Books
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Winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by Ronald Wallace
At Some Point is available from the University of Wisconsin Press, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other booksellers. “Plain-spoken, warm, and affectionate poems give way to deeper observation as O’Connell turns a wry eye on finitude and mortality. These poems never leave us behind, embracing a world in which even a ‘lummox’ (like us) can be ‘gobsmacked’ by ‘so many choices’ that ‘the whole universe seemed possible.’ This is a capacious and big-hearted book.” — Ronald Wallace, judge, Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry |
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Our Best Defense is available from Cervena Barva Press or by contacting me.
These wonderful poems combine intellect and feeling, family life and history and are the “best defense” against the sleep of contemporary life in which people live vicariously through the famous, refuse to acknowledge the lessons of history, and persist in denying our finitude. They enact the scrutiny and self-awareness that Robert Lowell called for, that “agonizing reappraisal,” and do so with great tenderness and with a wry sense of how our lives are interwoven with myth and history and with work memos and The Weather Channel. Our Best Defense arms us with humor, fearlessness, and wonder. —Robert Cording |
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Winner of The Philbrick Poetry Chapbook Award, selected by Dennis Barone
A Better Way to Fall is available from Amazon or by contacting me. A Better Way to Fall offers the reader fifteen poems full of cruel irony and beautiful precision, Greek mythology mixed with contemporary mass media, global vision and neighborhood close-up. These poems of our moment presented in an all-of-a-piece orchestration are readily understandable and profoundly meaningful. They tell a reader that an instant in the sun might be worth the fall. They warn a reader that too often innocence does not lead to experience but instead self-induced ignorance ends in cliche: events, as well as sounds, repeat. Falling may be necessary, these poems say, if we plan—someday—to rise or, at least, "navigate escape." —Dennis Barone |