Keith althaus
Keith Althaus is the author of five poetry collections, Rival Heavens (1993) and Ladder of Hours (2005), and Cold Storage, winner of the 2016 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and New & Selected Poems (2024). He has received a Pushcart Prize as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Foundation of the Arts.
In 1969 he was one of the first Writing Fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He lives on Cape Cod with his wife, the artist Susan Baker.
“Keith Althaus has been writing some of the most hauntingly beautiful poems I’ve ever read for as long as I can remember.””
Cold Storage
Poems by Keith Althaus
The poems in Cold Storage are revelations in the fullest sense, uncovering a world at once familiar and rendered new again in resplendent, transformative detail: a halo on the threshing floor, a drop of water on the skin, the nearing dark. Keith Althaus is a poet who walks by the shadow yet thrills with his illuminations, producing lanterns from yucca blossoms, a last breath, or “a plain hospital gown.” Here, light is what surrounds a painting or frames a closed door, saturating both the landscape and the interior of the self until “even darkness glows.”
winner of 2016
off the grid Poetry prize
