Poems
Forthcoming
“Field Notes: Worcester County, April” and “Field Notes: Worcester County, September” and “Field Notes: Worcester County, November” // forthcoming in Flyway
“Secret Words for Blue” // forthcoming in Third Coast
“Eve Accompanies a Ghost on Her Last Haunting” // forthcoming in The Arkansas International
“Sic Transit” // forthcoming in Denver Quarterly
2025
“Vanitas with Baleine” // TriQuarterly Issue 167 (Winter/Spring 2025)
“Petechiae” // Radar Poetry 41 (February 2025)
Three Vanitas Diptychs // Rougarou (Fall 2024; online Winter 2025)
“Vigil,” “Impasto,” and “Recalibration”// The Evergreen Review (April 2025)
“Angelus” // RHINO Poetry 2025 [print]
“Westering” // Lily Poetry Review Issue 13 (Spring 2025) [print]
“Seamen’s Bethel” // Interim Palimpsests Issue (June 2025)
“Pool” // Folio Volume 40, Issue 1 (2025) [print]
“Dear Friend [In the dark, let’s meet]” // EcoTheo Review (June 2025)
“Camera Obscura” // Bluestem (Summer 2025)
“Look Up Mammal” // Ecotone The Moon Issue (2025) [print]
“Haptics” and “Fidelio” // The London Magazine (October/November 2025) [print]
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall // The Maine Review (November 2025)
“Wake” // Inscape (Fall 2025)
“Neptune Picnic” // Salt Hill Journal 54 (Fall 2025) [print]
2024
“Chalice” // Peripheries No. 6 [print]
“Kill Crossing” (reprint) and “Kyrielle” // Bonefolder no. 1 (2024) [print]
“Field Notes: Worcester County, December (II),” “Field Notes: Worcester County, January (II),” “Field Notes: Worcester County, February (II),” “Field Notes: Worcester County, March (II),” and “Field Notes: Worcester County, April (II)” // Posit 35 (Tenth Anniversary Issue, 2024)
“New York State Thruway” // Prelude (Winter 2024)
“Gettysburg” // Hunger Mountain 29 (February 2024)
“Mine Own Tom Wyatt” // Image 120 (Spring 2024) [print]
“Three Highways” // Pedestal 93 (March 2024)
“Your Average Bear” // Nixes Mate Review Issue 30/31 (Winter/Spring 2024) [print]
“On the highway somewhere beyond Utica, we come to an understanding about the nature of time” // MER Vol. 22 (2024)
“Vanitas with Hi-Tops + Vanitas with High Wire” // Pine Hills Review (May 2024)
“All the Big Men are Weeping” // Zone 3 38.2 (Spring 2024) [Nominated for Best of the Net]
“Questions about Bisexuals, #3” // South Dakota Review Vol. 58 No. 2 (Spring 2024) [print]
“Soap” // Yalobusha Review 39 (June 2024) [Nominated for Best of the Net]
“Letter to the Apprentice Jeweler” // Ocean State Review Vol. 13 No. 1 (2024) [print]
“Field Notes: Worcester County, June (II)” // Moist Poetry Journal Deep Summer Issue (August 2024)
“Yours” // Action, Spectacle (Summer 2024, Part II)
“Cemetery Praise Song: April” // Sweet Auburn (Summer 2024) [print]
“Phantasia on Dvořák’s Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 85” // NEPC Annual Prize Winners’ Anthology (2024)
“Field Notes: Worcester County, August” and “Field Notes: Worcester County, July (II)” // Midway Journal Volume 18, Issue 4 (October 2024)
“Our Dearest Friend,” “On Eversion,” and “Plainsong” // Cape Cod Review Issue 10 (November 2024) [print]
“Boat Poem” and “Wine River” // B O D Y (Fall 2024)
“Dear Friend [This morning, as goldfinches tussle]” and “Small Situations” // Swing Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Fall/Winter 2024) [print]
“My Mother Texts Me Regarding the Humility of the Angels” // Smartish Pace Issue 31, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Issue (Fall 2024) [print]
