Under a Gathering Sky presents a quest narrative that examines the essence of questing itself. Grouped in five sections, the collection opens with a gathering called “Auguries,” marked by the crossing of spatial and temporal thresholds. Section 2 offers poems in “slant” dialogues with such writers as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lucille Clifton, W.G. Sebald, and Robert Hass. The thirdsection, “Ingathering,” engages most directly with twenty-first-century reckonings as well as voices and images from the author’s past. Section 4 consists ofmostly four-line poems, which demand that the reader engage with the text and their own ethics. In the final ascent of the fifth section, the concluding poems reflect on personal and collective geographies as well as on the limits of our knowing

A poet, translator, and essayist, Daniel Simon is assistant director and editor in chief of World Literature Today magazine at the University of Oklahoma, where he also serves on the English, International Studies, and Judaic Studies faculty. The author of two previous verse collections, Cast Off (2015) and After Reading Everything (2016), his third book of poems, Under a Gathering Sky, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in April 2024. His poems have appeared in three anthologies, been translated into five languages, and nominated for multiple awards. Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867–2017, which he edited, won a 2018 Nebraska Book Award and was included on NPR’s “50 States” summer booklist (2022). His latest anthology, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2020), was a Publishers Weekly starred pick. Most recently, he served as consulting editor for the Best Literary Translations annual anthology, forthcoming from Deep Vellum in spring 2024. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, PEN America, Nebraska Center for the Book, and the Norman Arts Council Roundtable. The grandson of Czech and Irish immigrants, Daniel grew up in Nebraska along the banks of the Platte River. He and his wife currently live in Norman, Oklahoma, and have three daughters. (Author photo by Alba Simon)