Allen is variously known as a mystical poet, a poet concerned with recording the history of the century’s last fifty years and the beginning years of the 21st Century, a poet of contemporary science, a Zen Buddhist-oriented poet, and a poet whose eclectic style ranges from formal to free verse. In recent years, he has often written in a new narrative-lyric hybrid form of his invention that he calls “Randomism.”

Present Vanishing: Poems (Sarabande Books, 2008), The Day Before: New Poems (Sarabande Books, 2003), Ode to the Cold War: New & Selected Poems (Sarabande Books, 1997)

The Best American Poetry (Scribner, 2006)

Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, New Criterion, New Republic, Ontario Review, Poetry, Yale Review