“My friend is dying & I’m looking for another poem” // Free State Review online (December 2024)
2023
“Field Notes: Worcester County, February” and “Field Notes: Worcester County, May” and “De Profundis” // Paperbark Issue 4 (January 2023) [print]
“Celestial Bodies” // TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics Vol. 11 Issue 1 (2023) [print]
“Field Notes: Worcester County, January” and “Field Notes: Worcester County, June” // The Dodge (Winter 2023)
“Deep Learning” and “Devonian” and “Manifestation” and “Strange Attractor” // Cutleaf Issue 3.4 (February 2023)
“The Alcestis Machine” // Passages North 44 (2023) [print]
“From Her Tulip Bower Tommelise Writes the Swallow” // Fairy Tale Review The Rainbow Issue (2023) [print]
“Someday I Will Go Back to Sunday School” // NELLE Issue 6 (2023) [print]
“Space Age” // Menagerie Issue 5 (Spring 2023)
“Eve and Saint Anaesthesia Tour the Maternity Ward” // Presence (2023) [print]
“Dear Data Miner” // The Woodward Review Vol. 2 Issue 2 (Spring 2023)
“Sunday, Ivy Not Yet Sending its Chartreuse up the Courtyard Wall” // Soundings East Volume 45 (Spring 2023) [print]
“Nonchalant” and “Love Letter from Upstairs” // Southern Indiana Review Vol. 30.1 (Spring 2023) [print]
“Triangulation” // Consequence Vol. 15.1 (Spring 2023) [print] [Nominated for the Pushcart Prize]
“Annunciation” and “The Archaeoetymologist Recovers Bliss from the Riverbed” // Matter Monthly Issue 32 (May 2023)
“Vanitas with Weather Eye” and “Vanitas with Whether I” // Couplet Issue 4 (June 2023)
“My Grandmother in the Arms of the Boxer” and “If as You Claim the World Is Remade by Love, Let Us Not Speak of Harbors” // Crab Creek Review (Spring/Summer 2023) [print]
“Eve Brings the Head of Charlotte Corday to the Museum to View The Death of Marat” // ballast Issue 1.3 (July 2023)
“Eve and Insomnia Barbie Tour the Dream House” // MAYDAY (Summer 2023)
“Estuary” and “Serenade” // Cagibi Issue 19 (July 2023)
“Tenebrism” and “My Son Tells Me He Loves Me Like the Stars” // The Ilanot Review Parents Issue (October 2023)
“Field Notes: Worcester County, October” // On the Seawall (November 2023)
Selections from dearling (Honorable Mention for 2023 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize) // NEPC Annual Prize Winners’ Anthology (2023)
“Mock Moon” // Tupelo Quarterly 31 (December 2023)
“Eve and Maria Mitchell Confer at the Heliopause” and “Twenty years ago, before the others return” // Permafrost Volume 44.2 (2023) [print]
“To Frank, Our Gallant Goldfish Dead These Thirty Years” // Red Wheelbarrow Volume 24 (2023) [print]
2022
“Letter to an Unmet Farmer” // Dunes Review Vol. 26 No. 2 (December 2022) [print]
“Field Notes: Worcester County, July” // Empty House Press Issue 9 (December 2022) *Nominated for Best of the Net*
“Prayer for a Haunting” // Psaltery & Lyre (December 2022)
“Lux Hours” // TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics Vol. 10.6 (November 2022)
“Nyctinasty” // Storm Cellar 10.2 (Fall 2022) [print]
“Just a Game” // Copper Nickel Issue 35 (Fall 2022) [print]
“Conclave” // Bear Review Volume 9, Issue 1 (October 2022)
“My Father Met an Angel” // Psaltery & Lyre (September 2022)
“Four Freedoms” // America (September 2022)
“Glass Hours” // hex (August 2022) [Nominated for the Pushcart Prize] [Nominated for Best of the Net]
“Eve and Virginia Woolf Peruse Flash at the Tattoo Parlor” and “Familiars” // Virginia Woolf Miscellany Issue 99 (Spring/Summer 2022) [print]
