With No Hat

Celebrating his 70th year, Tim Seibles presents With No Hat, a new collection with a long history. Energized and original, With No Hat also offers a retrospective of Seibles' life and career--including his signature sassy villanelles; pop up cameos of cartoon characters; meditations on aging, death, identity, and at-one-ment with all beings; and leading the parade--the main character: the poem itself--lithe and mischievous--not only bareheaded, but in the full glory of his birthday suit. Yeats says, "I made my song a coat...but there's more enterprise in walking naked." With No Hat enterprises--strides, sprints, gavottes, and tiptoes through a life work of forging imagination into unforgettable tableaus, spanning self and other, and embracing and assessing, with Seibles' empathic but cold eye, our culture and our lives in mortal crisis.

Tim Seibles was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018. His poems engage many aspects of life, from the romantic to the sociopolitical to the mystical. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow.

His eight books include Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, Buffalo Head Solos, and Fast Animal, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry. One Turn Around the Sun, an extensive examination of his immediate family was published in 2017.

In the last year, Tim has also written poems for two monuments. One in Norfolk, dedicated to the Norfolk 17 who began the fearful process of integrating Virginia public schools, the other for an installation in Dallas, Texas, that addresses the many race-based lynchings that took place there.

His poems have appeared in several anthologies. Among them: In Search of Color Everywhere, Seriously Funny, Uncommon Core, This is The Honey, and Villanelles. Seibles' works have also been featured in Best American Poetry 2010, 2013, 2023. His latest collection, Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems was released by Etruscan Press in 2020.