Stephen Dobyns Books in Order

Small-town policeman Charlie Bradshaw travels to New York to find the son of his former high-school love. The missing young man's involvement in a major drug deal makes Charlie unwelcome to nearly everyone, but stubbornness keeps him investigating.

Charlie Bradshaw leaves police work for a quieter job guarding a Saratoga stable, only for his employer to be shot while swimming. Investigating the murder leads him through the racing world's hidden dealings and a conspiracy reaching into powerful circles.

Stephen Dobyns responds to the paintings of Balthus through a sequence of narrative poems. Rather than describing the images alone, the collection develops personal interpretations of their themes and turns visual encounters into stories shaped by the poet's imagination.

An investigator with Boston's arson squad is assigned to a suspicious warehouse fire. The case places the work of determining how and why a building burned at the centre of a crime investigation.

After an awkward date leaves him responsible for a dead dog, Latchmer searches New York for a way to dispose of it. An eccentric Haitian cabdriver turns the task into an increasingly bizarre journey that also exposes Latchmer's unresolved past.

A former jockey scheduled to testify about race-fixing is murdered after seeking shelter with Charlie Bradshaw. Suspected of betraying the witness, Charlie must clear his name and find the killers while more violence closes around him.

Victor Plotz's sideline photographing tourists nearly gets him killed when a driver runs him down and steals his camera. Charlie Bradshaw investigates while a hotel murder and a missing waiter suggest links to a wider robbery scheme.

A Vietnam veteran struggling to adjust to civilian life becomes entangled in drug trafficking in a small Maine town. The coastal setting becomes the backdrop to a thriller about a former soldier unable to settle into ordinary life.

Stephen Dobyns uses narrative poems to explore dreams, domestic passions, altered myths and the presence of death. Frightening and comic situations reveal lives driven by regret, desire and need, connecting imaginative storytelling with questions about human experience.

A gambling party in Saratoga ends in robbery, while a stolen painting and a murdered grocer leave Charlie Bradshaw juggling several problems. Following five serious gamblers may connect the crimes, but the investigation takes an increasingly dangerous turn.

As violence fills the streets of a Latin American city, three men gather for dinner at a surgeon's luxurious home. A photograph prompts disturbing revelations of desire and betrayal, while the conflict outside draws steadily closer to their sheltered evening.

Stephen Dobyns examines the body as the place where emotional and physical life meet. These poems move through birth, desire, pleasure, pain, commitment and mortality, asking how our engagement with the world is shaped by embodied experience.

The murder of a colleague draws Charlie Bradshaw into a mystery with an unexpected literary clue. A poem written in iambic pentameter may explain a series of deaths, if he can work out how its language connects them.

A young Canadian arrives in Detroit searching for his runaway sister and becomes involved with a rooming house's diverse residents. Against the city's violence in 1973, crimes and personal crises draw fifteen inhabitants into an unstable form of community.

A woman looks back on the Chilean earthquake of 1960 and the upheaval it brought to her family. Memories of deaths, acts of courage and endurance reveal how a catastrophic event continues to shape the lives that survive it.

A man Charlie Bradshaw helped convict twenty years earlier leaves prison and begins sending threats against his life. As Charlie faces danger from the past, his longtime partner presses him for a commitment he has been avoiding.

When his fiancée is abducted, gentle professional wrestler Michael Marmaduke must leave the scripted moral world of his career. A search through New York brings bizarre physical threats and philosophical puzzles that challenge the identity his public image has supplied.

A wealthy horse owner tells Charlie Bradshaw that his wife may be planning to kill him. When the man dies in an apparent accident, Charlie and Victor Plotz investigate whether his suspicions were justified and who benefits from his death.

New poems appear alongside selections from Stephen Dobyns's seven earlier collections in a survey spanning more than twenty-five years. The volume brings separate stages of his writing together, allowing readers to follow the development of his poetic work.

Working at Saratoga's racetrack draws Victor Plotz into trouble surrounding a troublesome mare named Fleshpot. A disappearance, murders and suspicious followers threaten to make him the chief suspect, leaving Charlie Bradshaw to help clear his friend's name.

Stephen Dobyns examines how poems make meaning through memory, metaphor, pacing, voice and tone. Essays on poetic technique and readings of writers including Rilke, Mandelstam and Chekhov offer readers and practising writers ways to understand the craft more closely.

Across sixty-nine poems, Stephen Dobyns considers the difficulty of loving a world marked by cruelty, absurdity and compassion. Spiritual questions sit beside bodily appetites as he explores contradictory impulses within ordinary human lives.

Three girls disappear from a small upstate New York town, transforming unease into panic and mutual suspicion. As residents turn against outsiders and one another, old grievances surface and the search for safety begins destroying the community from within.

Victor Plotz agrees to collect a suitcase from Montreal, expecting easy money and little trouble. Instead, questionable helpers, criminals and a stripper turn the assignment into a mess that requires Charlie Bradshaw's intervention before Victor loses more than his fee.

A new headmaster arrives at a New Hampshire boarding school where staff resist his reforms and newcomers conceal difficult pasts. Beneath the orderly campus lie old privileges and resentments that become increasingly dangerous as the school year turns toward murder.

Stephen Dobyns gives the heart a voice as it wrestles with love, loneliness, hope and its own restless desires. These poems combine that troubled inner life with a longer meditation on isolation and human inaction in a crowded world.

Men and women discover that their own irrational impulses can undo seemingly orderly lives. In these stories, marriages unravel, careful plans dissolve and ordinary occupations become settings for guilt, desire and unexpected disruptions.

Prose poems follow a man considering his life's successes and failures, interspersed with brief observations on human behaviour. A second section offers unusual definitions of words, while Howie Michels's artwork accompanies Dobyns's exploration of attitudes and language.

Stephen Dobyns examines life's complications through poems ranging from everyday situations to mythic encounters. Free verse and traditional forms carry humour, absurdity and sudden shifts in tone as he investigates the joys and disturbances within familiar experience.

Daily walks, imagined creatures and encounters with literature become starting points for Stephen Dobyns's reflections on love, politics and art. These narrative poems bring ordinary routines into contact with philosophical questions about living honestly in an uncertain world.

Stephen Dobyns explores how poets choose subjects, shape language and revise their work. Drawing lessons from writers including Philip Larkin, Pablo Neruda and W. B. Yeats, he offers practical ways to think through obstacles in the creative process.

A baby vanishes from a Rhode Island hospital and a snake is left in its place. As coyotes gather and unexplained violence unsettles the town, Detective Woody Potter investigates while rumours of something supernatural turn local unease into spreading paranoia.

Small-time charity con artist Connor Raposo witnesses a fatal motorcycle crash that two detectives come to suspect was murder. His latest target's connection to the mysterious Fat Bob draws Connor into questions whose answers may determine whether he survives.

Stephen Dobyns confronts mortality through poems about bereavement, memory and the people who remain after loss. Sonnets for his wife and a portrait of poet Hayden Carruth sit alongside imagined scenes asking how one continues to live and endure.

Stripped of his investigator's licence, Charlie Bradshaw is trying to settle into retirement when a murder victim appears outside his home. Looking into the death risks prosecution, while a kidnapped horse provides another reason he cannot leave detective work behind.

Dobyns uses darkly comic narrative poems to examine injustice and the contradictions of American life. Absurd encounters and strange situations bring the struggles of working people into focus, mixing ordinary experience with unsettling turns of imagination.