A finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award

A finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize, awarded by the Balcones Center for Creative Writing

Selected for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets Series 

Cover design by Phil KovacevichCover art:  Louis le Brocquy, "Head with Open Mouth" (1971)Photo by Carmen Radley

Cover design by Phil Kovacevich

Cover art:  Louis le Brocquy, "Head with Open Mouth" (1971)

Photo by Carmen Radley

       Read or hear Malachi read a selection of poems from the book.

       Invite Malachi to read at your series, festival, or university.

Access a full set of notes to Storm Toward Morning.

"Formally exacting and creatively expansive, Black is an intensely inquisitive John Donne for the Millennial generation."

Publishers Weekly

"[O]ne of the most accomplished debuts I have read in years."

Ilya Kaminsky

"Pound famously said to 'make it new.' Reginald Gibbons, in his essay 'Poetry and Self-Making,' argues that a more worthy goal may be to 'make it last.' Storm Toward Morning is one of those rare books that accomplishes both... These poems have something important to say, and they say it beautifully."

— Poetry International

"To be both visionary and accurate, true to physics and metaphysics at the same time, is rare and puts the poet in some rarefied company. Black, like a few other younger poets, is willing to include all the traditional effects of the lyric poem in his work, but he has set them going in new and lively ways, with the confidence of virtuosity and a belief in the ancient pleasures of pattern and repetition. Yet there is more than a pyrotechnic display going on.... Black takes readers from the paradox of illness to the paradox of belief."

— Mark Jarman

"Black [is] a writer who pushes against limitations even as he creates them.... Black's mind is a pleasure to watch work on the page... one of the most sophisticated debuts I've read in some time."

Shara Lessley

"What does it mean to suffer and to try to give a physical body to the suffering? How does one give to suffering a sound that embodies what is pathos and acts as a guide through one’s labyrinthine exploration of a self that seems to constantly be midst slipping away? Big questions.... Black creates in this collection a new-aged Job who–despite his dips of faith in himself, God, and even the reader–finds beauty everywhere he looks."

The Rumpus