Anthologies

Sincerely Elvis: An Anthology of Original Poems About Elvis Aaron Presley. Hot Biscuit
Productions, Memphis, TN, 2005

two southwests, Virtual Artist Collective, Chicago, 2008. (This was a collection of poems written by poets in the Southwest USA and Southwest China. All poems appeared in both languages.

travelin’ music: A Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthrie. Village Books Press, Cheyenne, Ok, 2010.

Agave: A Celebration of Tequila. Ink Brush Presss, Dallas, 2011.

Oklahoma Poems: and Their Poets, Mezcalita Press, Norman OK, 2014.

Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way; Celebrating Woody Guthrie Poems of Protest and Resistance, Village Books Press, Cheyenne, OK, 2017.

Poetinis Druskininku rugduo 2010, Druskininkai Poetic, Fall 2010. Ministry of Culture the Republic of Lithuania, 2010. This was the festival publication. Poets from Lithuania, Europe, Asia, and North America were printed in their language and translated into Lithuanian and English.

The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, Lamar University Literary Press, Beaumont, 2016.

Saint Peter’s B-List: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints, Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2014.

Loan Star Poetry: Championing Texas Verse, Community, and Hunger Relief. Kallisto Gaia Press, Austin, Texas 2023.

Trek-A-Tanka:A Poetry Anthology. House of the Fighting Chupacabras Press, Corpus Christi, 2021.

Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets. Lamar University Literary Press, Beaumont, 2024.

Partial List of Journals, Webzines and other Periodicals

American Literary Review, The Christian Century, The Concho River Review, The Red River Review, The Blue Rock Review, Windhover, The Windward Review, The Switchgrass Review, The Texas Review, New Texas, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, The Green Fuse, The San Antonio Express, Spitball, The Main Street Rag, Front Range: A Review of Literature and Art, The Langdon Review of the Arts In Texas, Slow Trains, The New Formalist, Ruminate, Adanna: Women and Spirituality, Ardent, MO: Writings form the River, The Penwood Review, The Enigmatist, Voices de la Luna, and recently he’s been a regular contributor to The Texas Poetry Assignment. 

Books

In 2004 Berecka was contacted by his thesis advisor from UNT, Rick Sale, who asked Berecka to send him all the poems he had written since his thesis.  Sale offered Berecka a chapbook in his Trilobite Chapbook Series. The series included luminaries such as Walt MacDonald, Naomi Shihab Nye, Scott Cairnes, Albert Goldbarth, Jack Myers and B.H. Fairchild, so he leapt at the chance, and Each Man has One Life came to be. Each year the chapbook was sold as a fundraiser for the UNT libraries and that year’s poet gave a reading on the UNT campus. When Berecka was a student there, he occasionally worked in the Rare Book Room, where the readings were held. One of his jobs was to set up and break down the chairs for the readings. To read in the same room was quite a full circle moment for Berecka. 

In 2007 Berecka’s second chapbook Beacons was published by Oil Hill Press, Wichita, Kansas. Later that year he was approached by Neil Orts, during a party to celebrate Larry D. Thomas being named Texas State Poet Laureate, who offered to publish a full length manuscript with his press NEONuma Arts. Berecka agreed and The Comic Flaw came to be. Orts had just published a book of poems by Jill Alexander Essbaum, and Essbaum was a great help in finalizing Berecka’s manuscript. The book was an attempt at a biography in free verse. In his blurb for the book, Scott Cairnes described it as: “Berecka’s commedia is not so much divine as it is deeply human, accompanied by a wince and a grin.”

In his review of the book Steven Schroeder wrote: 

Berecka, like Flannery O’Connor, has little patience for “sublime” vision that closes eyes to the grotesque. Like O’Connor, he is a teller of tales because he believes deeply in the redemptive power of stories that make us look — that witness rather than theorize — and that moves him, as she predicted story tellers would move, to poetry rather than the novel. O’Connor’s description of “a descent through the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking” fits the sensibility of Berecka’s poems. And this, as she says, “is the beginning of vision. . .”

