When he won the New York City Barton's Bonbonniere Passover Poetry Contest at the age of fourteen, Barry Sheinkopf's prize was a five-pound box of chocolates. He had a bad case of acne at the time and likes to say his career as a poet has gone downhill ever since. But he has continued to produce poems in a wide range of styes in the intervening decades, taking up technical challenges ranging from making traditional stanza and verse forms sound like free verse, in his first two selected volumes, to his latest work, which attempts to capture the rhythms and absence of punctuation characteristic of email.
