Eric Stiefel is a poet and critic living in Athens, Ohio with his dog, Violet. He teaches at Ohio University, where he is also pursuing a PhD. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apple Valley Review, Prism Review, The Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.
Eric Stiefel
Eric Stiefel: If It’s True of Human Nature
Actually, I hate the flowers— now that the birds have vanished, as the last clouds drain away and a thin light winnows down where a grove of bees used to flourish— and if you spoke to me of cruelty, I’d think about primrose in winter, lying dormant in the dirt, holding itself frozen, while the […]
Eric Stiefel: Phantasmagoric
Each time I kill one of my old selves—or more often let him loose into the static—I stumble on his shade sometime later, often when the seasons have changed and the lilacs have withered so that they, too, no longer resemble their former selves— He was there, right there, standing in front of the […]
Eric Stiefel: At This Point, I’d Take Anything
A claw of thread’s all it takes to follow one thought to the next— when West killed himself I didn’t say his name out loud for months, though most days I still lean forward and pull my head back as if some spectral hand pulls my chin taut and points my gaze to the […]