He graduated from Amherst College and Harvard University, with a Ph.D.
He teaches at Amherst College, and Wellesley College. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
His work appeared in AGNI, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books,He and Meghan O'Rourke are co-poetry editors of the Paris Review.. His poems have been translated into German by Jan Wagner, the selected poems have been published as "Naturgeschichte" at luxbooks, a publishing house focused on American poetry in bilingual editions.