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"This anti-elegy, both reverent and funny, anticipates the funny reverence that Wier finds, makes up, and sustains throughout her decades of subsequent writing."Jacket Magazine
Dara Wier's loose sonnets insist on a living language in the face of death, cycling and vibrant as the water that runs through them.
. . . Assigned to
Adventure said the motto on our buttons. The last thing we knew
Before we left with our satchels concerned how love withdraws
Moving backward taking with it everything, our names, this way.
Dara Wier directs the MFA program at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This is her ninth book, and first new collection of poetry since 2006.
List of contents
Contents
Not a Verbal Equivalent
Where Do You Stand on God?
Needle Threader in Need of Needle
We Traveled by Night in a Ship Made of Ebony Splinters
Hyperlexia
Stainless Steel Spiders
Restoration of an Individual Conulariid
You Are Our 3rd Destination and Our 9th Destiny
Blind Eyes in No-Man¿s Land
In Principle, Infinite in Width, in Practice Not Quite That Wide
Proprioception
This Machine Kills Fascists
At Issue Were the Ways We Would Welcome Them
Another Way to Look at It
Crooked Cabinet Slightly Ajar
Without You
Our Ways
Oblivious Conclusion
Scorch Marks
Many Similes Are Protestant, Most Metaphor Is Not
Swags of Light in the Quaternary
Seeming to Think like a Falcon
The Terrible Poem
Preemptive Grieving
Cypress, Dateless
A Shambles
The Last Was a Very Good River
Importance of Passing Time While Moving through Space
Riverine
Several Delays in One Passage of Time
No Stranger
Almost You
Nothing You Can¿t Bear
Sand against the Wind
Sweetest Words for a Noble Man
Stargazer
Apophenia
Evidence of Increasing Lack of Evidence
Stranger
In Oval Mirrors We Cruise through Touch-Me-Nots
Preoccupied with a Purpose
Epitaphic
About the author
Dara Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009), Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005, 2006 SFSU Poetry Center Book Award), Hat On a Pond (Verse Press, 2002), and Voyages in English, (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). Also among her works are the limited editions (X In Fix) in Rain Taxi’s Brainstorm Series, Fly on the Wall (Oat City Press), and The Lost Epic, co-written with James Tate (Waiting for Godot Books, 1999). Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the American Poetry Review. In 2005 she held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.
Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, The Fairytale Review, Hollins Critic, jubilat, New American Writing, slope and Volt, among other magazines.
She teaches workshops and form and theory seminars and directs the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-directs the University of Massachusetts’ Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. Each June she teaches a poetry workshop for the Juniper Summer Institute. Her editing work includes publishing limited edition chapbooks and broadsides with Factory Hollow Press, North Amherst, Massachusetts, a small independent press she co-edits with Emily Pettit and Guy Pettit. Along with James Haug and James Tate she edits the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Series for poetry.
