D. S. Waldman

Biography

D. S. Waldman is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Atria (Liveright/WW Norton, 2026). Winner of the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from Poetry Society of America and a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, his work has appeared in the Atlantic, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and ZYZZYVA.

D.S. Waldman
Jemimah Wei

See Work

POETRY / Winter 2024

San Francisco

By D. S. Waldman

Last day for the Rivera mural; we can see a narrow section from over the near rail. Against a ribbon of hills and low sky one man swings a hammer, another an axe.

 

POETRY / Winter 2024

Tisch, 1962. Oil on canvas.

By D. S. Waldman

On the train to the museum, at the Embarcadero stop with my father, I start to get 
emotional. Tender as ever, having told a woman who loves me I cannot, or can no 
longer, love her.

POETRY / Winter 2024

The Lake

By D. S. Waldman

Overhead the Kentucky sky was clear and went on forever. I don’t really remember how we parted or where I went after, only that he wanted to stay awhile, that at some point he hugged me, tucked a cig behind his ear, and started down toward...

POETRY / Winter 2024

The Fayette Co. Line

By D. S. Waldman

I drive out Old Frankfort Pike past the ditch 
by the creek where you pulled off on New Year’s Day 
to pick from the mud that Jack Russell 
with swollen nipples and bring her back to the farm.

POETRY / Winter 2024

Man Ray

By D. S. Waldman

Every piece in its frame, behind glass, is really two works. There’s the rayograph, its vaporous, everyday shapes drifting across the once light-sensitive paper. And over it, caught in the glass, a spontaneous portrait of the viewer...