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  • Garrett Caples is the author of Lovers of Today (Wave Books, 2021), Power Ballads (Wave Books, 2016), Complications (2007), and The Garrett Caples Reader (1999), a collection of outtakes, The Rise & Fall of Johnny Volume (2020), and a bilingual selection, Noches Apátridas (Unstated Nights, 2019). He’s also written a book of essays, Retrievals (2014), and a pamphlet, Quintessence of the Minor (2010). He’s the editor of Philip Lamantia’s Preserving Fire: Selected Prose (2018), Samuel Greenberg’s Poems from the Greenberg MSS (2019), and Michael McClure’s Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems (2021), as well as the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013), Particulars of Place (2015) by Richard O. Moore, Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (2016) by Frank Lima, and Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader (2019). He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco.



    (Photo by Suzanne Kleid)

  • Reviews

    [The Garrett Caples Reader] displays genuine intellectual engagement along with its playful exuberance, making for a most winning combination.
    Publishers Weekly

    Caples supplies us with a full aesthetic meal, with alarming images right out of the French Surrealists. He also means what he says; regardless of any implications to the contrary, Caples is writing out of emotion, even well-done sentiment.
    Max Winter, Rain Taxi

    I adore [Caples’] prescription to read widely and even perversely; and his breezy style is engaging--despite the weighty title, the essay feels like some chunk of a great conversation you'd have over a couple of beers. And we need more poets weighing in on things the way he has here...
    Don Share

    With a supply of thumbnail biographies that read like the most improbable fiction, and a leisurely but learned style, Caples makes the minor seem major.
    Ed Park, The Poetry Foundation

    Reviews of books by Garrett Caples

    Lovers of Today

    Preserving Fire

    Power Ballads

    Retrievals

    Quintessence of the Minor

  • Poems
    - "Tratatus" (on Bear Books)
    - “Sundial Tone” (in Granta)
    - “Aubade” (in Poetry)
    - “Ordinary History America” (in Poetry)
    - “Richard O. Moore Imagined as a Bob Dylan Song” (in OmniVerse)

    Interviews
    - Bookslut, with Patrick James Dunagan
    - PhillySound, with CAConrad
    - Otolith, with Eileen Tabios

    Articles by Garrett Caples
    - “How to Rhyme” in Concrescent
    - “Surrealism Is a Romantic Critique of the Avant-Garde from Within” in The Poetry Foundation
    - “Kerouac as Poet: A Response to Cedar Sigo” in The Poetry Foundation
    - “Two Chicagos” in The Poetry Foundation
    - “The Secret Life of Sylvia Fein” in The San Francisco Bay Guardian
    - “Homage to Ralph Nader” in The Brooklyn Rail

  • Video
    Garrett Caples @ City Lights for Wave Books
    Reading with Andrew Joron for the release of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia:

    Reading three poems:
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