El Cerrito CA
other books from
PECULIAR PAGES
The Fob Bible
Out of the Mount: 19 from New Play Project
Monsters & Mormons
Finding Place by Doug Talley
Preface by Tyler Chadwick
Foreword by Susan Elizabeth Howe
Neil Aitken: “Conditional”
Claire Åkebrand: “On a Photograph of a Farmer in Småland”
Mark D. Bennion: “Joseph Smith”
James Best: “Return”
Sara Blaisdell: “Ophelia”
Alex Caldiero: “Almost a Song”
Shannon Castleton: “After Her Stroke”
Melissa Dalton-Bradford: “Pietà”
Elizabeth Garcia: “Atlanta to Salt Lake”
Laverna B. Johnson: “Oleander Snow from Yucca Flat”
Karen Kelsay: “Divining a Lost Summer”
Casualene Meyer: “Why you should not bite your tongue”
Calvin Olsen: “Morning Storm”
Jonathon Penny: “Open Letter to Joseph Smith, Charlatan”
Elisa Pulido: “Revelation”
Will Reger: “Mass Transit Madonna”
John W. Schouten: “Runaway”
Paul Swenson: “Nature of the Beast”
Terresa Wellborn: “The Science of Forgetting”
Afterword: A Bright String of Poems by Ángel Chaparro Sáinz
Contributor Notes
Acknowledgments
Index of Other Mormon Poets
A fire in the pasture undulates
of blue and white and yellow flower,
a fire like a snake, iridescent by sunlight
and undulant in the wind.
Here one will understand the Nazarene’s joy,
awash in the lilies of his own field, a spicery
of uncommon radiance in a common hour
rising from the dark, speluncular sod.
Consider, he said. Simply consider. Flowers
catching light like the scales of a serpent’s skin,
a yellow apple sun delicious to the taste,
and temptations to joy irrepressible!
The kingdom of heaven found on earth
is like a pasture, a strange, little kingdom
full of spicery, the undulant and speluncular,
and all other words by which we frame it.
In this life we find the peaceable kingdom
within, then above, beneath, and all around.
What can a person driven by grandiosity
know of the quiet, hidden God found here?
—Doug Talley
Tyler Chadwick
In 1985, Sunstone’s poetry editor, Dennis Clark, began a four-part series for the magazine called “Mormon Poetry Now!” Once a year for four years, he surveyed “the state of the art of Mormon poetry” in order to examine “the best of what Mormon poets [were] trying to publish” (6). I’m sure his survey of the field dovetailed nicely with the work he was doing alongside Eugene England, gathering poems for the anthology, Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems. Together, these projects composed a unique moment in Mormon literary history—an intentional move to place Mormon poets center stage and to definitively represent what England called “the new Mormon tradition of poetry.” As England had it, those working within this tradition tend toward “an unusually healthy integration of skillful form and significant content,” toward the marriage of formal poetic training and the moral “ideas and values…they claim to know through religious experience.” It’s a union, England concluded, that leads them to “act with energy to communicate those ideas in confidence that they will be understood” and accepted by both their peers within Mormonism and within the field of mainstream American poetry (285).
Twenty-years before Harvest hit bookshelves, Mormon poet and playwright Clinton F. Larson spoke to the possibilities of such a union with the prescience of a poet-seer. He suggested that “[p]art of the spiritual record that must be kept [by the Latter-day Saints] is the poetry of the people.” He warned that without a “body of significant and enduring poetry” to connect the Saints sensually and aesthetically to their religious experiences, Mormonism’s cultural heritage would be in jeopardy. But if Mormon poets could, in his words, “take their work as seriously as they should, and by ”seriously’ I mean that they become professionally responsible, then a significant and coherent literary movement can begin.” In other words, if Mormon poets could meet the demands of their craft even as they faithfully responded to the demands of Mormonism, they would rise to their “literary promise” as a “believing people.” They would earn an honored place in the Church, whose authorities would trust and accept them as “conveyors of individualistic truth” and experience (80).
Five years later, in 1974, Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert published the first anthology of Mormon literature, A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints. Although designed specifically for a course in Mormon literature at Brigham Young University, Cracroft and Lambert hoped it would be “a good beginning” in the development of a Mormon literary tradition, one worth boasting about as the Church became increasingly international. After all, the collection was intended to represent the growing quality of Mormon letters, which included some “good novels and fine short stories,…some stirrings in the personal essay,” and, of course, “a body of good poetry.” That body ripened over the next fifteen years into Harvest, which then became the standard for contemporary Mormon poetry and poetics.
And rightly so: England and Clark had gathered hundreds of poems from fifty-eight poets whose writing careers spanned the half-century before the book was published. The title of this anthology, Fire in the Pasture, is meant to honor the standard set by these poets while revising Harvest’s basic conceit. The scriptural notion of a harvest suggests an eleventh-hour reaping completed in preparation for the Lord’s return; thus the title, Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, suggests, advertently or not, that the editors’ gathering was such an eleventh-hour act, meant to be undertaken once and for all. But farmers sometimes burn their fields post-harvest in preparation for another planting. This is where Fire in the Pasture picks up the metaphor.
The phrase comes from Doug Talley’s poem, “Finding Place,” which I believe speaks to the intersection of religious, spiritual, and moral experience with the aesthetic experience inherent in well-crafted poetry. Through metaphors we often use to describe and to connect with God’s kingdom (fire and light, the serpent, wind, gardens, planting, reaping, etc.) the poet takes up language as a form of worship—by which I mean that he uses it, yes, to praise God, but also to emulate God, whose words make worlds out of chaotic matter. If we think of poetry in etymological terms—poesis being the Greek term for the process of making—God, then, is the first Poet. His words and His worlds are constantly inviting us to reconsider our relationship to Him, to language, to the universe. Talley echoes this in “Finding Place” as he drops words like live coals on our tongues and invites us to “[s]imply consider.”
The title Fire in the Pasture is intended to invoke these associations—and more. But it’s not my intention to elaborate fully on these themes. Rather, as the editor of this collection, my intention is to showcase poets who have emerged or established themselves since Harvest, with special emphasis on poems written or published since the turn of the millennium. You’ll find a range of published and unpublished work from eighty-two poets, including new poems from eight of the younger Harvest poets: Susan Elizabeth Howe, Patricia Karamesines, John W. Schouten, Laura Hamblin, Lance Larsen, Philip White, Danielle Beazer Dubrasky, and Timothy Liu. This vanguard joins seventy-four established and up-and-coming poets to provide an expansive look at 21st-century Mormon poetry. The poems range from artfully crafted traditional forms—including sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles—to free verse to prose poems to light verse to dramatic monologues to translations to cowboy poetry. All of these represent the varieties of the contemporary lyric voice; and the range of poets speaking here represents the varieties of the contemporary Mormon experience—a chorus of voices that calls again and again for us to reconsider our relationship to poetry, to the modern world, and to 21st-century Mormonism.
For her help in the early stages of this project I’m indebted to Sarah (E.S.) Jenkins, especially because she introduced me to a number of poets I may not have otherwise discovered. I’m also grateful to Susan Elizabeth Howe, who selected which of my poems to include; to Eric W Jepson, who sparked this anthology’s flame; and to my wife, who kept fanning that flame when other obligations threatened to snuff it out.
Works Cited
Clark, Dennis Marden. “Mormon Poetry Now!” Sunstone 10.6 (June 1985): 6 – 13. Print.
Cracroft, Richard H., and Neal E. Lambert. Introduction. A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints. Ed. Cracroft and Lambert. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1974.Web. 8 July 2011.
England, Eugene. “Editor’s Commentary: New Tradition.” England and Clark. 285 – 8. Print.
England, Eugene, and Dennis Clark, eds. Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1989. Print.
Larson, Clinton F. “A Conversation with Clinton F. Larson.” Interview with Edward Geary. Dialogue:A Journal of Mormon Thought 4.3 (1969): 74 – 80. Print.
Susan Elizabeth Howe
As I read this impressive anthology from beginning to end, the word that occurred to me again and again was abundance. What a pleasure to be in the company of so many excellent poets! The bounty of the anthology reminded me of Christ’s generosity in feeding the five thousand (see Matthew 14: 15 – 20). Christ took real substances—a little bread, two small fish—and he created from them far more food than had originally existed, food that nourished the people and made it possible for them to return to their lives both physically and spiritually renewed. Poets take matter (language, emotion, thought, experience) and make of that matter a new creation, a work of art that did not exist before the poet organized it, a work that has the potential (each poet hopes) to nourish—to make readers see what they did not see before, to offer insight, to create empathy, to provoke thought, or to express beauty, soundness, depth. To offer abundance in place of scarcity.
Understood rightly, the writing of even exquisite poems should create humility in the poet, not pride, because poetry itself always exceeds any individual poem, any poet’s oeuvre, or even any culture’s entire body of poems. Donald Revell writes, “Poetry, the soul of poems, does not reside or rest in them. It goes. We follow” (28). Working poets will tell you that they are always reading, always studying, to learn what other poets can teach them, as well as considering what currents of life and thought they care about enough to embody in poems. Like any lasting human endeavor, poetry is far more important than any single example of a poem and always challenges the poet to greater effort, higher achievement. As Revell comments: “The satisfactions of poetry arise from conduct, not from production” (18).
And so it is for the Mormon poets included in this volume. What is presented here is not all of poetry or even all of Mormon poetry. But that these more than eighty poets care about poetry enough to work at it, to produce engaging and startling poems, is significant. And that they would represent themselves as Mormon in some way—by contributing poems to an anthology identified as Mormon, for instance—gives me great optimism about the LDS culture’s participation and growing excellence in this art.
