Writing Portfolio | Erik Fuhrer | Poet

Published Books

Click on a Cover for more details

Cover image for Gellar Studies. Pink, yellow and white text mimicking a magazine cover.

Poems by Erik Fuhrer

Erik is a wordsmith of the highest caliber: their passion and erudition radiate from every phrase, each a carefully constructed blade fearlessly peeling back layers of the anatomy of trauma.

- Stephen Susco, Screenwriter of The Grudge and The Grudge 2

Eye, Apocalypse Cover Image. Collage with upside down half moon shape.

Poetry and Interior Art by Erik Fuhrer. Cover Art by Kimberly Androlowicz.

The Apocalypse as love story, as a MAGA hat, as a poem: the Apocalypse personified. This collection by Erik Fuhrer showcases his skill at making the fantastical mundane and the mundane fantastical. Every piece in this book has a lingering bite, a tiny world-ender that sinks into you and doesn’t let go.

—Cathy Ulrich, author of Ghosts of You

Cover for in which I take myself hostage. Abstract organic shapes.

Poems by Erik Fuhrer. Cover and Interior Images by Kimberly Androlowicz.

This book of poems is a horror film. It is a book in which the weird transformations, animate horror, and tender gore of Argento, Cronenberg, and Carpenter receive a horrible rebirth in language. Bodies invaded by flies, walls covered with cockroaches, spores that ache to sicken you proliferate within these pages, squarely sourced in the soil of the everyday. Read this book; insert these poems into your skin.

- Ali Raz, co-author of Human Tetris

Cover for not human enough for the census. Purple and black background reminiscent of hanging tree branches.

Poems by Erik Fuhrer. Cover and Interior Images by Kimberly Androlowicz.

In Erik Fuhrer's not human enough for the census, there arecreatures of dark habits, organ breathers, tree butchers, and 1 in 100scientists agree the state of god is liquid. In these poems, aftermath requiresa new language. Dust and ash compound with mother and father, mud compoundswith blossom. These spare lyrics contain numerous transformations, and"just because the body is gone/does not mean the absence of body isgone." Absences loom everywhere--the mouth, the breath, the treacherousgod in the tempest. -Traci Brimhall

At Root Cover Image. Geometric shape on top of spare background.

Poems by Erik Fuhrer. Cover and Interior Images by Erik Fuhrer.

Cover image for VOS. Wedge shapes in primary colors.

Poems by Erik Fuhrer. Interior images by Erik Fuhrer. Cover image by Kimberly Androlowicz.

“Inspired by Woolf’s first novel, ‘The Voyage Out,’ precisely to cut her words loose from any settled meanings, Erik Fuhrer’s ‘VOS’ shimmers with the multiplicity and plasticity of language. The result is a remarkable series of poems that assemble human and nonhuman (as well as what Fuhrer calls ‘Honestly inhuman’) life in playful, strange, intimate, and often surreal arrangements.”

— Derek Ryan

Cover image for every time you die. Blue and red background.

Poems by Erik Fuhrer. Interior images and Cover Image by Marcel Herms.

"This new collection by Erik Fuhrer is as the title suggests - it deals with death. Ironically, what makes this collection truly unique is that each relatively short poem is fully alive, vibrant and possesses a cathartic power that is both personal and universal. Here is a poet who is a master of metaphor and creates lucid narratives that are layered with complexities that capture an inspired fusion of loss and enlightenment."

—Kevin Pilkington, Author of Where You Want to Be: New and Selected Poems

Select Art

Click Here for a Photo Essay Published in Sonic Boom

Abstract collage with some music sheet elements and blotches of red, black, blue, and silver.

Love Affair With the Apocalypse (2019)
Encaustic on Wood Board
Published in Eye, Apocalypse (2021)

The Revelation of the Seven Dead (2019)
Encaustic on Wood Board
Published in Eye, Apocalypse (2021)

Multicolored collage with bright colors, mostly pinks and yellows.

Apocalyptical Time (2020)
Collage on Wood Board
Published in Eye, Apocalypse (2021)

Encausted collage with a house-like object. Mostly yellow with some blue streaks.

Untitled Haunted (2019)
Encaustic on Wood board
Published in Eye, Apocalypse (2021)

Published Articles

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“Drought, Human Stones, and the Arthropodocene: Reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the Anthropocene”

"Queer Kinship in the Work of Nathalie Djurberg and Djuna Barnes"

Gale Researcher Guide for: Jonathan Swift

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Front Cover

Book Review: Jaillant, Lise. Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917–1955.

"A Woolf in Priest’s Clothing: Female Prophecy in A Room Of One’s Own"

"On Jean Valentine's Lyric Dreamscapes"

"What if Jesus Had a Sister? Virginia Woolf's Messianic Re-imaginings"

Read My May, 2022 Interview with Version(9) Magazine(pages 33-45) for a discussion of my poetics as well as my new projects, My Buffed Up Life and Gellar Studies.

Select Reviews

"This collection is immersive and forces the reader to confront disaster as a sprawling, volatile force that exposes awe, horror, and humor in the same vein. To navigate through these poems is to sink into each layer and listen to the voices that are freed when the human decomposes. The poems feel radioactive, charged with multiple force that clash with each other and make material that is unstable. This collection ultimately investigates happens when the human becomes compost, becomes indiscernible from the detritus of disaster, and speculates what remains when what is human morphs into decay."

-Scarlett Wardrop

Ecotheo Review

not human enough for the census

Eye, Apocalypse - Independent Book Review - IG, FB_edited_edited.jpg

in which I take myself hostage

"Erik Fuhrer does this amazing trick where he reflects my deepest and darkest assumptions about the world—effectively validating them—but then makes a slight turn, giving me the will to wish for something more. Something better. And that, when you boil it all down, is exactly what poetry is here for."

-Joseph Haeger

Independent Book Review

Interviews and Collaborations

Read my 5 Question Interviews with Other Writers

"In Conversation, A Collaborative Text by Erik Fuhrer and AM Ringwalt"

Wombwell Rainbow Book Interviews

The Book Ends Review Cover to Cover Podcast

The People Who Shaped my Writing, Fly on the Wall Press

Erasing [ ] with Erik Fuhrer, Writing Remix Podcast, Hosted by the USC Writing Program

The Art of Writing # 38, talking about strawberries all of the time

Interview with Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu at Marías at Sampaguitas

Person of the Week, Indian Periodical

[the creature of dark habits], Backstory of the Poem

Author spotlight Erik Fuhrer, Lori's Book Loft