Ned Balbo
Ned Balbo’s books include The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize), 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Donald Justice Prize and the Poets’ Prize). He has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (translation) and the Maryland Arts Council (poetry). In July 2021 he was a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Reading List
Firefly or Lightning Bug
If you are indeed a fly of fire, impossibly incandescent yet alive, why don’t high branches, kindled, turn to flame when you alight? But if, instead, it’s lightning that you hold pulsing inside yourself, impatient glow some catalyst’s arrival will ignite, why don’t you strike? Perhaps it’s fire and lightning you contain those summer nights […]