Eric Howd, assistant professor in the Department of Writing, will be publishing his fourth collection of poetry with the Orchard Street Press in 2021. The collection, entitled Universal Monsters, consists of about 25 poems, all of which reveal “the monsters in our everyday lives, whether they lumber toward us in the form of ailments, family, or isolation.” Howd said the poems within the collection “range from an award-winning crown of sonnets from a raspy voice in an insane asylum, to a love controlled and devoured by a kiss, to a haunted piano filled with phantoms.”
Although Howd has been a published poet since 1988, he noted that he has been writing and publishing poems more consistently since the beginning of the pandemic. Two of the longer poems in this specific collection have won national awards, he said, and others have also been previously published elsewhere. In its entirety, the collection merges two areas of passion in Howd’s life, those being “the supernatural and the magical powers of the world.” In the blurb she wrote for the collection, poet Natasha Sajé said that “these artful and various poems describe ways in which humans represent evil — and beauty, the two forever twined.”
When the collection is published, you can find it at the Orchard Street Press’s website.
Some of the other published works and collections of poetry by Howd include “Blaming Icarus” (Crane Press), “Origami” (Sometimes Y Publications), and “Instances” (Sometimes Y Publications). The awards he has won include Inaugural Milton Kessler Poetry Prize, the Switchback Poetry Prize, and contests from Flying Ketchup Press.