Praise for The Most Natural Thing:

“Keplinger’s poems, by juxtaposing such disintegration or failure to an integrated aesthetic that does not fail…ultimately [succeed] at precisely those moments where they take the most risk. The Most Natural Thing is a tender, graceful, and profound meditation on the ways in which we experience our bodies in the world; shuttling expertly between the narrative and the lyric, the ordinary and the wild, the book asks us to envision the body as that lived intersection between, as Keplinger would have it, the natural and the natural.”
—Triquarterly Review

“…somehow this clever magical poet’s fervor brings to the page a splendor of humanism— the extension of wit, delight and cynicism. He’s at the top of the heap of the originals. When I finished reading, I said what would become of us without them.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

“These poems are strongly rooted in human experience, each like a pulsing body. Read the pieces again and you’ll be surprised what powerful images were hiding the first time around.”
—The Rumpus

“…it’s evocative and haunting, a meditation on memory and the body and desire.”
—The Fiddleback

David Keplinger

David Keplinger is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Clearing (2005) andThe Prayers of Others (New Issues, 2006), which won the 2007 Colorado Book Award.He is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the SOROS Foundation, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2011 BOA, Ltd. published House Inspections, his translations of Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen, and in 2007 World Cut out with Crooked Scissors, Nielsen’s selected poems, appeared from New Issues Press.Keplinger directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C.