Amorak Huey
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amorak.bsky.social
Amorak Huey
@amorak.bsky.social
3.7K followers 3.5K following 1.1K posts
Loyola grad’s dad. BGSU dad. Poet. BGSU prof/director of creative writing. Proud union member. Co-founding editor @riverriverbooks.bsky.social. Auburn fan. Dodgers fan. I like board games & ttrpg. He/him. It's pronounced uh-MOR-ack. https://amorakhuey.com
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“… Amorak Huey's Mouth is an exploration …”

😬
MOLLY SPENCER ON MOUTH Amorak Huey's Mouth is an exploration-sometimes gentle, sometimes raucous—of one of the fundamental forces of nature: desire. In its quiet corners and its echoing sweeps, this collection returns to us our creatureliness and our (futile? noble?) attempts to transcend it, reminding us that our bodies were born "to crave / and end." Meanwhile, the planet burns. Meanwhile, all around us are the loves of our lives: people and music and landscapes and memories and new beginnings and "our dry lakebeds, / our impetuous affairs." Mouth can hold them all and, indeed, holds them out to us in a beautiful and tender rendering of both our absurdity and our magnificence. If we must crave and end, and if we must do it in this particular moment of human and geologic time-and, of course, we must—how lucky we are to have Mouth as our companion. -Molly Spencer, author of Invitatory Amorak Huey’s book Mouth is COMING IN JANUARY 2026 FROM CORNERSTONE PRESS
November 14, 2025 at 1:11 PM
amorak.bsky.social
“I must break the language to tell it myself…” Donna Vorreyer
The book of poems Unrivered, by Donna Vorrreyer. Sundress Publications, 2025 Skeleton Key My ribs pick-up sticks, my skull a bowl for cherry pits and pyrite, a cauldron to simmer the marrow into song. The teeth from my jawbone strung like pearls with a clasp of hammer and anvil, adorning my laddered neck. Beneath the leaded apron, with each thunk of exposure, hymns are humming. After, the machine shows me arranged in the usual way, and the doctor reads the film. Minor lapses in density. Arthritic calcifications. Small fissures and lesions. But he doesn't know the real story. I must break the language to tell it myself: Once upon a time there was a girl whose skin was jeweled, whose sentences were filled with bones and ghosts.
November 9, 2025 at 3:48 PM
amorak.bsky.social
“When I am inside having sex while it snows I want to be thinking about the birds too, and I want my love to love thinking about the birds as much as I do, for it is snowing…” — Mary Ruefle, “Snow” (www.versedaily.org/2008/snow.sh...)
A brown-leafed tree on an Ohio cul-de-sac where the first snow of the season has fallen, wet and cold along the sidewalks.
November 9, 2025 at 1:19 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Look what arrived in the mail!

ARCs of Mouth, my fifth full-length poetry collection, due out in January from Cornerstone Press. Preorder link coming soon —
Amorak holding two copies of his poetry book titled Mouth.
November 6, 2025 at 12:42 PM
amorak.bsky.social
… and out the other side …
The super moon rising yellow over an Ohio farm
November 5, 2025 at 11:24 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Out the right side of the car …
A striking colorful sunset over a river
November 5, 2025 at 11:24 PM
amorak.bsky.social
…
Screenshot of a Google search result for “Amorak”: AI Overview "Amorak" can refer to the Inuit spirit of the wolf from a creation myth, the Italian outerwear brand Amorak Italy, or the poet Amorak Huey.
November 5, 2025 at 4:47 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Found this in a notebook today & couldn’t remember what prompted me to write it, or even what meeting I was in when I wrote it.
Note that says: the surveillance is the punishment.
October 28, 2025 at 1:00 AM
amorak.bsky.social
Couple of love poems in the new issue of Waxwing --
waxwingmag.org/items/issue3...
