Think of him as always facing left or right,
like a book page,
sometimes lingered on, more often turned from sight,
leaving only this edge.

(from "Profile," an uncollected poem by Dick Allen)

A link to the past and a guide to the future, Dick Allen is the leading "transition generation" Expansive poet in America. His work has consistently focused on recording and exploring life in the fin-de-siècle decades at the end of the second millennium and the dawn of the third. A principal founder of the Expansive poetry movement, he helped reestablish subject-oriented and narrative poetry as an alternative to the confessional, autobiographical, free-verse lyric that came to dominate American poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century. Ranging from free verse to formal verse, Allen's substantial poetic oeuvre crisscrosses international borders from East to West, encompassing Surrealism and Realism while spanning the wildly...