Poetry. The poems in Gardner McFall's second volume address questions of death, faith, and love. As in her first book, The Pilot's Daughter, McFall investigates and responds to the natural world with her finely tuned senses. Her deepened sense of time and mortality is reflected in the poems about her mother's death, her journey to Vietnam forty years after her father's service there, and her exploration of love and family. RUSSIAN TORTOISE celebrates beauty and mystery, whether in an Audubon plate, a tortoise her daughter brings home from school, or a man shouting "Alleluia" on the street.

Author Hometown: New York, NY USA



About the author: Gardner McFall is the author of The Pilot's Daughter (Time Being Books). She is also the editor of Made with Words, a prose miscellany, by May Swenson (University of Michigan Press), the author of two children's books, Jonathan's Cloud (Harper & Row) and Naming the Animals (Viking), and the librettist for Amelia, an opera commissioned by Seattle Opera, with music by Daron Hagen. Ms. McFall, who has received a "Discovery"/ The Nation award and the Missouri Review's Thomas McAfee Prize for Poetry, earned her master's degree from the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University and her doctorate, in English, from New York University. She lives in New York City and teaches at Hunter College.