Daniel Bowman Jr.'s poems have appeared in journals such as The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, The Bitter Oleander, Main Street Rag, The Midwest Quarterly, Rio Grande Review, Seneca Review, Words on Walls Literary Fresco, and others.

As an undergraduate at Roberts Wesleyan College, he studied with poet Thom Ward, senior editor at BOA Editions, Ltd. At Cincinnati, he studied with John Drury, Don Bogen, and visiting Elliston poets CD Wright and Carl Dennis. Currently he is working with Jeanine Hathaway and Jeanne Murray Walker in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.

Sample poems:

November sits in the cupboard
with the tinfoil and sandwich bags.
It's after dark.
I'm riding in the back seat,
down the back roads.

Some houses are dark.
Some have one light on
and I can't help wondering
who is doing what in that light.

The snow makes me sleepy.
There's a dream:
a woman with plum-black hair-
a bit of a local celebrity-
standing at the sink.
Without looking in the mirror,
she cups her hands,
fills them with warm water.
I am small.
I do a swan dive
from the tip of her nose
into her pool and open my eyes,
floating on the wait.

November straddles plum-black fields.
November waits for me,
its shadows like dreams in the dry stubble.

I'm chasing birds and cats and leaves,
chasing the days.
I'm choosing
Old Testament names;
I'm trailing apostles through Judea,
studying the moves of the Lord Himself.
I'm chasing myself
around the living room.
I'm seeing sleepy projections-
15th-Century Flemish art:
the Merode Altarpiece.
I'm running down baseballs
in the backyard,
searching for a homer
through tinseled trees,
shivering,
spiking at the calves
of long-legged cross-country runners;
I'm playing lost solos
to my best friend's twelve-string-
Brookwood Park.
It's a tag game
and we're still moving-
Herkimer (the bridge), Ilion,
the back roads of Mohawk,
the cemetery,
the candle shop in Utica.
Hunting down day and night themselves,
of course,
and climbing toward big bands:
the elusive bari sax,
the Latin percussion,
the ghosts of nightclub conductors.
I'm riding shotgun
in my brother's LTD,
sinking Cobain
back to the belly,
knowing I'm being chased too,
being run out of my own town
like an outlaw
until finally,
at last,
the body becomes the name,
the words become the body,
the body, the body,
the thousand versions of warmth.