Aperture Amorak Huey we’re tangled in nowhere knotted in not supposed to be & I say I want to frame this what I mean is I want to keep it, the now of it like time is a thing we can hold to look at later & also I mean I want to draw a border around this blackberry thicket & the here we are the can you believe it & I want to trim away the rest of the world, I want to make of the universe a blankness everywhere except here where the light enters through the brambles that hide us except here where parts of us touch nothing beyond the thorns of our entangling & on the sheets of this touching a million tiny points of blood or is it the juice of berries spilling like stars, like sand an offering
October 23, 2025 at 12:48 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Jennifer Martelli —
The book of poems Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, by Jennifer Martelli Rooms My little office has two windows, and the one above my cluttered desk looks out, east, down my street, Ruby Ave. I'm half listening to two poets read on Zoom. They are in squares and I fill in the squares of the Sunday crosword puzzle. Still, I'm hearing a rhythm, or their rhythms travel the cold blue cyberspace, hit and thrum the hammer and anvil in my ear. It stays light now, after five. The snow we had this week won't last with the extra minutes of sun. If I walked down my street, I'd hit one pond and then a beach. The poets talk about politics now, in conversation, in poetry. Do politics belong in a poem? The more famous writer says she writes what she writes, what comes to her. The chat turns to Ana Mendieta, pushed out a window by her husband. So, how do we mourn her? Does forgiveness belong in art? Does love? Women wept ar her art exhibit: wept like a chorus for her un-answered-for death. I'm not saying clearly what I need to say. Outside, a small icicle falls past my window.
October 21, 2025 at 12:57 AM
amorak.bsky.social
Sandra Beasley on Mouth Thank goodness that Amorak Huey understands our craving for skillful poems that are unafraid to be both sweet and rude. We need the mega-poem called "Bodies, in Concert," the bawdy aubades, the lines that admit: "our greatest fear is morning comes / our greatest fear is mourning comes." Threaded among the ironic odes and the concerns of mid-life commitments are quick, piercing considerations of mortality and ecological peril. The voice of Mouth is confident in its moves, sometimes breath-stopping in its leaps, by turns despairing and lusty, deeply funny, and—always— restoratively human. -Sandra Beasley author of Made to Explode: Poems Mouth is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in January 2016
October 20, 2025 at 1:38 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Hey, this is fun news! Mouth, my fifth book of poems, comes out in January, and I’m delighted to share the cover —
COVER REVEAL MOUTH poems Amorak Huey COMING JANUARY 2026 FROM CORNERSTONE PRESS COVER PHOTO BY ERIN SCHMERR / COVER DESIGN BY ALLISON LANGE
October 15, 2025 at 11:17 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Excited to dig into these new lovelies from @juneroadpress.bsky.social
Two books of poems: Level Watch by Mary Ardery and mother, daughter, augur by Mary Simmons
October 13, 2025 at 12:49 AM
amorak.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt —
What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt Translated and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill This was the farewell: Many friends came with us and whoever did not come was no longer a friend. This was the evening: Haltingly, it slowed our pace, and drew our souls out the window. This was the train: Measuring the country in flight and slowing as it passed through many cities. This is the arrival: Bread is no longer called bread and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.
October 11, 2025 at 3:24 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Jenny George—
Fortune Autumn, with its vivid exchanges, streams the avenues of an old city. The falling leaves produce a kind of wedding. There's a thinness to the air. Golden cottonwoods tremble with their visions. We walk along the street with our shoulders nearly touching. One of us carries a bag of delicate pastries wrapped in paper like sticky jewels. Here, says the Future, that famous comic. Here are your lives. They are yours to live in extravagantly.
October 5, 2025 at 12:01 AM
amorak.bsky.social
This has been in my TBR pile far too long. Finally reading it & now all I want to do is make poems like these.
After Image, by Jenny George
October 2, 2025 at 12:13 AM
amorak.bsky.social
Ross Gay —

#smallpoemsunday
ode to the flute A man sings by opening his mouth a man sings by opening his lungs by turning himself into air a flute can be made of a man nothing is explained a flute lays on its side and prays a wind might enter it and make of it at least a small final song
September 28, 2025 at 4:35 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Up early this morning, walked the dog under an impossibly bright coupe glass moon, living this poem almost word for word & & & www.dmqreview.com/hueyf25
Up Early, Three Months After Moving to a New State Walking the dog before sunrise & there are so many stars over Ohio & I’m pretty sure that big one is Jupiter & Orion’s belt is so bright & I lift my eyes & lift my eyes & reach for the profound & which of course escapes into the dark spaces & between the sky & distance & distance & everyone is so far away & here I think I am supposed to & say how insignificant it all makes me feel & but it’s the opposite & I am the center of the motherfucking universe & the hunter watches me & specifically me & it sounds like I’m talking about God & I’m not & I’m talking about & I sleep less here & I am lonely & I’m talking about & you & despite the stars & because of the stars.
September 17, 2025 at 10:15 AM
amorak.bsky.social
Two pieces in the new prose poems issue of DMQ Review -- www.dmqreview.com/hueyf25
Why Is One Side of a V of Birds Always Longer? It Has More Birds in It. Saturday and cold sunshine and a crooked checkmark of Canada geese veers low overhead noisily. They bark and glide and shape themselves: river, rope bridge, narrative arc. The goose at the foremost point — would that be crisis? climax? crossroads? whatever, the bird wearies, its turn as leader complete, slides back toward one of the ends: resolution? catalyst? It’s hard to keep track. Stories begin, they end, they overlap like seasons. The last time you touched me, I jumped. Bit my tongue. The blood warm against my teeth.