“Kill Crossing” // Columba (Issue 12, Summer 2022)
“Field Notes: Worcester County, December” // Matter Monthly Issue 31 (July 2022)
“Surfacing” // Midwest Quarterly Vol. 63, No. 4 (Summer 2022) [print]
“Church” // Notre Dame Review No. 53 (Winter/Spring 2022) [print]
“The Baltimore Monet” and “Field Notes: Worcester County, March” and “Night Flight” and “Dear Neighbors” // Twyckenham Notes Issue 15 (Spring 2022)
“Poem with Koi, Oak, and Reindeer-Hedgehogs” // Bracken Issue IX (June 2022)
“Mast Year” // Sepia Issue 5 (May 2022) [Nominated for Best of the Net] (Journal now closed; archive.org link here)
“Self Portrait as Illumination” // phoebe 51.2 (May 2022)
“Crepuscular Rays” and “Poppies” // Superstition Review Issue 29 (April 2022)
“Archangel Days” // Channel Issue 6 (April 2022) [print]
“Figure Swimming Alone” // Pedestal 89 (March 2022)
“Horses in the Mist” // The Shore Issue 13 (March 2022)
“To the woman at the NASCAR race cheering only for the winless drivers” and “Foreign Affairs” // Electric Literature’s The Commuter Issue 207 (February 2022)
“The Builder” // Limp Wrist Issue 5, Part 1 (February 2022)
“The stranger” // Rogue Agent Issue 83 (February 2022)
“The Apple Speaks” // Sixth Finch (Winter 2022)
“My son says that on his birthday he will wake up early” // West Trestle Review (January 2022)
“Abyssal” // At Length (January 2022)
“An Aubade” // Driftwood Issue 9.1 (January 2022) [print]
2021
“To My Friend in Spring” // The National Poetry Review (Issue 19, December 2021)
“To the woman weighing lemons at the grocery store” // Moist Poetry Journal (December 2021)
“Footnotes for an Essay on Submersion” // Muzzle Issue 29 (Winter 2021)
“Salt Marsh” // NEPC Annual Prize Winners’ Anthology (2021), winner of E.E. Cummings Prize, selected by C. Prudence Arceneaux
“Just Another One of Those Things” and “Cigarettes after Sex” // UCity Review Issue 23 (December 2021)
“The Astronauts Hope to Be Translated Soon” // Whale Road Review Issue 25 (December 2021)
“Night Ocean” and “In Another Life, You Live” and “Eve and Bridget Bishop Whisper on Gallows Hill” // Nimrod Awards 43 (Volume 65, Number 1, Fall/Winter 2021). Finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.
“Northwest” and “Paris, Early Summer at the Fontaine Saint-Michel” // The Ilanot Review (Ephemera[l], October 2021)
“My Son Asks if I Would Rather Live in a House Infested by Bees or a House Infested by Koalas” // Southeast Review (Vol. 39.2, November 2021)
“Walking Alone” // Foundry (Issue Fifteen, Fall 2021)
“The Storerooms” and “Seven Offerings for a Sick Friend” // Psaltery & Lyre (November 2021) [“The Storerooms” nominated for Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net]
“Storm Warning” // SWWIM Every Day (October 2021)
“Blueshift” // Plume (September 2021)
“Sycorax and Bertha Mason Scale a Mountain” // Smartish Pace Issue 28 (Summer 2021) [Finalist for Beullah Rose Prize] [print]
“My Son Is a Quantum Particle” // One Issue 24 (August 2021)
“In the Distance” // Ninth Letter Online (Summer 2021: Distanced)
“A Valediction For Mourning” // DIALOGIST (August 2021)
“Frost Heaves,” “Questions about Bisexuals, #4” and “Do Not Fail to Yield” // Shenandoah (Volume 70, Issue 2, Spring 2021)
“The Holy Pines” // Sporklet 16 (Summer 2021)
“In Shaker Heights They Culled the Elms” // Radar Poetry (Issue 30, June 2021)
“Eve Considers Cezanne’s The Basket of Apples” // The Massachusetts Review (Volume 62, Issue 2: A Gathering of Poets, June 2021) [print] // reprinted in Poetry Daily, 2 October 2022
“Listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams on a Tuesday Night” // River Mouth Review (Issue 7: Poetics, May 2021)
“Island Living” // Atticus Review (April 2021)
“Essay on Erosion” // Kahini Quarterly (April 2021)
“At the Columbus Park of Roses” // Valparaiso Poetry Review (Volume XXII, Number 2, Spring/Summer 2021)
“Convent” and “Hip Check” // On The Seawall (May 11, 2021)
“The Patron Saint of Soldiers Too” // Cherry Tree Issue 7 (2021)
“I-80 Haibun” // Rise Up Review (February 2020)
“I overhear a boy humming ‘Jolene’ while he practices long division” // Limp Wrist Issue 2 (19 January 2021)
“April 18, five inches of snow” // phoebe 50.1 (January 2021) [print]
2020
“Travelers” and “Young Wine” // Twyckenham Notes (Issue 12, Winter 2020)
“Curation” // Porter House Review (November 2020) *Nominated for Best of the Net*
“On a school morning in mid-October” // Southern Indiana Review (Volume 27, Issue 2, Fall 2020)
“Night Baseball” // The Hopkins Review (Volume 13.4, Fall 2020) [print]
“Flowers for the Virgin” and “Watertown” // 32 Poems (Volume 18, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2020) [print]
“Soon Enough” // Pedestal (86.2, Summer 2020)
“Reading Szymborska under a Harvest Moon” // Michigan Quarterly Review (Issue 59:3, Summer 2020) [print]
“Clam Diggers” // Prime Number Magazine (Issue 179, July-September 2020)
“Dear Dr. Park, it’s June again” // Anesthesiology (Volume 133, No. 2, August 2020) [print]; appeared online March 2, 2020
“No Names” // Thrush (May 2020)
“Epithalamion with Missing Groom” // Cave Wall (Number 16, Winter 2019/Spring 2020) [print]
“Questions about Bisexuals, #2” // Contemporary Verse 2 (Volume 42, Issue 4, Spring/Printemps 2020) [print]
“Eve and Johnny Appleseed Sift Through Ohio Pomace” “Eve Visits the Aquarium Where a Green Anaconda Has Just Given Birth via Parthenogenesis” and “Eve Makes a Target for William Tell” // Cagibi (Issue 10, April 2020)
2019
“Somewhere a shark” and “In Your Copy of Akhmatova’s Poems” // Sugar House Review (Vol. 11, 2019) [print]
“Saint Agnes Meets a Hawk on the River’s Edge” // The Shore (Issue 4, Winter 2019)
“The Glass Museum” // The Comstock Review (Volume 33, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2019) [print]
“Argent” and “Track Listing: 2008” // Figure 1 (Issue 3.c, December 2019)
“Suite: Anna Votova” // The Cincinnati Review (Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2019) [print]
“Self-Portrait as Cedar Chest” // Cutbank Online (All Accounts & Mixture, November 2019)
“Rhododendrons” // The Worcester Review (Volume 40, Nos. 1 & 2, 2019) [print] *Winner of the Frank O’Hara Prize, selected by Rachel McKibbens*
“April Ghazal” // Nightjar (Issue 7, September 2019)
“Trivia” // The Fiddlehead (No. 281, Autumn 2019) [print]
“At Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge” and “To a friend offended when I text her instead of calling” // Peauxdunque Review (Issue 2, 2019) [print]
“The Anchorite to Rising Seas” // Beloit Poetry Journal (Volume 69, Number 2, Fall 2019) [print]
“Skin” // Sixth Finch (Summer 2019)
“At the Dead Mothers Motel” // Gingerbread House 37 (July 2019)
“Tornado Drill, St. Gregory the Great” // Iron Horse Literary Review (Volume 21, Issue 2, 2019) [print]
“Crohn’s Disease” // The Comstock Review (Volume 33, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2019) [print]
“Regression” // Animal (June 2019) [Journal since closed.]
