Philip Memmer

Poet, editor and teacher Philip Memmer is the author of five books of poems: Pantheon (2019); The Storehouses of the Snow: Psalms, Parables and Dreams (2012); Lucifer: A Hagiography (2009), which was awarded the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry from Lost Horse Press; Threat of Pleasure (2008), winner of the Adirondack Literary Award for Poetry; and Sweetheart, Baby, Darling (2004).

 
Memmer’s work is centered in an agnostic search for meaning, and his questions return both thematically and formally to the discarded Biblical stories of his youth. In Lucifer, Memmer reimagines the age-old character as God’s first son, whose rebellion against his Father is an act of self-making, not war-making: confronted with the reality of death in God’s new creation, Lucifer leaves Paradise as an act of solidarity and defiance—a decision he wrestles with throughout the collection. In The Storehouses of the Snow, Memmer writes psalms to a god that is “always ceasing / to be, and then ceasing / to cease to be.”

 
Memmer lives in upstate New York, where he works as executive director of the Arts Branch of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse. In 2001, he founded the YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center, a literary arts center in downtown Syracuse. He also serves as associate editor for Tiger Bark Press.