William Allen is a poet and visual artist, working at the United Nations in New York for many years, hoping to bring a poetry of humanism to the poetry canon. He has published six books of poems: The Man on the Moon (New York University and Persea Presses, 1987); Sevastopol: On Photographs of War (Xenos Press, 1997), North Passage (Clay Street Press, 2018), The Largest Glue Factory in the World (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), A History of the Azores (Clay Street Press, 2025) and The Birth of the Atlantic (Spuyten Duyvil, 2026). A member of PEN America, he was awarded a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship with residencies at Art Matters, Yaddo, Breadloaf and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. These days he’s working with a conservation group in the Hudson Valley to inventory natural resources and prepare people and the environment for climate change
PRAISE:
“In View of Toledo, William Allen demonstrates the sheer extent of his range as a poet. His deep sense of place – whether in coastal Rhode Island or a Greek monastery – not only flies the reader around the world but also serves as a catalyst to explore a wild array of natural and emotional land and seascapes. Through his craft, the poet taps the reader into the interconnected root systems that are history, art, and ecology. They do what only poems can do – bind us along with the poet to the living world.”
—Emily Knight, poet, oceanographer, Director of Outreach & Engagement, Blue Convergence Fund
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“With bird’s eye deep wonder and granular clarity, William Allen‘s View of Toledo redistributes a new meter and measure for an ecopoetics of trace, drift, and memory, carved through radical copresence in disparate times and spaces. Both a celebration of passage and a memorial to irremediable loss, Allen writes from under the volcano to subvert calcifying complacency—”Nobody/seems to be noticing as the world burns inward”—and entangle the often unlikely processes that connect all things to one another and ourselves in the solitary and collective breathwork of poetry: an incantation, a murmur, a misheard hymn, a boomerang that always comes back, though only by curving the straight and narrow line of destiny.”
–Chris Campanioni, poet, author of Windows 85, north by north/west and other collections
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“In William Allen‘s View of Toledo, we follow a poet deftly “…scribbling a poem of pilgrimage” across space, time, landscape, and artistic movements. These poems wonder and wander; like the titular El Greco painting, they are lush and thrumming with quiet energy and painterly observations of living things, from Shih Tzus to pipistrelles to people. It’s a gift to walk alongside Allen through a poetic world in which our “only compass is this wind.”
–Rachel Dillon, poet, Managing Editor of Ploughshares
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