Selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize.
“These illuminating pages are a gift in reciprocity for the gifts of the land.”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
I write because the words of others saved me in the long blue silence of my childhood and making poems for me has come to be about living more deeply and widely. Reading the poems of others and making my own is about expanding the available beauty and meaning of life amidst all the losses we must face. Writing is redemptive, individualistic, and the process puts me in touch with a mysterious aspect of being. Call it what you will–God, muse, imagination. It is like nothing else I’ve encountered.
Header photo, Night Falls, by Marc Dilley.