Kelly Cherry
Former Eudora Welty Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Kelly Cherry is a prolific writer of poetry, essays and fiction. Her many books include Death and Transfiguration: Poems (LSU, 1997), The Life and Death of Poetry (LSU, 2013), The Woman Who [Stories] (Boson Books, 2010) and A Kind of Dream [linked stories] (2014). She received the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry in 2012, and a new collection of poems, Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer, was recently released by LSU.
Reading List
Reunion
She brings him African violets, geraniums. A breeze from the harbor nudges the white curtains aside, probes. Sounds—a crying gull, a screeching car alarm, the pneumatic gasp of bus doors opening and closing—are separate and distant, like islands: they do …
Battle Scene
The blacksmith sun hammered the empty plain Into a great gold plate: a mere mountain Wouldn’t withstand that onslaught day in and out. Bird droppings dropt on bright rock rang like cut Glass, and a scorpion darted, like a tongue, …
White Sands
A turquoise sky, its overflowing light splashing down on buttes, mesas, mountains, ravines, arroyos, canyons, caves, and flats, white sands where scaffolding abuts the sun and engineers are measuring the space between annihilation and the view. Oppie’s porkpie hat shadows …