Fire Pond

The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized writer and former professor at the University of Utah, and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English. Fire Pond is the 2008 prizewinning volume selected by this year’s judge, Medbh McGuckian, poet, editor, and teacher from Belfast.

Jessica Garratt grew up in rural Maryland. A doctoral candidate, she currently teaches and holds a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of Missouri. She has also received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, and other journals. This is her first book.

Table of Contents:

Abstract

I.

Cogito
Without
Answer This
Foundation
The State of Things
En Route
Transmission
Neighborhood
Mirador
Home after a weekend with old friends
Permanence
Leaving Sykesville
Climate of Refrain
Rotation
Farewell!

II.

Fire Pond

III.

Woman drives past, crying
Infidelity
First Flight
Elegy
The End of Things
True North
Self-Preservation Ode
Epilogue
Pilgrim
Things said (me & others, dreams & waking, yesterday & years ago): An Exorcism
Expression
Brooklyn, February
Fascicle

Notes
Acknowledgments