Purchase neverwell!

Darren C. Demaree grew up in Mount Vernon, Ohio. He is a graduate of the College of Wooster, Miami University, and Kent State University. He is the author of nineteen poetry collections, most recently neverwell (Harbor Editions, 2023). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system and living in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and children.

Praise for neverwell:

In this stunning collection of poems, Darren C. Demaree masterfully controls compressed language to explore the many multitudes a person can contain. I love the way the sequence cascades and crescendos, filling the quiet space between night and day. These poems bring the wreckage of a fragmented life up to the surface with brutal and surreal honesty about what it can mean to live “two lives / in one world.”

—Adam Clay, author of To Make Room for the Sea

Darren C. Demaree writes, "I’ve been waiting for a collection of poetry about addiction that holds no metaphors at all." Instead of waiting for someone else to write it, he wrote it. Although there are metaphors in this book, they are subject to one hard and fast rule—the truth about recovery and its shapelessness. The conventional beauty of a triumphant recovery, the success story everyone loves—is absent. "I wish I were alive in a different way," writes Demaree. Metaphor has its uses, but sometimes it just gets in the way of real life.

—Nikki Wallschlaeger, author of Waterbaby

These sober psalms are the words that accompany the music of addiction—humming soft and sinister in the background. As they say, your addiction is out in the parking lot doing push-ups, and this speaker is intimate with his antagonist. We overhear his daily internal dialogue—an archive of the ambivalent feelings on the other side of wreckage, what it means to “live two lives in one world.” To be the kidnapped and the kidnapper. The trauma and the traumatized. To be lucky and haunted. Demaree captures that peculiar specter of spirits so precisely: “A car skids / onto our / front lawn / & I rush out / to make sure / I’m not in it.” This book is the second chance we don’t deserve. 

—Joy Priest, author of Horsepower