September 15, 2025 at 12:02 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Natasha Sajé —
ALIVE You and me, of course, and the animals we feed and then slaughter. The boxelder bug with its dot of red, yeast in the air making bread and wine, bacteria in yoghurt, carrots, the apple tree, each white blossom. And rock, which lives so slowly it's hard to imagine it as sand then glass. A sea called dead is one that will not mirror us. We think as human beings we deserve every last thing. Say the element copper. Incandescence glowing bright and soft like Venus. Ductile as a shewolf's eyes pigmented red or green, exposed to acid in the air. Copper primes your liver, its mines leach lead and arsenic. Smelting is to melting the way smite is to mite. A violence of extraction. What's lost when a language dies? When its tropes oppose our own? In the at-risk Aymara the past stretches out in front, the future lags behind. Imagine being led by knowing, imagine the end as clear.
August 31, 2025 at 2:39 AM
amorak.bsky.social
Boiled down my AI policy this semester --
I get it; AI is everywhere these days. Let this class be a bubble where it is not; where we learn by focusing on process, not product; where we embrace the friction and joy of expressing our own ideas in our own words; where we lean on our own imaginations, histories, and imperfections as we write our own imperfect human pieces.
August 25, 2025 at 4:21 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Kayleb Rae Candrilli —
ON TRAVELING TOGETHER In a Super 8 just outside lowa City, two twelve-year-old boys cuddle on the lobby couch, scrolling on their phones. It's four in the morning, and they don't expect me, or anyone, in this holy space they've drawn for themselves. Their parents are asleep on the third floor, resting before a hockey tournament or some other rough-and-tumble game. It's clear by the way the boys jump as I walk by: their parents know nothing. The floor is lava. | The continental breakfast will start soon. The couch they're on is an island I've been to.
August 17, 2025 at 6:11 PM
amorak.bsky.social
Dawn Lundy Martin —
The book of poems titled Instructions for the Lovers, by Dawn Lundy Martin. It was a national book critics circle award finalist. ABOUT SECRETS, D+D I like secrets though. I think about the way secrets are a product of a shared. Secrets are a necessary part of how people form, locate themselves and each other. The secret is crucial for the erotic. And devastating for what happens after the moment of foreclosure. If a secret is held right where the nature of the secret is shared and understood, the disclosures are less personalized, so the devastation is still present but shifts from altering truth to the multiplicity, ever present (loss) against oneness. How can a secret be shared when the very word "secret" means apart? The secret isn't shared, but the purpose of the secret is shared. What if I, say, accr-dentally murdered your hamster, and that's the secret? If you accidentally murdered my hamster, I would know you didn't tell me because you have your own feelings about it that you were processing before processing my reaction/response to it. A secret is a promise in reverse. Which is the weapon? Which hurts the most? For example, it's just us on earth now and our eyes are quite dry. We think we hear a yodeling from afar. We reveal the door.
July 24, 2025 at 8:53 PM
amorak.bsky.social
“… or / I must change my understanding of what it means to be satisfied.”

—from the new issue of @shopoetryjournal.bsky.social
AMORAK HUEY Sumac I learned as a child which red sumac berries were safe— brittle dots of tartness to suck and spit into the underbrush, leaving the inside of my mouth puckered, tender. Today, on a walk starting in the woods, ending beside a meadow, I discover berries I think are those, but it has been so long. I must carry my sudden craving into the angled sunlight of afternoon, unsatisfied, or I must change my understanding of what it means to be satisfied.
July 8, 2025 at 12:17 AM
amorak.bsky.social
The new issue of @shopoetryjournal.bsky.social is gorgeous & I’m grateful to have two poems in it. Here’s one:
Shō Poetry Journal on a kitchen counter. Cover depicts a gorgeous blue painting of a figure in a white dress with a bird head sitting on a limb under the moon. AMORAK HUEY Beer Garden, Ohio Nearby, someone sparks a cigar to life, the odor of it rises, is what we both will remember later— not the light, which is ordinary, nor the depth of the sky, the ever so slightest of winds, absence of temperature-but the smell of burning earth, rich like that, and the rough wood table between us and the fear neither of us can shake that none of this is real, that like the smoke it could all go away which it could, but it hasn't.
July 5, 2025 at 12:41 PM