Sandra Meek

Sandra Meek is the author of six books of poems: Still (Persea Books, 2020), named a New and Noteworthy Poetry Book by The New York TimesAn Ecology of Elsewhere (Persea Books, May 2016); Road Scatter (Persea Books, 2012); Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo 2008); Burn (2005), and Nomadic Foundations (2002), as well as a chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival (2001). Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, Agni, Terrain.org, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review, among others. A recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has three times been awarded Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, in 2017 for An Ecology of Elsewhere, in 2006 for Burn, and in 2003 for Nomadic Foundations. She has also twice been awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry, for An Ecology of Elsewhere and for Nomadic Foundations. Meek served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991, where she taught English at Boswelakgosi Junior Secondary School. She served as Director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit 2007-2019, and is Co-founding Editor of Ninebark Press, Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. She received her BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, and a PhD in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Denver. Since 1996, she has lived in Rome, Georgia.

Poem

Aftermath

Blindfolded, without sky- or land- mark, no lightning-struck fir flagging the pine break, no particular ark of known stars—Little Dipper, Southern Cross—the body, pressing on, no matter how piano-wired, how absent Continue reading