon, river, barn, and paramour all desire of each other, Amorak Huey has done it in Mouth. Each line is electric, illuminating poems that extend their metaphors, believing to endure in language is to make love endure.
—Steven Leyva, Author of The Opposite of Cruelty

Amorak Huey@amorak· Mar 11

If you’ll be in or near Northwest Ohio on Saturday & wanna come help me celebrate my new poetry collection, I’d love to see you— facebook.com/events/s/amo...

Amorak Huey
Mouth
Saturday March 14
2:30 pm
Gathering Volumes Bookstore, Perrysburg, Ohio

Amorak Huey@amorak· Mar 9

Baltimore was lovely —

A seagull appears to ponder bright blue piles at the edge of the harbor

Bromo Seltzer clock tower rises into the fog

The Domino Sugars sign reflects red in the water of the harbor

Baltimore’s inner harbor on a foggy morning

Amorak Huey@amorak· Feb 26

A delight to see the full set of new @riverriverbooks.bsky.social titles arriving to readers!

Seven books on a wooden table:

Antibody by Elane Kim
Fifty Mothers by Preeti Vangani
House of Myth and Necessity by Jennifer A Sutherland
Backyard Alchemy by J.D. Ho
The Visible Field by Zoe Ryder White
Scythe by Elizabeth Sylvia
There Is News Along the Ohio River by Beth Gilstrap

Amorak Huey@amorak· Feb 26

new poem in @oneart.bsky.social --