Poetry. "BONFIRE is a passionate, controlled book by an extraordinary poet. First is evident the lucidity of intelligence; then the radiance; and finally the sheer power"--Josephine Jacobsen. "From deep places, these poems allow things to well up: memory, love, fear, and a sense of how our individual natures belong to the same great nature which keeps pushing life forward out of death.... In 'Lot's Wife' and other poems, Gilbert reinvents mythology, bringing it closer to the realities we recognize"--Alicia Ostriker.

Author City: CAMBRIDGE, MA USA

Celia Gilbert has published three books of poetry: AN ARK OF SORTS, winner of the first Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award; BONFIRE; and Queen of Darkness, a bilingual collection of her poetry forthcoming in Poland. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Southwest Review, Field, and the New Yorker, among other places, and her work has been frequently anthologized. She is the winner of a Discovery Award and a Pushcart Prize. The Poetry Society of America awarded her an Emily Dickinson Prize and a Consuelo Ford Award. She worked as Poetry and Fiction Editor and feature writer for the Boston Phoenix and helped edit Women/Poems. A printmaker and painter as well as a poet, Gilbert grew up in Washington, D.C. After living abroad in England and France, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.