He earned degrees from Temple University and the University of Oregon. He is a professor of English at the University of Vermont and a faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

His poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Grand Street, and TriQuarterly. His poetry has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, [[Parnassus (magazine)|Parnassus]], Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Some of his poems have been translated into German and published in the anthology Schwerkraft: Junge amerikanische Lyrik (Gravity: Young American poetry).

His honors include a 2003 Whiting Writers' Award, a 1995 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a 2003 Witter Bynner Fellowship. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Full-length Poetry Collections

Anthology Publications

• The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner, 2004)
• The Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).