Thin Ice Olympics

by Jeffrey McDaniel

Arranged mostly chronological, the book is a poetic dream diary, charting the psyche of a citizen of America, isolating in a village in the Hudson Valley, during the Covid pandemic, with a wife and teenage daughter. Swerving between dazed loneliness, grief, and dark comedy, the poetic speaker considers mortality, as death encroaches. The speaker yearns for connection with loved ones, both living and gone. At times profane and brash, at other times tender and sincere. The poems are natural in the throat as speech, and yet energized by explosive metaphor, achieving moments of bruised pathos and temporary enlightenment.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

Published October 14, 2022

About the author

He is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has been included in Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry 1994, and The New Young American Poets, as well as on the National Endowment for the Arts website.

Although McDaniel has not performed in a poetry slam in over 10 years, he has made spoken word appearances at Lollapalooza, the Moscow Writers Union, and the Globe in Prague, as well as numerous poetry slams across the United States in the early-to-mid '90s.

A compilation of selected poems, Katostrophenkunde, was translated into German by Ron Winkler and published in 2006.

He teaches creative writing and is a faculty advisor at Sarah Lawrence College.