It is useful to ask, what about this poetry is “Mormon”? Are there qualities in these poems that distinguish them from the rest of contemporary American poetry, or are the poems substantially the same as the poetry of the greater American culture? Of course, the answer is both yes and no. At the Sundance Film Festival I once heard Robert Redford say that filmmakers should have the right to put their vision before the viewing public. To apply that notion here, each poet in this anthology has a vision of reality, of what human experience is like (including his/ her own), of what matters—including a sense of how Christ’s Gospel is present in his or her life. That vision certainly must inform each poet’s poems, whether consciously or unconsciously. Reading the poems, I have enjoyed trying to get at that vision: “Gospel philosopher,” I identified one poet, and “quirky, pop-culture, family man,” “lyrical, serious lover of Utah and pioneer culture,” “cynical, lonely urban single,” “nature-loving adventurer,” “historian,” “world traveler,” and “curious inquirer about all things,” to name a few other characterizations. It is worthwhile for readers to undertake this exercise for themselves. To identify a poet’s attitudes and concerns is to make clear which poets are nourishing, which poets to seek out in other books and journals.
It is true that the majority of these poems don’t have content that identifies them as specifically Mormon. Many of them might be published (and, indeed, have been published) in the most selective and prestigious American literary journals. Nevertheless, I would claim these poems to be as Mormon as those that deal with specific Mormon experience. I can explain by using the ideas of fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, who wrestled with similar questions from a Catholic perspective. She realized early in her career that she was not going to write stories that the majority of the Catholic faithful would enjoy reading, and she defended her choices by reminding her critics that writing is a gift of the spirit. She said, “The Christian writer particularly will feel that whatever his initial gift is, it comes from God; and no matter how minor a gift it is, he will not be willing to destroy it by trying to use it outside its proper limits” (“Fiction Writer” 27). She also explains, “A vocation is a limiting factor which extends even to the kind of material that the writer is able to apprehend imaginatively” (27). In other words, individuals that we are, bearing unique life experiences, each of us thinks originally and must write in a way that is true to our experience and our interests, in order for our poems to live and breathe and speak to readers.
With this guidance to writers, O’Connor explains how to imbue secular subjects with spiritual truth: “Now none of this is to say that when you write…you are supposed to forget or give up any moral position that you hold. Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be a substitute for seeing” (“Short Stories” 91). She emphasizes her ideas in another essay: “In the greatest fiction [and poetry, I might add], the writer’s moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing…” (“Fiction Writer” 31).
I find that the content of many poems in this anthology suggests the Mormon identity of the poets, even when that content is not specifically Mormon. More than half the poems are records of personal experience or observations about the experience of others. To record one’s experience is a universal human endeavor; Donald Justice notes that “one motive for much if not all art…is…to keep memorable what deserves to be remembered” (251). But the interest in recording, thinking about, and trying to find meaning in what one observes, suffers, or exults in is of particular significance to us Mormons, believing, as we do, that our time on earth is vital in our growth towards salvation. “Know thou,” said God to Joseph Smith, and through him to us all, “that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good” (D&C 122: 7).
In another large group of poems, the poets imagine the experience of others, including, for example, Marie Curie, Andrew Wyeth, Native Americans, the wife of a sheep rancher. There are many poems set in foreign countries and cultures. Many poems examine a question, a concept, a mystery, in an attempt to come to greater understanding. All of these poems illustrate the poets’ appreciation of the Doctrine and Covenants admonition to learn “of things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass…things which are at home, things which are abroad…of countries and of kingdoms” (D&C 88:79). Poems about ancestors, spouses, children and grandchildren indicate a deep concern for lineage and family. These poems generally demonstrate a Mormon consciousness, even when the content of the poem is not specifically Mormon.
It strikes me that these poems are largely serious rather than comic, and that even the comic poems grapple with experience in a significant way. To perceive of life as having an eternal purpose and of choices as having eternal consequences leads Mormon poets to serious engagement with their subjects. The poems seldom make use of irony—the rhetorical stance that, in suggesting something other than the actual meaning of the words, often expresses cynicism about or mocks the subject. Those that employ irony use it to question or critique concerns about contemporary American culture and sometimes Mormon culture: for example, seeming to praise the way corporations label employees in order to expose corporate indifference to their actual human needs, or claiming that all is right with Mormon culture to suggest a lack of self-examination and awareness. These are legitimate uses of irony, but the overall lack of irony in the anthology is to our credit because it indicates that we actually engage with the world rather than dismissing it as hopeless or not worth the trouble.
And what of those poems with specifically Mormon or Christian content? They are of major importance in that they demonstrate that Mormon subjects can be treated with the same excellence that might be applied to any other subject. I particularly enjoyed the poems that explore questions about scripture and doctrine: What might Abish’s life have been like beyond her small role in the story of Ammon and King Lamoni? How can we reconcile the biblical account of the creation with the scientific evidence of homonids during the Ice Age? Why must the earth of the millenium be crystal when it is magnificent as it is? To whom is forgiveness available?
Of the many poems about biblical and historic LDS figures, it seems significant to me that Adam and Eve recur almost like a motif throughout the collection. Why is that? Because they are the first humans and their struggles represent our own? Because our understanding of their role in God’s plan is so different from that of other Christians? Because they are always before us in our temple worship? Or because we are in some ways troubled by the gender implications of their story and feel the need to see it in more depth, to expand it, to tell it with a different emphasis?
There are a number of poems in which poets try to represent their faith, their testimonies. These are a special case in that they are the most difficult of all poems to write successfully. The inadequacy of language is at the heart of the problem, language being an imperfect medium with which to convey any experience, and particularly transcendental experience. The customary language we have for conveying personal testimony has been used so often that it has become clichéd. In our testimony meetings, it is one’s presence that allows the spirit to convey one’s convictions with power. When language stands in for the self, as it does in a poem, the usual language will not work in this way. In prayer, Moroni noted his weakness in writing: “for Lord thou hast made us mighty in word by faith, but thou hast not made us mighty in writing…. Thou hast also made our words powerful and great, even that we cannot write them; wherefore, when we write we behold our weakness, and stumble because of the placing of our words” (Ether 12: 23, 25). It is our greatest challenge to find language, imagery, metaphor, rhetoric, and forms that can convey spiritual experience, spiritual truth. Attempting to write such a poem is a courageous and necessary act but very difficult to succeed at. Many of my own poems about the religious experiences most important to me have been identified by my most skilled readers as weaker than my other poems, vague or sentimental. They are the poems I’ve been told to omit from my collections as I’ve looked for publishers, but I leave them in because they are important to me. Like some of this anthology’s poems that attempt to represent the transcendent, they can help us learn to better embody spiritual experience and truth in the poems we will write in the future. And when they succeed, as many in this anthology do, they are of the highest order of poetry.
You may ask why I haven’t identified specific poems that I find to be successful in this way. Partly it is because the anthology includes almost four hundred poems, and for each poem I mentioned, I would have to pass over ten other worthy poems. And partly it is to allow for individual taste and preference. Just as poets are individuals, so are readers, and each reader should get to discover the new country of each poem for himself or herself, without prejudice.
Tyler Chadwick has extended a huge effort in compiling and editing this anthology and is to be congratulated for the result. Like Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert’s A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints in 1974 and Eugene England and Dennis Clark’s Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems in 1989, this collection is a pinnacle in the development of an enduring Mormon poetry worthy of the truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Works Cited
Justice, Donald. “Meters and Memory. ” Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. Eds. Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004. 250 – 254. Print.
O’Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country. ” Mysteries and Manners. Eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961. 25 – 35. Print.
———. “Writing Short Stories. ” Mysteries and Manners. 87 – 106. Print.
Revell, Donald. Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2005. Print.
Pray Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?
if they ask for the sky then {
promise only the preset shades of blue,
do not suggest clouds, however wispy or well-proportioned,
nor the effect of wind from the east,
do not imply there will be green-winged birds of any sort,
nor the dusty evidence of farms, burning fields, plumes of gray smoke
echoed in the heavens, signatures of the dead or laid off,
definitely no angels—no visions hovering secretly in corners,
coded scripts, triggers for events not planned
if there are to be stars then
cast them as multiple instances of the same fiery eye,
else
stitch black thread over black thread till night gleams in absentia
} else if they wish for the earth then {
while the world is not null {
draw ink-black stones from the mountain side
sketch the long gravel road home, curve after curve,
or whatever you recall, trees and their forgettable leaves,
the small burdens of sight
}
}
There are plots of land he cannot tend.
His slender face turns to the camera, his eyes look aside.
Plots that don’t belong to him. Wild things grow there.
His cupped hand is raised, his neck bends
with the seed bucket hanging from it. He’s frozen mid-stride.
There are plots of land he cannot tend.
The flung seeds form an arch, descend
like a comet’s tail against the pine forest’s night—
land that doesn’t belong to him. Wild things grow there.
Where’s his eyebrowless glance resting if not the lens?
Maybe the ground where his father lies.
There are plots of land he cannot tend.
The tossed seeds hesitate in the air, suspend
themselves for a time, before seed and soil collide.
Not all land belongs to him. Wild things grow where
pine trees thicken, and pastures end,
where toadstools nod drowsy with their own poison inside.
There are plots of land he cannot tend,
that don’t belong to him. Wild things grow there.
