We begin the final week of #NationalPoetryMonth with "Dog Gospel" by TMR Language Lessons contributor Brian Barker. http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2010/04/brian-barker.html @coppernickel

Brian Barker is the author of The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition, and of The Animal Gospels (Tupelo Press, 2006), winner of the Tupelo Press Editor’s Prize. His poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, American Book Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Indiana Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, fugue, and storySouth. His awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2009 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. He has earned degrees in Creative Writing and Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University, George Mason University, and the University of Houston. He is married to the poet Nicky Beer and teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where he co-edits Copper Nickel.