Poetry. BLOOD ORBITS is a series of poems and prose poems exploring various conceptualizations of history both as a generative principle of meaning and as particular contexts and events through which we shape our subjectivities. In language that is richly musical and startlingly surreal, these poems interrogate and confront narratives that encode oppression, violence, and dishonesty, both the "grand narratives" which structure our place in history as well as the stories that we as individuals tell ourselves to make sense of our lives in their dailiness. In writing that is at once philosophically sophisticated and restlessly energetic, the poetry of BLOOD ORBITS brings to life what Wallace Stevens called "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind," exploring ideas as ideas, but also evolving a poetic language that squarely confronts the consequences of those ideas in real human lives.

Author City: NESKOWIN, OR USA

Ger Killeen's most recent book is BLOOD ORBITS (Parlor Press, 2009) His previous books include SIGNS FOLLOWING (Parlor Press, 2005), A Wren, which won the 1989 Bluestem Award for Poetry, and LIA A LEIMFIDH THAR TONNTA/A STONE THAT WILL LEAP OVER THE WAVES (Trask House Books, 1999). His work has been anthologized in From Here We Speak (Oregon State University Press), On the Counterscarp (Salmon Publishing), and American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon University Press). Killeen lives on the Oregon coast and is a professor in the Department of English Literature & Writing at Marylhurst University.