for anyone, a lullaby, lieto fine, music for baking. What puzzles me is why you look to poetry at all, if you find the unsettling so unsettling. The Christmas questions arrive in tight little wrappings (a hobby, right?) and only pave conviction’s increase. My deprivations do not make me as achy as one might think. I am blessed to be among those who love to be astonished (footnotes & footnotes everlasting). I too stir flour and sugar with my toddler, radio set on happy. At night he feeds from the furnace of my body, and we romp through the rhyming fields of language. But then: dust off the domestic and sit at the desk. The world must be with us. What have we created that is monstrous? What needs remembering? What has hit my breastbone with astonishing force? For instance: that the dogs of Baghdad set to barking in the moments before the first bombs dropped. This is unsettling. This might make you ache for someone. This unsettled me. This made me ache for someones. To refuse to pull from the numbing pharmacy. This is my only kind of confection. I bring it to your table.
is a poet and scholar. She is the author of Pilgrimly(Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions, 2014). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in TheCincinnati Review,Colorado Review,jubilat, Mid-American Review, The Missouri Review,New Letters,Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She also publishes scholarly essays on 20th-21st century poetries. Her current manuscript “For the Green & Signifying Fields” was selected as a semifinalist for the 2023 Interim Test Site Poetry Prize and finalist for both the 2023 Tupelo Press Helena Whitehill Award and the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize.
She earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. in English from the Poetics program at SUNY Buffalo. She is currently professor of English at Bethel College in Kansas, where she teaches literature and creative writing, runs a visiting writers series, and serves as faculty mentor to the undergraduate literary magazine YAWP! She is the recipient of fellowships from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the Brown Foundation. She lives near Wichita, Kansas with her son.
