Poetry. In these forty daring poems, Ellen Doré Watson sets out to see whether the mind's exuberance and language's abundance can in fact lead us back to the skin in which we are held, or whether we are constantly leaking, sometimes exploding. The various bodies in question are the bodies of infants, of lovers, of people to whom she responds as an emergency medical technician, her own flesh and beyond-flesh self exist in time, and in time are made vulnerable. Vulnerable to what pours in from outside, and therefore open, and therefore blessed, and also at risk. The subject is mortality, the desire to love what is mortal at all cost, and the vision is of a world where the splendors of consciousness and the nerve of language can restore in us the actuality of who we are and how we live.

Author City: NORTHAMPTON, MA USA

Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, Ellen Doré Watson is the author of DOGGED HEARTS (Tupelo Press, 2010), THIS SHARPENING (Tupelo Press, 2006), LADDER MUSIC (Alice James Books, 2001), and WE LIVE IN BODIES (Alice James Books, 1997), as well as Broken Railings (Green Lake Chapbook Prize, Owl Creek Press, 1996). She is also the translator of twelve books from Brazilian Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), and serves as Poetry Editor of The Massachusetts Review. Watson's poems have appeared widely in journals, including The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. Among her awards and honors are the Bullis-Kizer Prize from Poetry Northwest, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and a 1990 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant. Library Journal named her one of "24 Poets for the 21st Century."