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Welcome to Omnidawn Blog’s first Poetry Feature! Rather than be a forum for only Omnidawn authors, we see this as an opportunity to highlight the work of other writers we admire too.
This week you will find work featured by the poet Gillian Conoley.
In coming weeks you will find work by Karen Garthe, Brenda Iijima, Rob Schlegel, Ed Smallfield, Liz Waldner, and that’s just the start! We plan to feature new poetry by a different writer every week or two.
Feel free to comment.
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(click images to enlarge)
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Gillian Conoley is the author of five collections of poetry: Profane Halo; Lovers in the Used World; Tall Stranger, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; Beckon, and Some Gangster Pain, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer Award. Her work has been anthologized widely, most recently in Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricisms, Mondadori’s Nuova Poesia Americana (Italian), and Best American Poetry. A recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, as well as several Pushcart Prizes, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt. Barbara Guest said of her work, “Out of the old beliefs a new language speaks. We said this yesterday, and today the words are stronger. I am taken by surprise by the wit and jeopardy, by the way an ending is avoided on the surface of the book’s meaning. I am excited by the triumph of this writing.” Rain Taxi says of her poetry: “All the pleasures and dangers of the work achieve a brilliant suspension, like particles of dust in airŠ a time-stopping grace in quantum improvisations of form.” Conoley has taught as a Visiting Poet at the University of Iowa Writers’Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College and Tulane University. She makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Current projects include a new manuscript called The Plot Genie, from which these erasures are taken, and translations of Henri Michaux.
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