Poetry. The jazzy, lyric poems in LADDER MUSIC carry the reader through familiar territory, but the recognizable terrain of love, work, and family are transformed by Ellen Doré Watson's sensuous ebullience. She finds a delicious voice unmistakably freighted with experience and wisdom. "Ellen Dore Watson has the wonderful ability to translate idea, emotion, and her keen view of the world into verbal energy and rich patterns of sound. Her poems bang about on the page and are a great pleasure to read"--Stephen Dobyns.

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."