Born in Illinois, raised in southern Indiana, and now living in St. Louis, Newman is the author of Domestic Fugues (Steel Toe Books, 2009) and Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005), and four poetry chapbooks: 24 Tall Boys: Dark Verse for Light Times (Snark Publishing/Firecracker Press, 2007), Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets! (Snark Publishing, 2005), Tastes Like Chicken and Other Meditations (Snark Publishing, 2004), and Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press, 2001).

His work has most recently appeared in Best American Poetry 2006 [3] (edited by Billy Collins), Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry [4], Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac[5], Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, New Letters, (where he won the 2006 Reader's Choice Award), Poetry Daily [6], The Sun, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily[7] [8], as well as many other periodicals and anthologies.

Newman earned his MFA at the Brief-Residency Writing Program at Spalding University. He teaches at St. Louis Community College and Washington University, reviews books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and, for the last fifteen years, has served as editor for River Styx.

Coins

My change: a nickel caked with finger grime;

two nicked quarters not long for this life, worth

more for keeping dead eyes shut than bus fare;

a dime, shining in sunshine like a new dime;

grubby pennies, one stamped the year of my birth,

no brighter than I from 40 years of wear.

What purses, piggy-banks, and window sills

have these coins known, their presidential heads

pinched into what beggar's chalky palm--

they circulate like tarnished red blood cells,

all of us exchanging the merest film

of our lives, and the lives of those long dead.

And now my turn in the convenience store,

I hand over my fist of change, still warm,

to the bored, lip-pierced check-out girl, once more

to be spun down cigarette machines, hurled

in fountains, flipped for luck--these dirty charms

chiming in the dark pockets of the world.