“Coming Back from the Wedding” // Equinox (Volume 2, June 2019)
“n miles from Wall Drug” // Pasque Petals (Volume 90:4, Spring 2019) [print]
“The Eider Keepers” // Southern Indiana Review (Volume 26, Number 1, Spring 2019) [print]
“Lazarus Season” // The Maine Review (Issue 5.1, Spring 2019) [print]
“The Sleepers” // Alexandria Quarterly (Volume 5, Spring 2019)
“Spectral Evidence” // sidereal magazine (Issue 5, May 2019)
“St. Jude, We Need to Talk About America” // The Thing Itself (Issue 46, Spring 2019)
“To the man who tried to grab my face through the car’s open window” // JuxtaProse (Volume 19, March 2019) *Honorable Mention, JuxtaProse Poetry Prize*
“The Horse I Would Have Chosen” // Glass: A Journal of Poetry (January 2019)
2018
“Dead Reckoning”* and “Geography Lessons” // FIELD 99 (Fall 2018) [print] *”Dead Reckoning” featured as Mass Poetry’s Poem of the Moment, January 2020
“Nine Minutes in June” // The Louisville Review (Issue 84, Fall 2018) [print] *Winner of the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, selected by Maggie Smith*
“Hymn in My Sickness” // Rogue Agent (Issue 44, November 2018) *Nominated for a Pushcart Prize*
“Lilacs” // Off the Coast (Winter 2018)
“Horse Latitudes” // The Baltimore Review (Fall 2018)
“Interlopers” // MAYDAY (Issue 13, Summer 2018)
“The Sphinx” // America (August 9, 2018; Vol. 219, Num. 4, August 20, 2018 [print])
“Cleopatra in the Flesh” // Southword: New International Writing (35, August 2018) [print]
“Elementary” // Lunch Ticket Issue 13 (Summer/Fall 2018)
“Midlife” // The Shallow Ends (June 14, 2018)
“Old War Machine” // The Rush Issue 4 (June 2018)
“Mother’s Aubade” and “Playroom Canticle” // Tar River Poetry (Volume 57, Number 2, Spring 2018) [print]
“Enceladus Considers Cassini” // The Greensboro Review Number 103 (Spring 2018) [print]
“How the Moose Mourn Their Dead” and “Spring Triptych” // Virga Issue 3 (Spring 2018) [Journal since closed.]
“John Donne and Leonard Cohen at the End of the World” // Booth (February 9, 2018; Print Issue 12, Spring 2018)
“The Bus Driver” and “Dear Fox Who Patrols Our Yard at Night” // Gravel (February 2018) [Journal since closed.]
“Love Poem with Fiddlehead Ferns” // Calamus Journal Issue 14 (January 1, 2018) [Journal since closed.]
2017 and Earlier
“Saint Ursula Advises Emily Dickinson” // Gulf Stream Issue 19 (December 2017)
“Prayer” // Frontier Poetry (November 10, 2017)
“Bridges in Winter” // The Worcester Review (Volume 38, Nos. 1 &2, Fall 2017) [print]
“Pneumonia” // Cumberland River Review (6.3, July 2017); *Nominated for Best of the Net*; anthologized in The Cumberland River Review: The First Five Years
“Leap Day” // Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine (Spring 2017)
“Election” // Scoundrel Time (February 27, 2017)
“Home” and “Midsummer” // Free State Review (Issue 7, 2017) [print]
“Camp Stories” // Constellations (Volume 6: Interference, Fall 2016)
“Iphigenia Leaving Tauris” // America (Vol. 215, Issue 16, November 14, 2016) [print]
“Shift” // Bird’s Thumb (Summer 2016 Flash Issue)
“Catherine of Aragon Addresses the Stones” // Hermeneutic Chaos (Issue 12, January 2016) *Jane Lumley Prize 2015 Honorable Mention*
Anthologized & Reprinted Poems
“I overhear a boy humming ‘Jolene’ as he practices long division” in Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology, Eds. Dustin Brookshire & Julie Bloemeke (Madville Publishing, 2023)
“Spectral Evidence” in The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet, ed. Hannah Soyer (Sable Books, 2022)
“Enceladus Considers Cassini” in Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight ed. Julie Swarstad Johnson and Christopher Cokinos (University of Arizona Press, 2020)
“Watertown” in The Lumiere Review (Issue 9; 2022 Contest Finalist)
“Dead Reckoning” in Poem of the Moment, an online series by Mass Poetry
“I overhear a boy humming ‘Jolene’ as he practices long division” in The Hard Work of Hope, an online series by Mass Poetry
“Pneumonia” in The Cumberland River Review: The First Five Years (2018)
“Psalm 121 at the Continental Divide” and “Blue Alligator” in Voices From the Attic (Volume 27, 2022)
Carolyn Oliver 