Writing in 2026 in World Literature Today Oklahoma poet Ken Hada listed The Comic Flaw as one of seven books of poetry he returns to often, citing the poem Levelling as a personal favorite.

Berecka’s next full length book was Remembering the Body, Mongrel Empire Press, 2011, which was reviewed favorably in The Texas Review of Books by Robert Murray Davis, in his “Modest Poetry with Unforgettable Images,” and by Barbara Crooker in Borderlands. Writing of the book in his blog This is Just to Say, former Oklahoma Poet Laureate Ben Meyers writes:

“Finding your voice” is a writing cliché second in prominence perhaps only to “write what you know.” Yet, as a reader, one does look for poetry that in some way distinguishes itself from the crowd of contemporary voices. Alan Berecka’s new book does just that, moving beyond a distinct “voice” to offer something even more rare: a discernible poetic personality. Berecka’s poems seem, to borrow a metaphor from Montaigne, consubstantial with the poet, displaying a unique mind and distinct viewpoint on the world. The personality enlivening Remembering the Body is witty and clear-sighted yet also conflicted and, above all, empathetic.

Remembering the Body received an honorable mention from the Hoffer Awards that year.

In 2013 Lamar University Literary Press published Berecka’s third book, With Our Baggage. In 2017 El Grito del Lobo Press, Fulton, Missouri produced a handset limited chapbook The Fall of the Leaf. The poems in this chapbook were written at the request of cellist Susan Sturman and were Berecka’s interpretation of the composer Imogene Holst’s cello suite the Fall of the Leaf. Berecka and Sturman would alternate the reading of the poems and the playing of each movement of the suite in several performances. The duo was featured at the Scissortail Festival in Ada, Oklahoma that year. Because of an accident with a conveyor belt at a mail sorting facility in Missouri, half of the 100 copies were destroyed, so very few copies of this manuscript remain.

Berecka’s fourth book was The Hamlet of Stittville, Tale Feather Press, Santa Fe, NM, 2017. This book was a collaboration with boyhood friend John Klossner, who makes a living as a cartoonist and has placed pieces in the New Yorker, etc. In his review in Presence, Mike Lythgoe, who was an associate editor at the Windhover, commented about the role of family, faith and humor in Berecka’s poetry and how the cartoons helped to amplify the humor.

In 2021 Jonas Zdanys of Black Spruce Press in Brooklyn, New York solicited a manuscript. Berecka produced A Living is not a Life: A Working Title. This volume marked the first time Berecka produced a single work on one topic, work. The book was reviewed favorably by Cassie Dodd in the 2023 issue of Presence: Journal of Catholic Poetry. Dodd wrote:

Berecka is not new to writing poetry, and this practice is reflected in the comfort with which he navigates the narratives of his poems, often constructing seemingly simple memories to build toward a more surprising or profound conclusion.

Because it is narrative and accessible, Berecka’s work is often studied and written about by undergraduates. Brandon Villari, a student at Caldwell University, wrote:

It is significant to note that this humor is not just for the sake of humor but could be said to be a reflection of a fundamentally comedic view of human life, like that of Dante in the Divine Comedy, in which human life is understood in the context of the possibility of achieving prosperity eternally through salvation.

Berecka’s fifth full length collection, Atlas Sighs: Collected and New Poems, was published by Turning Plow Press Ringwood, Oklahoma, 2024. In her review, which appeared in Prescence, Angela O’Donnell wrote:

Berecka’s storytelling has the power to redeem his own foolishness and also ours, as well. Finally, Berecka’s poems speak to us powerfully of the present as well as the past. His poems about the tragedy of Uvalde, which unfolded in his adopted state of Texas while he was a world away, about the loss of a world in which newsmen sought to tell the truth instead of reporting fabrications, and about the practicalities of cell phones despite the freedoms we sacrifice, speak in a higher, louder register, critiquing our culture, enabling us to see ourselves through the eyes of a poet who has acquired the wisdom of a person approaching his three score and ten (though he isn’t quite there yet!) with nothing to lose. “You don’t have to be Atlas,” Berecka acknowledges…

A sixth book Why Matter Might Matter is forthcoming from Turning Plow Press in early 2027.