The Bar of the Flattened Heart

Keller’s poems captivate the reader with a musical style that asks us to “listen” while reading. The voice shares words with the reader encouraging emersion into the poem, with both style and content that connects us to what is real in the world around us.

David Keller is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Bar of the Flattened Heart 2014. He has taught poetry workshops in New York and has served as Poetry Coordinator for the Geraldine R. Dodge Biennial Poetry Festival, on the Board of Governors for the Poetry Society of America, and as a member of the Advisory Board of The Frost Place.  Along with the late Donald Sheehan he founded the Frost Places Center of Poetry and the Arts in Franconia, NH in the late 1970’s.  He had published widely in magazines and journals including Poetry, Sou’wester, and Gettysburg Review.

David Keller’s poems have the freedom of age. They don’t need to impress, they have no case to make, they don’t even insist on being right: their wonderful last words are, “What the hell do I know?” With their genial frankness and amused curiosity they remind us over and over how surprising our ordinary days are, how interesting and touching it is to be alive.
— James Richardson

David Keller’s voice mingles melancholy and wit, the prosaic details of life and sheer wonderment at things like how, after an early morning snowfall, “a distant stoplight turns green, and gradually/ one more time the world becomes beautiful.”  He does it so deftly, you may think the voice is your own, coming from inside your own life–while you marvel at his magical phrasing:  “the cave beyond memory,” “emptied of old clothes and arguments,” “the stars pinched and cold,” a monarch butterfly in November probably headed for the Yucatan:
“that heavy straight-ahead flutter you might think of as a flighty concentration, or as a kind of freedom.”
— Alicia Ostriker

May 2014
82 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-42-6