After Robert Hayden
After the pearl shines in the last country,
a ball of spindles, an iron rod,
a dove fashioned from gold plates
belonging to me like skin, free as sky,
after it brightens the unlit corners; after it is banners,
sun, tsunami, grand canyon, undercurrent;
after it sears the antipodes and septentrion;
after it is more than two missionaries
walking from door to door: a vessel, a seer,
a primary schoolboy, a wrestler jailed
in the Missouri reeds, tarred, seeing salt
in distant mountains, in handcarts, in Zion,
a mystic steeped in knowledge and burden,
a translator shall speak at the bar,
and not with Roman toga, not with princes
and medals and crisping pins,
but with Jesus’ arms far extending,
his children carrying the asp and lion,
New Jerusalem will start to gleam.
for Jan Grzebski, awake after a 16-year coma
What world of choice now.
Gone the walls, the drab komunista goods,
more surprising than to wake up
in your father’s body.
You marvel at a life without rations
as you set teeth to meat every evening.
you tell us: the world is prettier now
and you point out where colors weren’t.
But you are less of a miracle
than your wife’s silent diligence,
every hour shifting your wax body.
Two decades of just in case.
5,846 times
the world spun around your sleep.
Tonight you’ll fear to slumber
convinced this is some Brigadoon day.
For you hear the ocean call
to return, a yawn you can’t let take you,
the dope of your hibernation singing
in marrows and corners of your frame.
You wonder if Lazarus ever regretted,
as much as he loved Mary and Martha,
stole away from the revelers, down to the tomb
to breathe in his graveclothes, close his eyes.
You look so pleased with yourself
and now you think you deserve to be painted,
lying there, drowned, or crowding library shelves.
Your silly suicide cost me 6.95
at an art sale. I get jealous of you each morning
on the wall, resting there below the ferns.
Your arms are open to something, foolishly:
that prick prince isn’t coming back.
Still, everyone should have your painting,
a print for every room of the house,
for the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen,
for the garage where they get the rope or leave
the motor running—to prove you keep floating,
shining in bright pastels, thoughtful flotsam
till the resurrection.
something near the wave
yearns to taste the sea—
if it has a name
it is your name.
if it has a face
it resembles me.
something near the wave
yearns to taste the sea—
there’s no telling who
it is waiting for.
if it were a tongue
it would surely speak.
something near the wave
yearns to taste the sea—
Above this cold chair
they say vegetable. Voices like calves
bawling for their mother’s teats.
I think yellow squash, summer,
radish the shade of my lips
in sun, all the ways to be beautiful.
Even after five dull children,
my breasts really never sagged.
I cradle them days when he nods
across from me. He spreads his cold palms
on my cheeks, looks deep
though he thinks it’s just his face
he sees in my blue irises.
I want to say Lawrence
you never held me right. And when
did you see my legs never sprouted
one blue vein? The kind wandering
down a thigh like a wet blue trail of mud.
You can’t kiss a thigh like that.
What I love is my skin, how cool
it presses me. They watch scared.
I breathe to say it and everyone circles
my face. Scared I whisper, and they think
I mean me, and who knows
how long they’ll weep, pray me out
of my body, when it’s what I want to keep.
Toth was his name, Laszlo Toth: the death man
who one midmorning charged Saint Peter’s sanctum
lunged with frenzied hammer at the polished Madonna
frothing at the mouth
shouting he wanted Him as his own
cracking with mallet swing the curves of submission
breaking her soft hold on the dead Son.
The camera crowd gaped then contracted
wrestled him to the stone floor sentenced him
deported him declared him deranged.
Have pity on him.
Hard it is, to insanity hard, to behold a son’s graceful bow
in the hold of another (doctor, technician, nurse, mortician)
to glimpse quite by mistake through the sanctum doorway
as another cradles the warm form wilting, folding under death’s weight
as the gurney sheets must be removed from this side
and the tubes extracted from that side
and the limbs placed neatly at his sides
and machines are rolled away into shadows
as the muscles melt
twisting the stone sturdy man in the
ultimate capitulation:
deference to death.
Hard it is, to derangement hard,
to not swing a mallet or hammer, to not fling oneself
onto the stone floor,
to not break into sharp marbled shards.
Have pity on me.
for Sally
Prose will not capture some people, the way
they drift. You can only see them dragging
their furniture through Wyoming night,
down a dark throat of road, the ice
clear and slick. We stopped to sleep in a solitary
town: Rawlins, Wyoming. Ahead:
a slow hundred miles of snow. (Things ahead
are always murky, but we go anyway,
forward.) Oklahoma was first, the solitary
landscape scarred with arthritic trees, as if dragged
up by their bones. We stopped only twice,
once at a motel with “crap” on the walls, and all night
she couldn’t sleep, fearing what other nights
(“hookers and pimps”) had left in the sheets. And still ahead
of us, Nebraska flats and the Wyoming ice
a vast white cliché. It wasn’t the way
I expected, but an easier slope for dragging
that U-Haul than I-70. Just solitary.
Only a semi every few miles. We played laptop solitaire
by turns—her black skirt in the window shading her like night,
blocking the sun, while my toes went numb—dragging
the load away from failed relationships, hoping ahead
for clarity, like Thelma and Louise. But that’s not the way
it works. Still, we ate at that truck stop the night before. Ice
shrapneled our faces; her Dad phoned to warn us of icy
roads that could lead to cliffs and a solitary
death where our car might “blow up. That would suck.” His way
of cheering her up—and it worked. That night
we laughed through the rattlesnake backscratchers, Dead Head
T-shirts, Jesus figures, stuffed pigs dressed in camo, dragging
ourselves to warm beds in a decent motel. Then that dragging
day through whitewash, WY, horizons of ice,
to Rock Springs, shouts, and a Pizza Hut buffet. Ahead
was Utah, final destination for her solitary
path without men, though every night
she would think of the same one. But that’s the way
it works—in circles. The way she came dragging
back home, still obscured by night, months later, the ice
still thick inside. More solitary. Less looking ahead.
She hears her students cry,“Come see! There’s snow!”
How foolish on this broiling desert day
to think these children possibly could know
of whirling flakes. They’ve never watched them blow
in lacy sifts of white. Not here, I’d say!
She hears her students cry, “Come! See! There’s snow!”
Their choral invitations bid her go
to see them shaking branches in their play.
(To think these children possibly could know
that oleander bushes left to grow
so tall—hide future pain in white bouquet.)
She hears her students cry, “Come. See? There’s snow!”
Pink blossoms, narrow leaves begin to show
as flakes of ash fall from their overlay.
To think these children possibly could know
they play like simple guinea pigs below
atomic testing’s fallout—in the way.
We still can hear their cries. “Come! See!” There’s no
way these dear children possibly could know.
I’ve pushed aside the papers in my tray
and culled the wilted leaves from my bouquet
set on the shelf. I’ve lit a candle, made
a pot of tea and scones with marmalade,
the kind you liked. The blinds are slit; a cool
north wind has melded palms into a spool
of endive colored fronds. It’s quiet here.
I close my eyes; blurred images appear.
The room recedes. I sip the bitter tea
and think about a time by Paignton’s sea.
your gauze-like scent clings to the walls, despair
and giddy memories return. I swear,
I hear a gull and jetty bell’s refrain.
They both dissolve like sand hills in the rain.
Do you think biting the tongue enough
will clove it into Pentecostal ignition and you
will speak everyone’s language just right?
(If you believe such self-mortification,
you have one hair shirt for every day of the week.)
Or do you think this unruly member must be canined,
ripped apart as by a concentration camp dog?
(If you believe that you shave your head
or other people’s heads entirely.)
No, you reject either view,
for nothing flourishes by violence,
pain is poor restraint,
and you know the woman who starved
because she was always biting her tongue and couldn’t eat.
It comes to this:
angels will to dance on the tip of your tongue
and your own words want to bounce just once
then dive into others without waves.
A quiet blue bird
Stuck in the crib
Ryan pokes his brother
Down the hall
Sound of sisters cereal in the kitchen
Mom and Dad sleeping snoring
The lopsided evergreen dances silent outside glass
Mom and Dad sleeping snoring
Sound of sisters cereal in the kitchen
Down the hall
Ryan pokes his brother
Stuck in the crib
A quiet blue bird
Unruly boy,
how dare you trim the lamp down to the quick!?
What right had you to tamper with the wick
and blow the flame a bolder, brighter life
than we, its self-named guardians, preferred?
This is no toy:
this mighty, this empowering, governing word
to be blown and blasted, borne in bone, and (Heavens!) heard!
We’d careful kept its rusted notes and valves
to play our several orchestrated tunes;
your new age oil
unhinged our hold upon the book, presumed
to bring our sacred ruins near to rune.
You would dispense a covenant to plain folk;
save some space for Theology at least!
But you—oh coy!—
would make all women queens! and all men priests!
and perpetrate a scourge of prophecies!
would rather go and see God face to face!
alone, with none the wiser there to mediate!
Go to, Mal Foy!
Converse with angels! Open wide the gate!
Translate your sacred books! Come! Castigate
A generation serpentine, corrupt!
Fold centuries upon themselves and see,
unlettered boy,
what comes of all your books, your parlor trickery,
of your hat-gazing, treasure-seeking, multi-wivery,
your Zion’s Camp, your Nauvoo, of your still-born temple mount,
your New Jerusalem, Apocalypse, your martyr’s wounds,
and of your cult, your kin, your craze and then of you:
a name not had at all, unpublished fame, obscurity.
This do we, the undersigned, confirm as prophecy
Eternal and unchangeable, in faith, confidently,
I am ten, sitting on your sofa.
I watch as you paint and talk.
Your voice is a swallow,
which sometimes loops through the Andes,
spins over the terraced slopes
of Machu Pichu, then dips suddenly
to the bucket of pig slop by the kitchen sink,
or hovers over Little Bryant’s shot-off toe.
It is August. You recite Revelations.
