Steve Gehrke

He was raised in Mankato, Minnesota. He graduated from Minnesota State University, and University of Texas-Austin, with an MFA. He graduated from the University of Missouri with a Ph.D., where he studied with Lynne McMahon, and Sherod Santos. He was poetry editor of the Missouri Review. He taught at the University of Missouri, Seton Hall University, and Gettysburg College. He currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, and Mississippi Review, The Yale Review, Slate, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review. His first collection of poems, The Resurrection Machine, covers a range of topics related to human health, including transplantation (he had kidney failure, and his sister, Gwen, donated a kidney), disease, and the degeneration of the body. It won the 1999 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. His second book, The Pyramids of Malpighi, won the Philip Levine Prize, judged that year by Philip Levine himself. Michelangelo's Seizure, his third book of poetry, was selected for the 2005 National Poetry Series by T. R. Hummer. Writing in the journal Parnassus, reviewer Leonard Barkan called it "a dazzling success".

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Steve Gehrke also seeks to comprehend beauty in the mystery of the human body, yet Gehrke's search for comfort and understanding leads in rather a different direction than Stevens' abstractions, taking us through an unvarnished look at the body's flaws and failings that is another aspect of its power to inspire awe. Through the eyes of both patients and artists, Steve Gehrke examines "the world in repair." The savage and strange exploration of fragility embodied in this collection of poems nevertheless has the capacity to lend unexpected comforts to a reader faced with an inescapable mortality.