Reading The Water (Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Charles Harper Webb grew up in Houston. He was educated at Rice University (B.A.), the University of Washington (M.A.), and the University of Southern California (M.F.A. and Ph.D.). Webb worked for 15 years as a professional rock singer and guitarist, and is currently a licensed psychotherapist and Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, 1995, and many other magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of Stand Up Poetry: The Anthology and author of a novel, The Wilderness Effect. He lives in Los Angeles. Edward Hirsch is Professor of English at the University of Houston, and author of four books of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, The Night Parade, Wild Gratitude, and Earthly Measures. He is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, among others.

"Charles Harper Webb has a wild inventive energy, a quirky at times even manic wit, and a deep sense of wonder at the world. His poems are filled with curiosities, with odd facts and details, with unlikely anecdotes--all of which he takes personally. As a poet, he's a wise-acre, a trouble-maker--part stand-up comic, part anthropologist, part visionary. He is funny and. . .can be withering about contemporary life; his irony gives him no rest. And yet he is a romantic despite himself: a singer of tales, a poet of praise."

--from the Foreword