Grandchildren bang through the back door,
interrupt the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.
They ask for glasses of milk, take you away from
the canvas you have tacked on the living room wall.
Cattlemen pass through the front door.
Their barnyard boots crisscross your Persian carpet.
you pause to chat, then paint again—
I remember you giving Moses eyes,
so he could watch Pharaoh’s daughter
lift him from the Nile.
She looks around wondering if
The driver remembers her stop.
She does not speak to me
But bends her white neck
To check the child she holds.
Her hair was quickly gathered—
Pinned in haste against
The wind, uncorrected.
Her young eyes watching,
Gather age, take on the first,
Bolder lines of death
As though her life had crested:
Her gathering tide has turned.
On her knees are big brown eyes
Swaddled in white. They stare
From a grey plastic car seat.
Beyond them a low counterpoint
Of conversation and snatching
Laughter at the back
Of the rocking city bus
Reminds of an earlier peace.
The eyes meet mine, then sleep,
Content in their gathering life.
A bus token jingles
against the nickels and dimes
in the pocket of his Pendleton coat
as he lingers at the door
of the Salvation Army
bookstore and wonders, if he enters,
what new thing will happen to his soul?
Will it fold itself up like the city map
now lined more with creases
than with the streets he’s yet to search
for someone who might know her
who might have seen the face
that haunts him like a shadow of the one
reflected in the storefront glass
looking back with empty eyes
through words that spread
like ink across his brain:
all romance twenty-five cents
The Natural Man—God’s fool, Paul said.
By nature, Man (referring Genesis) finessed,
misled by Woman, devolved to stature
lower than the angels. Once fallen, perfect body,
conscious of desire. Mind perceived it flawed
and sinful, covered it in skins of animals.
But modesty did not put out the fire.
The Natural Woman—shame was not innate
to her. Refused to hearken to dictates
of her mate, or blame the serpent. For her,
felt natural in the lovely, dark and sensuous
pelts of beasts. Evicted from the garden, found
she could regard the stark & wild as beautiful.
Embraced the earth, the sky & childbirth.
The Animal (shy but fierce) drinks from instinct—
no need to think or reason. Natural Man
envies Creature’s freedom, yet denies the link.
Hears exultant cry of grandeur (new thrill
of innocence and fear) pierce the wilderness.
Afraid to die—irony, like blood, seeps through.
Man works his will to hunt and kill.
The Word, so long deferred by Natural Man,
now blurred. Woman heard the whisper, ate
the fruit, discerned light from dark, bent
the arc of patriarchy. Wisdom or duty?
Natural or unnatural? Anomalies of Nature
(lion and lamb, man and man) choose to lie
down together. Muse the Nature of the Beast.
The night settles
like spooned earth.
I no longer see faces,
I see trees.
The cutter is gone,
the forest has swallowed
him,
as it has
swallowed
me.
Ángel Chaparro Sáinz
When Eugene England and Dennis Clark published Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems I was thirteen years old. I had to wait five years to go to college, where I competed against teenage apathy and my hunger for adventure and successfully completed my degree. Even though Spain qualified for entrance into the European Union’s Economic and Monetary Union at that time, the job market was still a challenge for a recent college graduate like me and unemployment encouraged me to go back to school. I began my PhD and I discovered who the Mormons were—though it was still two more years before I read Harvest.
In March 2011,Tyler Chadwick sent me an email asking if I would write an afterword for a new anthology of Mormon poetry. He mentioned Harvest; I went back to take a look at the collection, and its names were so familiar: Clinton F. Larson, Susan E. Howe, Carol Lynn Pearson, Emma Lou Thayne, May Swenson. I closed the book and opened the manuscript Chadwick had sent. And I started doing what Mark Strand calls eating poetry.
The first thing that surprised me about the manuscript was its variety. There are different levels of attachment to the Church, motley themes, free verse and traditional forms, personal poems, elegiac poems, experimental poems, major topics, minor topics, new images, new mappings. American poetry is decentralized, richly varied, impossible to summarize. The same applies to Mormon poetry. It would be easy enough to compartmentalize: you could divide between those who follow stanzaic forms, conventional rhyme, traditional flavor and themes (including Michael R. Collings, Karen Kelsay, Alan Rex Mitchell, Jim Papworth) and those who are experimental (including Elaine M. Craig, Simon Peter Eggertsen, Calvin Olsen, Laraine Wilkins). But that would be too easy—and too narrow, because each writer in this collection associates with the Mormon literary tradition while also exploring strange lyric terrain and spilling over into mainstream American poetry. So while it’s tempting to compartmentalize these 82 poets, labeling is unrewarding.
A general overview of this volume’s outpouring invokes the names and voices of the poets included in Harvest, as well as other well-known names and voices. Calvin Olsen’s spontaneity mirrors that found in Charles Olson. Robert Frost and Maxime Kumin’s observations of nature gleam in Patricia Karamesines. Raymond Carver’s simplicity echoes in Laura Stott’s poems. Charles Bukowski’s loss of prejudice can be found in Nicole Hardy. Langston Hughes means jazz and that same music swings in Elaine Craig. Carl Sandburg was in love with flexible lines and Melissa Dalton-Bradford twists hers. Billy Collins, as poet Terry Gifford told me a couple days ago, keeps the mystery from one line to the other, and I feel the same as I read Warren Hatch. Gary Snyder goes to nature and Steven L. Peck follows. William Carlos Williams played the game of phonetics, which Alex Caldiero wins. Emily Dickinson’s lyricism flows into Marie Brian. Gary Soto’s aloof sentences and visual narration are like those found in S.P. Bailey. Adrienne Rich and Arwen Taylor talk about womanhood. May Swenson and Neil Aitken discuss death. Linda Pastan and Deja Earley speak from the depths of the quotidian; I would call them surgeons of the routine. C.K. Williams purifies ordinary things and Matthew James Babcock does the same from different angles, using new tones and with a tendency for little details, such as might be found in an airport reflection room. I could go on, but won’t, only to mention that many of these poets seem to focus on the specific detail as a source for the poem, making the poem’s core something real or tangible through which to distil profound emotions.
This collection’s current, assorted and composite nature is also highlighted by the experimental nature of certain poems. From Alex Caldiero’s dissection of the language of emotion to Elaine Craig’s visual poetry branches to the snaky, chaotic Calvin Olsen—who seems to write as if onboard a capsizing ship—to John Talbot’s use of dramatic techniques, the experimentation is blatant. But there is also a subtle overturning of rhythm, rhyming, diction, musical syncopation, irony and images in the other poets gathered here. Lance Larsen is a master of brand-new images. Natasha Loewen explores a wide range of personal metaphors. Tyler Chadwick is to rhythm what Emil Zatopek was to athletics. Helen Walker Jones masters time; Joe Plicka, perspective; Laura Stott, sarcasm; Sally Straford, momentum; Javen Tanner, syntax; Holly Welker, strength; Philip White, rhythm; Sunni Brown Wilkinson, collocation; Darlene young, symbolism; Danny Nelson, rhyming; Timothy Liu and Shannon Castleton, line-cutting. Music is basic to Michael Hicks’ line. Jon Ogden is funky. Michael Collings is able to broadcast static onto the page. Marilyn Bushman-Carlton, Laura Nielson Baxter, Danielle Beazer Dubrasky, Deja Earley, Elizabeth Garcia, David Passey, and Elisa Pulido all slip peculiar voices, tones, or vibrations into their poetry.
As illustrated above, the poets of Fire in the Pasture have developed and experiment with techniques and content that both express uniqueness and that tie them to a Mormon foundation as they draw lines to connect outsider and insider perspectives and sources. This tendency to seek interplay with and to establish connections and dialogue among various perspectives and sources—from candid revisions of the pioneering period to the stress put on relationships with nature, with other humans, with God—encompasses the whole collection. This mirrors the ever-present theme of connection in the Mormon religious tradition. And from this exploration of the connections among human beings and between humans and nature, we can draw significant metaphors that complicate the identities and voices of the poets gathered here.
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky frames her family relationships in terms of the desert’s beauty. Sarah Dunster links human experience and nature through references to Native-American culture. Aaron Guile’s internal rhyming patterns give a rhythm so personal and alluring that the reader is persuaded to follow him in his diving and whale-seeing. Patricia Karamesines is delicious, carnal; she follows the rhythms of nature in pursuit of communion and relief. Karen Kelsay uses stanzaic form to link nature and remembrance. Jim Papworth watches and discerns the flying of birds. Steven Peck is sage from Moab, juncos in winter, a coyote-man mapping a different geography. Laura Stott shares pregnant, colorful images of the Mojave Desert, with a penetrating insight into the ironic sociology of the postmodern migration from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Holly Welker digs in the soil of her body. Amber Watson states that “we’re too made of water” and language is affective water in her poetry. And Warren Hatch offers the beautiful metaphor of grafting. This method of plant propagation where the tissues of one plant are fused with those of another symbolizes the connections among human systems, time, and space that modulate this collection.
