Meet the Author - Rustin Larson

About Hamburgers on Election Night, Larson says, ” I began the series of poems on Election Day 2024. I voted for all the right people, but they didn’t win. I blame Mike, an invisible little man who lives inside the walls, for tampering with the election results. Mike makes a cameo appearance in a couple of poems. Beyond that, many topics are covered: The dead rise and walk the halls of the high school at midnight. The poet drinks coffee at a gas station and thinks. Rebellious turkeys fight the battle of Gobbler’s Knob. Monet talks about Camille. Someone rides in an elevator at Chelsea Hotel with Janis Joplin. Full-breasted throaty blues are sung in the streets. Lady centaurs give directions to a lost man. 67% of students love Mrs. Kinkel. Mozart skips through the dandelions. There is an afterparty somewhere with vol-au-vents and plastic goblets of Merlot. We belong to an obscure religious sect of produce worshippers. Portraits of cucumbers, crookneck squash adorn the wall. Many people believe that freedom can’t be what it already is. Ask the King of America. They are Rolling Their Voting Machine Over My Poetry! These poems are Hamburgers on Election Night.”
Rustin Larson‘s writing appears in the anthologies Wild Gods (New Rivers Press, 2021) and Wapsipinicon Almanac: Selections from Thirty Years (University of Iowa Press, 2023). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Puerto Del Sol, The Penn Review, North American Review, and Poetry East. His latest collection is Hamburgers on Election Night (Utopia Park Poetry Press, 2026).