Star Anchors | Dan Campion | $20 | 9781948509725 | 150p | Release: April 20, 2026, 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City
Star Anchors gathers a selection of Dan Campion’s poetry from 1975 through 2024. He has published in Poetry, Rolling Stone, North American Review, Shenandoah, and many others, building a body of formal work — predominantly sonnets — of remarkable range and accessibility. His poems move from cicadas to the iridium layer, from Seurat to spray-painted abandoned cars, from elegy to political sendup, always with what Ed Folsom calls “wild surprises that long-tested form still holds, in skilled hands like his.”
David Hamilton, former editor of The Iowa Review, writes that Campion’s poems offer “a master’s class in formal structures and the art of finding new turns of thought summoned by their rigors.”
Dan Campion launches Star Anchors at Prairie Lights Books, Iowa City, on April 20 at 7 p.m. He is available for interviews.
We previously published Dan’s book A Playbill for Sunset.
From the back cover of Star Anchors:
On A Playbill for Sunset (2022): When you encounter a poem by Dan Campion—and they have been appearing all over the place for many years now—you know you are going to be surprised by rhyme and entranced by smart formal choices. In this amazing book of (mostly) sonnets, Campion demonstrates some of the wild surprises that long-tested form still holds, in skilled hands like his. Poem after poem, you find yourself possessed for a moment, maybe by laughter or tears or something else hard to name—some complex possession of loss that arrives only after you have lost what you thought you possessed. —Ed Folsom, author, editor, and teacher
On The Mirror Test (2024): The delights of Dan Campion’s poetry rest with perceptions closely rendered and the poetic amplitude each allows—a branch, a finch, a hand curled across the arm of a chair, ordinary or surprising scenes. Each image is an occasion for reflection, a beginning. There are a variety of forms used here, all exceptionally well-wrought, though most notably Campion has, without fuss, recovered the sonnet as it was used by the Romantics as a vehicle for taking the emotional and mythic weight of the immediate. The Mirror Test, explicitly a test of an animal’s self-awareness, is also, momento mori, a way of testing for a faint breath on the glass, at once self-awareness, awareness itself and survival. —Michael Anania, author, editor, and teacher
Dan Campion was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and raised in Chicago, where he attended the public schools and earned degrees from the University of Chicago (AB) and the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (MA) and worked as an editor. He earned a
PhD at the University of Iowa in 1989 and taught at the university from 1991 through 1995 and worked from 1984 to 2013 as an editor for the educational company ACT. The author of the poetry books The Mirror Test (2024), A Playbill for Sunset (2022) and Calypso (1981), the
monograph Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995), and a coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981; 1998; 2019), he has contributed poems to many magazines and anthologies.