Maybe the most complex of these connections is the one between each poet and Mormonism. The Mormonness of these poems is evident in how some poets rely on recurrent topics within Mormon culture or how they develop and revise diverse tenets of the Mormon gospel, such as death, sin, Joseph Smith, pioneering, baptism. Sometimes this means a change in style, in the cadence of language, but I perceive a peculiar approach to these topics, an approach showing personal and dynamic introspection and evaluation rather than exposition. Neil Aitken and Sharlee Mullins Glenn approach death, the first as a personal challenge and as joined to movement and travel, the second, by slipping into sorrow and impotency. With a strong spiritual tone, Mark D. Bennion evokes the distance between living and remembering. Elizabeth Garcia follows a common pattern found in this collection with her musings on original sin, but she does it from the perspective of gender roles. Sarah E. Page turns back to Eve and the apple, but from an uncommon angle. Doug Talley talks about repentance, but he is really saying something else. Alan Rex Mitchell imagines Joseph Smith tending a garden and thinking about the West. Jonathon Penny not only talks about rites and dialogue as a healthy performance of religion, he also reshapes Joseph Smith. Elisa Pulido writes sharply about the Church’s pioneering days. Elizabeth Pinborough submerges readers in the volatility of a sensible woman’s spiritual experiences. Paul Swenson offers an explicit missionary poem. Sunni Brown Wilkinson writes about grace, Darlene young, a patriarchal blessing. Laura Hamblin solemnly, but controversially, approaches baptism.
And while all of these poets deal with spirituality, faith or the gospel on different levels and with different objectives, it is always with complexity, a lack of fixation, and as an exercise in paradox. As Scott Cameron says, “Truth is not static; it collides.” This collision gives Fire in the Pasture a superb diversity, and it explains the narrowness of making divisions. As Jonathon Penny says, “This is a rather wretched place, / All things considered: / More paradox than paradise.” Paradox dissolves boundaries and contraries; it opens toward possibility and complexity without forcing us to choose between extremes.
N. Colwell Snell speaks about “bottl[ing] words,” which is a good metaphor for how desperately we try to catch and retain, evoke and revive experience. But there are things impossible to bottle. You cannot bottle the Missouri River. And you cannot bottle poems. Poems are fluid; they connect, they unify, they prompt discovery. From this collection, I won’t keep any bottle, but a string—a “bright string of poems.” Not a string to bind with, but through which to telephone dear friends and family with tin can receivers. A tightrope to cross so we might embrace on the other side. A “gossamer” veil strung between “Thee and me,” “earth and sky” (as Judith Curtis says) through which each poet in this collection reaches a hand to welcome us into the intimate communion of minds, bodies and souls offered in what Laura Hamblin calls “a room made of poetry.”
Neil Aitken is the author of The Lost Country of Sight, winner of the 2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review. His poems have appeared in Barn Owl Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. A former computer programmer, he is presently pursuing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
Claire Ǻkebrand is a Swede who grew Up in Germany. She has a BA in English from Brigham Young University and plans on obtaining a PhD in Creative Writing. Claire has the unusual luck of being married to her favorite poet.
Matthew James Babcock teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at BYU – Idaho in Rexburg. He holds a PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His book, Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis, was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2011. He is a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize recipient, and Press 53 chose his novella, He Wanted to a Be a Cartoonist for The New Yorker, as one of two first-prize winners in its 2010 Open Awards competition. Among other places, his writing has appeared in Terrain, Spoon River Poetry Anthology, The Rejected Quarterly, Quiddity, and Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction.
Sometimes S.P. Bailey wishes he were an English gentleman some 200 years ago. He would like to spend his mornings with his children and dogs tending to the estate, afternoons reading and writing (and practicing law), evenings by candlelight with his beautiful wife, Andrea, Friday nights dancing at balls he would throw for everyone in the county, and Saturdays shooting things from his horse with Fitzwilliam Darcy, Colonel Brandon, and the rest. Alas, Shawn was born in Utah circa 1976, and he has no estate, horses, or dogs.
Laura Nielson Baxter was born and raised in Utah County and loves the people who live there despite all their quirks. She received her BA in English with emphases in Literary Studies and Creative Writing as well as a degree in Art from Utah Valley University. She has a passion for all things art, enjoys the outdoors, and loves having adventures with the most awesome husband ever invented, Kirk. Laura regularly shares many projects, including her poetry, on her blog, lauranielsonbaxter.blogspot.com.
In 2000, Mark D. Bennion graduated with his MFA from the University of Montana. Since that time, he has taught writing and literature courses at Brigham Young University – Idaho. His poetry has appeared in various journals, including Aethlon, caesura, The Comstock Review, Irreantum, and RHINO. He is also author of the collection Psalm & Selah: A Poetic Journey through The Book of Mormon (Parables Publishing, 2009). In addition to writing poetry, Mark collects baseball cards, plays racquetball nearly every week, and enjoys Korean cuisine. He and his wife, Kristine, are the parents of five children.
James Best lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Valerie, and their terminally ill bonsai, Moonlight Graham. He attended NYU’s MFA in Creative Writing and now writes for television to support his poetry habit. His poems have been published in RATTLE, Paterson Literary Review, Cold Mountain Review, South Carolina Review, Limestone, and other places. Also, he writes copy for t-shirts for American Eagle and Converse, shoots short films and web series, and publishes humor essays. He has plans to live forever.
Lisa Bickmore’s work has appeared in Quarterly West, Tar River Poetry, Caketrain, and elsewhere. Her book, Haste, was published by Signature Books in 1994. She teaches writing in Salt Lake City.
Will Bishop was born and raised in Boise, Idaho. After a two-year stint as an LDS missionary in Spain’s Canary Islands he earned both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Humanities from Brigham Young University. He currently lives in Lawrence, KS, where he is working towards a PhD in American Studies from the University of Kansas.
Sara Blaisdell’s non-fiction and poetry have appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Chariton Review, Literature and Belief, The West Wind Review, Sophia, and on public radio’s This American Life. She works at a dog daycare in Virginia.
Marie Brian lives in Woodland Hills, Utah, with her husband and three kids. She spends her time generating awkward moments with her family, reading lowbrow literature, and creating subversive embroidery in the name of her online pseudonym, The Cotton Floozy.
Joanna Brooks grew Up in a conservative Mormon home in the orange groves of Orange County, California, during the Cold War. She is now a national voice on Mormon thought, politics, and culture. Her prize-winning poems and essays have appeared in Dialogue, Sunstone, and other literary journals. For more, visit joannabrooks.org.
Gideon Burton has taught in the English department at BYU since 1994 and has been active in the LDS literary scene, teaching LDS literature, creating the Mormon Literature & Creative Arts database, writing on Mormon film, and promoting the Association for Mormon Letters. For many years he has composed a daily sonnet, many on religious themes. His most recent can be found at OpenSourceSonnets.blogspot.com.
Marilyn Bushman-Carlton has been a Utah Arts Council Artist-in-Residence, UAC Artist Grant recipient, and prize winner in the UAC Original Writing Competition. She is the author of on keeping things small (Signature Books, 1995), Cheat Grass (Pearle M. Olsen Publication Award, 1999), and Her Side of It (Signature Books, 2010). The chapbook version of Her Side of It was a finalist in the 2005 Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest at The Comstock Review, and the book received the Association for Mormon Letters’ Award for Poetry in 2011. She contributed to Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women and To Rejoice as Women: Talks from the 1994 Women’s Conference. Her work has been featured in Earth’s Daughters, Ellipsis, Exponent II, and Iris, among other periodicals and anthologies.
Polyartist, sonosopher, and scholar of humanities, Alex Caldiero makes things that appear as language or images or music, and then again as the shape of your own mind. Caldiero is the author of numerous publications, visual and text-sound works, including Body/Dreams/Organs (Elik Press, 2005), Poetry is Wanted Here! (Dream Garden Press, 2010), and Sound Weave, a poetry-music CD with Theta Naught (Differential Records, 2006). He is featured in Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Routledge, London/NY) and is the subject of the experimental documentary The Sonosopher: Caldiero in life…in Sound. Alex is Poet/Artist-in-Residence at Utah Valley University.
In 2009 and 2010, Scott Cameron received awards for his poetry from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes. He received his Ph.D. in English from Boston University and currently teaches English at Brigham Young University – Idaho.
Shannon Castleton has published poems in journals such as Northwest Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ellipsis, and Literature and Belief. She has taught writing classes at BYU, Salt Lake Community College, and Westminster College, where she also worked as the advisor to the literary magazine, Ellipsis. Currently, Shannon lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband and their four daughters.
Tyler Chadwick lives in Pocatello, Idaho, with his wife, Jessica, and their four daughters. His poems have appeared in Metaphor, Dialogue, Irreantum, Salome, Black Rock & Sage, Wilderness Interface Zone, and Victorian Violet Press Poetry Journal. In 2009, he received the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize and in 2010 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Ángel Chaparro Sáinz was born in Barakaldo, Spain, in 1976. He holds a degree in English Philology from the University of the Basque Country (Universidad del País Vasco – Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea) and he recently received summa cum laude marks from the same university for his dissertation “Contemporary Mormon Literature: Phyllis Barber’s Writing.” He is presently teaching at the University of the Basque Country. His research deals mostly with Western American Literature, ecocriticism and feminist studies, even though he is also interested in a variety of topics dealing with poetry, popular music and minority literatures.
Elaine Wright Christensen has two collections of poetry: At the Edges and I Have Learned 5 Things. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Ensign, Weber Studies, Ellipsis, Dialogue, Petroglyphs, and The Comstock Review, where she placed first in the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award judged by Stephen Dobyns. She has also published poems in anthologies, such as The Cancer Poetry Project, Encore (a collection of prize winning poems for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies), Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women, and recently, New Poets of the American West. She has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. In 2007 she was a finalist in the Utah Arts Literary Contest and was selected for the Bite Size Poet of the Month in November 2010. Elaine received a BA in German and English from Utah State University. Living in Sandy, Utah, she is the mother of five, the grandmother of eleven.
Michael R. Collings, Emeritus Professor of English at Pepperdine University (Malibu, California), has been publishing literary and bibliographic studies; articles, chapters and reviews; novels and short stories; poetry; and other works for over thirty-five years. His academic studies emphasized such writers as Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Dean R. Koontz, and other science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors—he is considered a leading authority on both King and Card. His creative works similarly address mainstream, science fiction, fantasy, and horror audiences, although several of his novels and volumes of poetry directly explore LDS themes. His twelve-book Renaissance-style epic, The Nephiad, is one of a handful of LDS verse epics published over the past century-and-a-half. He is now retired and lives with his wife, Judi, in his native state of Idaho.
Elaine M. Craig enjoys a varied life. In addition to an interest in poetry reading and writing, she has been a thesaurus editor, a professional butterfly catcher, a bike mechanic, and a geologic map colorer. She enjoys singing, catamaran sailing, the outdoors, and making many types of things—although sometimes not dinner. Elaine has several times had the opportunity of collaborating with composer David H. Sargent on solo and choir compositions. Their song cycle, Notes, premiered in 2010 and was published by Mormon Artists Group. Elaine and her husband live in Utah; they have three children.
Judith Curtis has English degrees from BYU, Boston University, and completed the Creative Writing Certificate program at Phoenix Community College. In addition to writing poetry, directing memoir groups, and writing stories for her grandchildren, she is a Master Gardener and a volunteer at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. She has had poems published in Irreantum, Dialogue, Segullah, Exponent II, and Wilderness Interface Zone; and she participated in the Mormon Women Writers tour in 2010 that was organized by Dr. Joanna Brooks and Dr. Holly Welker. She is currently poetry editor for Exponent II.
Melissa Dalton-Bradford resides in Singapore with her husband, Randall, and the two youngest of their four children, Dalton Haakon and Luc William. (Their daughter, Claire, studies at BYU-Provo.) This is the sixth international address she has called home, having lived in Hong Kong, Vienna, Oslo, Paris and Munich. She took a BA in German and an MA in comparative literature from BYU, and taught German, humanities, English and writing at the University level. In addition to serving actively in local church congregations everywhere she’s lived (and thereby learning their languages), Melissa has been cataloguing this unusual trajectory in the written word. She is currently expanding her poetry and essay portfolio, (her work can be found in Segullah and Irreantum), compiling an extensive grief anthology, and completing a memoir on her firstborn, Parker.
William DeFord lives in Grand Junction, Colorado. His poems have been published in Tar River Poetry and Red Rock Review.
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky has received a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. Her manuscript, Drift Migrations, was a finalist for the 2010 White Pines Press Poetry Prize. She also received the 2006 Utah Arts Council First Place Award for a book-length collection of poems. Her poetry has been published in ECOllective, Tar River Poetry, Weber Studies, CityArts, Petroglyph, Irreantum, and Dialogue. Her publications include Persephone Awakened (a poetry chapbook). She teaches creative writing at Southern Utah University.
Sarah Duffy was born in New York City on January 18, 1978. Spending most of her youth between New York and Southern California, she eventually moved to Utah in 1997 and graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in English in 2011. She currently resides in Provo, Utah, and works for a non-profit organization. Her poetry has appeared in Inscape and Tar River Poetry. Her favorite poets are constantly changing, but more recently they include Li-Young Lee, Jay Hopler, and Jane Hirshfield—to name a few of many.
Since she was a child, Sarah Dunster’s journals have been littered with poems and stories. Literature and writing keep her sane as a stay-at-home mother of many small children. Sarah’s poems have been published on Wilderness Interface Zone. This spring, her poem, “Three Miles with Ghandi,” was awarded an honorable mention in Segullah’s spring contests, and her short fiction piece, “Back North,” took first place. Sarah loves the association of other LDS writers and artists that she has gained over the last few years.
Deja Earley’s poems and essays have previously appeared or are forthcoming in journals like Arts and Letters, Borderlands, and Lilliput Review, and three of her poems were recently included in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume II: Mississippi. She has received honors in several writing contests, including the 2008 Joan Johnson Award in poetry, the 2004 – 2005 Parley A. and Ruth J. Christensen Award, and first place in Sunstone’s 2011 Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Contest. She completed a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and moved to the Boston area, where she works as a development editor at Bedford/St Martin’s Press.
Simon Peter Eggertsen was born in Kansas, raised in Utah and schooled in Virginia and England; he now lives in Montreal. He has degrees in literature, language and law. His pedigree in poetry is recent. His work has been published, or will be, in Nimrod, Vallum (Canada), Atlanta Review, Dialogue, Irreantum, The Caribbean Writer, New Millennium Writings, and elsewhere. He has won an International Publishing Prize (Atlanta Review, 2009), been named a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry (Nimrod International, 2009), was Runner-up for the Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize (2010), and had two poems selected as finalists for the New Millennium Writings Awards #29 (2010).
Kristen Eliason received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where she spent an additional year in residence as the 2008 Nicholas Sparks Prize recipient. Kristen’s work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Scrivener Creative Review, Six Little Things, Two Review, Reed Magazine, Makeout Creek, Juked, and others.
Lisa Ottesen Fillerup lives in Heber Valley, Utah, where she is best known for speeding while delivering hot cinnamon rolls to friends and neighbors. Though she handles a mean red KitchenAid mixer, she also loves to hike, read the funnies, write poems and find treasures at the local thrift store. She and her sculptor husband, Peter, are the parents of six children.
Elizabeth Garcia lives with her husband in Atlanta, Georgia, where she taught Literature and Composition for six years before deciding to write poetry full-time until children come along. Her poems have appeared in Borderline, Segullah, Eudaimonia Poetry Review, and Irreantum, which nominated her for a Pushcart Prize. She also serves as an Associate Editor for FutureCycle Press, as Assistant Editor for the Georgia Poetry Society’s Reach of Song, and on the poetry board for Segullah.
Sharlee Mullins Glenn is a writer of poetry, essays, short stories, and criticism. Her work has appeared in periodicals as varied as The Southern Literary Journal, BYU Studies, Irreantum, Segullah, and Women’s Studies. She holds a Master’s degree in Humanities from Brigham Young University and taught there for a number of years. She is also a nationally published, award-winning author of children’s books. Sharlee lives with her husband and children in Pleasant Grove, Utah.
Aaron Guile is the clichéd eternal student, trying to graduate while raising three children alone. He is an English major at Utah Valley University; hopefully he will graduate in 2012 after twenty-five years of trying. He lives in Provo, Utah, with two of his children, a paper-strewn desk, and his beloved, overfilled bookshelf.
Laura Hamblin received her Ph.D. in creative writing/poetry from the University of Denver. She is a full-professor at Utah Valley University where she has received awards including the Faculty Ethics Fellow, the Dean’s Faculty Creative Award, and the Faculty Excellence Award. She teaches women’s literature, the history and theory of the genre of poetry, composition, and topic classes including seminars on Martin Buber and William Blake. Hamblin is part of the faculty who put together Utah Valley University’s new Peace and Justice Studies Program. Her book of poetry, The Eyes of a Flounder, was published by Signature Books in 2005. From 2007 – 08 Hamblin lived in Amman, Jordan, where she gathered oral histories of Iraqi women refugees.
Nicole Hardy is the author of two poetry collections: This Blonde and Mud Flap Girl’s XX Guide to Facial Profiling, which was published as part of Main Street Rag’s 2006 Editor’s Choice chapbook series. She earned her MFA at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and was nominated for a 2007 Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in journals including Nimrod, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, as well as The New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. Her memoir, Fallen, is forthcoming from Hyperion.
Warren Hatch’s poetry has been published in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review and elsewhere. His first collection of poetry, Mapping the Bones of the World (2007), is available from Signature Books. Warren teaches technical communication and nature writing at Utah Valley University where he is also Associate Director of the Capitol Reef Field Station.
Michael Hicks is Professor of Music at Brigham Young University. Author of four historical books for University of Illinois Press, he has just completed four years as editor of the journal American Music. His poetry has been published in Dialogue, BYU Studies, Literature and Belief, Sunstone, and in the recent anthologies Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses and New Poets of the American West.
Susan Elizabeth Howe is an associate professor of English at Brigham Young University. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Denver and an M.A. from the University of Utah. She has directed the BYU Reading Series and been a reviewer and contributing editor for Tar River Poetry, the poetry editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Literature and Belief, the managing editor of the Denver Quarterly, and the editor of Exponent II. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and other journals. Her first collection, Stone Spirits, won the publication award of the Redd Center for Western Studies. She co-edited the collection Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women, which has been released in a second edition. Her next collection, Woman & Snake, will be published by Signature Books in 2012. She and her husband, Cless young, live in Ephraim, Utah.
E.S. (Sarah) Jenkins received her MA in English from Brigham Young University in 2008. After writing a thesis on contemporary American poetry, she turned her attention to writing contemporary American poetry, completing an MFA at Northwestern University in 2011.
President of Utah State Poetry Society 2009 – 2011, LaVerna B. Johnson enjoys sharing poetry and encouraging young poets. She is a co-founder and first president of Redrock Writers (www.redrockwriters.org). She has served as a Utah State Poetry Society board member, president of the Dixie Poets chapter, originator and first director of Poetry In the Park (www.zionpark.org), as editor of the UTSPS publication, Panorama, editor of Redrock’s Chaparral Poetry Forum, and on the editorial board of Utah Sings. Her work has been published in Panorama, Irreantum, Nine One One, Encore, Utah Sings, Heritage Writers Anniversary Book, Southern Quill, online at www.cowboypoetry.com/lavernab, in three chapbooks and numerous newspapers and magazines.
Helen Walker Jones has received the Association for Mormon Letters short story award, Sunstone’s annual fiction prize, first-place in the Utah Arts Council fiction competition and Dialogue’s fiction prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist in the Iowa Short Fiction Contest, she has published in Harper’s, Wisconsin Review, Gargoyle, Richmond Quarterly, Florida Review, Indiana Review, Chariton Review, Cimarron Review, Apalachee Quarterly, Nebraska Review, and many others. She and her husband, Walter, live in Salt Lake City.
Patricia Karamesines has won many awards for her poetry, essays, and fiction, including from the University of Arizona, the Utah Arts Council, and the Utah Wilderness Association. She is the author of The Pictograph Murders (Signature Books, 2004), which received the Association for Mormon Letters’ 2004 Award for the Novel. She writes for the Mormon arts and culture blog, A Motley Vision (www.motleyvision.org), and runs the nature writing blog, Wilderness Interface Zone (wilderness.motleyvision.org).
Karen Kelsay is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the editor of Victorian Violet Press, an online poetry magazine. Her poems have been featured in The New Formalist, The Raintown Review, The Flea, The Lyric, 14 by 14, The HyperTexts and Lucid Rhythms. She lives with her British husband in Orange County, California.
Lance Larsen is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Backyard Alchemy. Recipient of a Pushcart prize and an NEA fellowship in poetry, he teaches at BYU and is married to mixed-media artist Jacqui Biggs Larsen.
Timothy Liu is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Polytheogamy and Bending the Mind around the Dream’s Blown Fuse. He lives in Manhattan.
Natasha Loewen is a mother of four, an English student, and a writer living in Victoria, BC. She has been published in Canadian literary journals and recently won a scholastic award and publication for her poetry. She plans to attend art school one day, and perhaps live as a gypsy, travelling to and also fro, speaking English of all sorts, very mediocre French, and about twenty Italian words.
P.D. Mallamo lives in Kansas City with wife and children, and has just completed a master’s degree in exercise physiology at the University of Kansas. He writes the Sunday ward bulletin. Everything else is scribbled in the margins.
Casualene Meyer (Richardson) was born in Seattle and attended BYU (BA, 1991; MA, 1994) and The University of Southern Mississippi (PhD, 1996). Poetry editor for BYU Studies and a mother of seven, she lives with her family in Madison, South Dakota.
Alan Rex Mitchell was raised in rural Oregon and educated at Utah State University and the University of California Riverside. His numerous scientific journal articles, reports, and columns have been concerned with theoretical and practical agro-environmental practices. He is recovering from having worked for Universities, state, and federal agencies, and is now politically libertarian, culturally omnivorous, and philosophically anti-nihilist. His missionary novel, Angel of the Danube (Cedar Fort, 2000), prompted Richard H. Cracroft to call him the Mormon Saul Bellow. In addition to poetry, he has written about religion and economics, and started a publishing company, Greenjacket Books. He lives with his wife and occasional children in the wilderness of Utah’s west desert.
Danny Nelson’s short stories, columns, and poetry have appeared in publications such as The Collegiate Post, Rio Grande Review, and Inscape. He is a major contributor to The Fob Bible, published in 2009 by Peculiar Pages. He lives in Seattle, where he pursues a PhD in English Literature.
Glen Nelson’s poetry has predominantly been published in collaboration with composers. He has written three operas with Murray Boren and six song cycles and individual songs set to music by a number of fine-art composers. Four of his poems in this anthology were composed by Boren into a cycle for baritone and piano titled, “Pop Art Songs.” In addition to poetry, Nelson is a ghostwriter and editor whose books have appeared repeatedly on The New York Times’ bestseller list. He owns and operates Mormon Artists Group, a company based in New York City that commissions and publishes work from LDS artists. To date, they have produced 21 projects with 76 Mormon artists in a wide variety of media.
Dave Nielsen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He attended BYU, where he received a master’s degree in English. Currently, he is a student at the University of Cincinnati, pursuing a PhD in English. He is the brother of poet and essayist, Shannon Castleton, whose work also appears in this anthology.
Marilyn Nielson received the Gordon B. Hinckley Presidential Scholarship from Brigham Young University, and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2002, with a double major in Music and Home Economics and a minor in English. As a student, she won the Academy of American Poets prize and several other poetry prizes. For her Honors Thesis, she composed a set of Art Songs for soprano and piano, with text by T.S. Eliot. She has won First Place for both Poetry and Personal Essay in the BYU Studies contest, and her poetry and personal essays have been published in, among other publications, BYU Studies, BYU Magazine, and Inscape. She has also been a staff writer for the Spanish Fork News. Marilyn and her husband, Sam, live in South Jordan, Utah, and are the parents of five young children.
Jon Ogden has a master’s degree in rhetoric and composition from Brigham Young University. He lives in Provo with his wife and son.
Calvin Olsen received his B.A. in English from Brigham Young University and is now completing his MFA in Poetry at Boston University. He received a 2011 Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and recently returned from the Iberian Peninsula, where he completed a translation project on the poetry of Alberto de Lacerda. His poetry has appeared in The Honeyland Review,Clarion, and SWAMP. He currently works as an editorial assistant at AGNI magazine.
Sarah Elizabeth Page graduated Cum Laude from Brigham Young University in 2007 with a degree in English and an emphasis in creative writing. She is currently pursuing her Masters of Science and Certification in Secondary English at Southern Connecticut State University. When not scribbling novels or taking pictures of the ragged aster and other weeds running rampant in her garden, she enjoys getting lost on long walks in the Naugatuck State Forest.
James (Jim) Papworth teaches at Brigham Young University – Idaho. He helps Anne, who is (at the time of this writing) feverishly trying to finish her dissertation before Christmas 2011, raise their two young sons and a couple of 20-somethings who still find comfort in the nest. Jim loves the outdoors, especially fly fishing and backpacking. He appreciates Irreantum, Perspective, and Cold Drill Press for publishing some of his poems.
David Passey has worked as a lawyer in New York City since 1999. During his Undergraduate studies at Brigham Young University, he won BYU’s annual poetry contest twice and received a grant from the University for his work as a poet. In 2009 he was the winner of the annual BYU Studies poetry contest.
Steven L. Peck works as an associate professor of Biology at Brigham Young University where he teaches the History and Philosophy of Biology. His poetry has appeared in Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, BYU Studies, Irreantum, Red Rock Review, Glyphs III, Tales of the Talisman, Victorian Violet Press Poetry Journal, and Wilderness Interface Zone. His chapbook of poetry, Flyfishing in Middle Earth, was published by the American Tolkien Society. In 2011, he was nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award. He lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah, with his wife, Lori Peck.
Jonathon Penny teaches English literature at UAE University in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, where he lives with Wendy and their three giant sons. He has only recently started publishing poetry—at Gangway Magazine, Wilderness Interface Zone, and in Dialogue. He is at work on several projects Under the nom de plume “Professor Pennywhistle,” which he expects will be published soon and to much fanfare and critical acclaim. Samples of that work can be found at professorpennywhistle.wordpress.com.
Elizabeth Pinborough is a BYU alumna and graduated with her master’s degree in religion and literature from Yale University in May 2011. Art is her greatest love, and she spends her happiest hours drawing, painting, photographing, and writing creatively. Women’s history captivates her, and she comes from a line of strong, faithful women. She is a member of the Exponent II staff and is a contributor to the Mormon Women Project.
Joe Plicka is the former editor of Quarter After Eight, a journal of innovative prose. His work recently appeared in Bananafish, Anti, and Fringe Magazine and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He currently lives and teaches in Athens, Ohio, where he is working on various novels and short fictions.
Elisa Pulido’s writing has appeared in numerous journals in the U.S, including, River Styx, The Ledge, The North American Review, Margie, Another Chicago Magazine, The Tor House Newsletter, The New Guard, Litteral Latté and RHINO. Her work has also appeared in Interchange and The New Welsh Review in the U.K. She is an honorary member of Academi Cardiff, the national literary society of Wales. She has an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently finishing coursework for a doctoral degree in Religions of North America at Claremont Graduate University’s School of Religion. In 2010, she participated in “Our Visions, Our Voices: A Mormon Women’s Literary Tour,” and organized a Religions in Conversation Conference at CGu on the theme, “Poetry and Religion—Finding Religious Realities through Sacred Verse.” The conference brought together scholars, poets, and performers of liturgical verse from eight world religions. She has served as a missionary in the Switzerland, Zurich mission and is currently a church service missionary to the San Clemente Stake Singles’ Ward.
Will Reger was born and raised in the St. Louis, Missouri area. He began writing poetry in his 7th grade P.E. class to entertain his friends, and then never quite stopped. He later served a mission in Belgium and went on to earn two bachelor’s degrees from BYU in Russian Language and Literature and European Studies, followed by a Masters and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in medieval Russian history. He is currently a professor of history at Illinois State University and the author of several articles on mercenaries, serving also as the editor of the Military Encyclopedia of Russia and Eurasia. Despite these distractions, he continues to be devoted to the short story, often scribbling an occasional poem in the margins of his notebooks when the fever comes upon him. He lives in Champaign, Illinois, with his wife, Mary, and their two youngest children.
Jim Richards completed a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston in 2003 and has since taught at BYU – Idaho. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Texas Review, and Contemporary American Voices. He currently serves as poetry editor of Irreantum.
John W. Schouten is a poet, a novelist, a consumer researcher and a marketing professor at the University of Portland. He has authored two books to date: a textbook, Sustainable Marketing (Prentice Hall, 2011), and a novel, Notes from the Lightning God (BeWrite Books, 2009).
Casey Jex Smith has shown his work in galleries across the United States. His book Church Drawings is available in a limited run from Mormon Artists Group. He is married to the artist Amanda Michelle Smith. Visit him at caseyjexsmith.com.
N. Colwell Snell graduated from the University of Utah with a BA in English. He was named the 2007 Utah State Poetry Society Poet of the year. His manuscript, Hand Me My Shadow, won the 2007 Pearle M. Olsen Book Award, the 2007 City Weekly Arts Award for Best Poetry Collection, and was runner-up in the 2007 Utah Center for the Book award. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005, and his poetry won 1st Runner-up in the 2006 William Faulkner-William Wisdom poetry competition. His poetry has been published in Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, California Quarterly, Comstock Review, Weber Studies, and elsewhere. He lives in Salt Lake City.
Laura Stott grew up in Draper, Utah and currently lives with her husband, Jake, in Los Angeles, California. She attended graduate school at Eastern Washington University in Spokane where she received her MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry. She has been an adjunct instructor at Weber State University for the past six years and has spent most of her summer months in the small town of Skagway, Alaska. Her poetry has been published in various publications. Laura is currently looking to publish her full-length manuscript of poems.
Sally Stratford’s poems have been published in Dialogue and Tar River Poetry. She received her bachelor of arts in English from BYU. She plays guitar and Upright bass in a bluegrass band, and is an accomplished fine art and documentary photographer. She lives in Grand Junction, Colorado, with her husband, Willie DeFord, and their two children.
Paul Swenson is a Utah journalist whose writing morphed into poetry in the 1990s under the lingering influence of his sister, May Swenson, one of the most anthologized American poets of the 20th Century. His first poetry collection, Iced at the Ward/Burned at the Stake, was published in 2003 by Signature Books. His second, In Sleep, is due in Spring 2012 from Dream Garden Press.
John Talbot is the author of two books of poetry, The Well-Tempered Tantrum (David Robert Books, 2004) and Rough Translation (2012). His poems appear in Poetry, The Yale Review, The American Scholar, The Iowa Review, Literary Imagination, The Southern Review, Arion, Southwest Review, and many other journals both in America and Britain. His verse translations from Ancient Greek and Latin appear widely, including in a recent Norton anthology of Greek poetry. He writes on poetry and translation for The New Criterion, The Yale Review, and The Weekly Standard, publishes chapters and articles on Greek, Latin, and English literature in scholarly books and journals, and collaborates in larger projects, such as The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English and the forthcoming Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, both from Oxford University Press. His third book, a study of English poets’ Uses of ancient meters, will be published by the London firm Duckworth.
Doug Talley received a BFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University and a JD from the University of Akron. Early in his career he practiced law with a firm in Akron, Ohio, and presently works as an executive in a small consulting company. For several years he edited a poetry column for an on-line publication, MeridianMagazine.com. His poems and essays have appeared in various literary journals, including The American Scholar, Christianity and Literature, and Irreantum, and in 2009 his work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poetry collection, Adam’s Dream, was released in 2011 from Parables Publishing. He and his wife, April, live in Copley, Ohio, where they both continue to write and raise their family.
Javen Tanner’s poems have appeared in Roanoke Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, Dialogue, The Raintown Review, and several other journals and magazines. His chapbook, Curses for Your Sake, was published in 2006 by the Mormon Artists Group in New York City. In Manhattan, Javen worked as Associate Artistic Director of Handcart Ensemble, and co-produced and/or acted in two Yeats plays: The Cat and the Moon and The Only Jealousy of Emer, and the New York premiere’s of Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, Ted Hughes’ translation of Alcestis, and Simon Armitage’s adaptation of The Odyssey. He is currently the Artistic Director of The Sting & Honey Company in Salt Lake City.
Arwen Taylor studies medieval literature and the history of the English language, and spends most of her professional time writing dissertation chapters. She hopes, however, to someday finish grad school and get back to writing unpublishable novels. Her poetry and fiction have appeared previously in The Fob Bible.
Amber Smith Watson is a Creative Writing MFA student at Brigham Young University. Her creative work has appeared in Touchstones, Utah Valley University’s journal of literature and art, and Cutbank, the University of Montana’s literary journal, and it will appear in The Normal School fall 2011. Native to Columbus, Ohio, Amber now lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah, with her husband, Jeff, her children, Elaina and Carter, her dog Copper, and a tank full of fish.
Holly Welker was born and raised in southeastern Arizona, the descendant of dour Mormon pioneers who moved south from the Great Salt Lake Valley shortly after arriving in it. Having relocated to Salt Lake City a few years ago, she is surprised at how much she loves the city. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona and a PhD in contemporary American literature from the University of Iowa. Her poetry and prose have appeared in such publications as Alaska Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, Bitch, Black Warrior Review, The Cream City Review, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Gargoyle, The Guardian, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Image, The Iowa Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Other Voices, New York Times, PMS, Poetry International, Poetry Northwest, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Sunstone and TriQuarterly.
Terresa Wellborn is a bricoleur, librarian, and cartographer of words. She is fond of the color blue, rock gardens, and chocolate chip waffles. She has a BA in English Literature from Brigham Young University and a MLIS degree from San Jose State University. Her writing has appeared in Segullah and is forthcoming in Monsters and Mormons and Inscape. She is writing her way to a book.
Philip White’s poems have won a Puschart Prize and have been published in The New Republic, Slate, Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. His first book, The Clearing, won the Walt McDonald prize. He teaches Shakespeare at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.
Laraine Wilkins prided herself in being an intellectual, gaining a bachelor’s and master’s degree in German literature from Brigham Young University and doing additional graduate work at Harvard University. She was the editor of the Mormon literary journal Irreantum from 2004 – 2006. Laraine loved writing and spending time in the outdoors, especially the desert. In 2006, at the age of 41, she died in an automobile accident.
Born and raised in Cache Valley, Sunni Brown Wilkinson currently teaches English and writing at Weber State University. She received an MFA from Eastern Washington University. Her work has been published in Red Rock Review, Tar River Poetry, Southern Indiana Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West, among other publications. She lives and gardens in Ogden and loves hiking the trails there with her husband and sons.
Darlene Young has published in Irreantum, Dialogue, Exponent II, Victorian Violet Press Poetry Journal, Segullah, and several anthologies. She currently serves as secretary for the Association for Mormon Letters. She lives in South Jordan with her husband and four sons.
Neil Aitken. “Pointer,” diode (May 2009). “Conditional,” ReDactions 8/9 (2007). “Letter Fifty,” DMQ Review (2007). “Burials” and “The Art of Forgetting,” The Lost Country of Sight (Tallahassee, FL: Anhinga Press, 2008). Used with permission of the poet and Anhinga Press.
Claire Ǻkebrand. “October Plush” and “House,” Splash of Red (12 Feb. 2010). “Thief in the Night,” Inscape (Fall 2008). Used with permission of the poet.
Matthew James Babcock. “Moose Remembered,” Terrain 25 (2010). “The Transient Rains of April Thirteenth,” PANK Magazine 4.8 (2009). “Daughters and Geese,” Weber Studies 22.2 (2005). “Jerusalem Artichoke,” Irreantum 12.1 (2010). “Inch,” Winner, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, 2008. Used with permission of the poet.
S.P. Bailey. “Reliquary” and “Prayer,” BYU Studies 45.3 (2006). “Sisyphus” and “Ripple Rock,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43.3 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Mark D. Bennion. “Our Only Summer in Black Earth, Wisconsin,” Perspective 1.1 (2001). “Joseph Smith,” BYU Studies 40.1 (2001). “Dear Father, Love, Abish,” “Swollen,” and “Triptych,” Psalm & Selah: a Poetic Journey through The Book of Mormon (Woodsboro, MD: Parables Publishing, 2009). Used with permission of the poet and Parables Publishing.
James Best. “Wayne,” Slipstream 28 (2008). “Expiration Dates,” Rattle 30 (Winter 2008). “Contingency #4:White Out,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43.2 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Lisa Bickmore. “Autumn Sutra,” Sugar House Review 2 (2010). “Where No One Follows,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22.1 (2001). “Dog Aria,” featured in the Utah Arts Council Series of Bite Size Poems (May 2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Will Bishop. “Moses und Aron” and “When I Do Go On My Honeymoon,” The Fob Bible (El Cerrito, CA: Peculiar Pages, 2009). Used with permission of the poet and Peculiar Pages.
Sara Blaisdell. “you Rise from the Exhibit,” The Chariton Review 30 (2007). “Closer,” West Wind Review 24. (2005). “Ophelia,” Literature and Belief 23.2 (2004). Used with permission of the poet.
Marie Brian. “Orisons,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 39.3 (2006). “Spindrift,” Segullah 2.1 (Spring 2006). “Pangaea Lost,” Popcorn Popping (6 Nov. 2006). Used with permission of the poet.
Joanna Brooks. “Invocation/Benediction,” Exponent II (Dec. 2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Gideon Burton. “I Promise,” “Her Fingers Knew the Alphabets of Rain,” “Red Wheelbarrow,” “Beacon,” and “Salt and Blood” are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute them (just give attribution).
Marilyn Bushman-Carlton. “Goodbye,” BYU Studies 48.1 (2009). “Nothing We Needed To Know,” “Prayer for a Grandchild,” “The Smell of a Baby,” and “So She Wouldn’t Fail,” Her Side of It (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Alex Caldiero. “It Occurs To Me,” I Am Not Only: only Bruce Conner did not say this (Salt Lake City, UT: Alex Caldiero, 2008). “Almost a Song,” Body/Dreams/Organs (Salt Lake City, UT: Elik Press, 2005). “Love Adoration Amour Devotion,” “Keep Listening,” and “Analfabetismo,” Poetry is Wanted Here! (Salt Lake City, UT: Dream Garden Press, 2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Scott Cameron. “We Think We Know the World When We Divide,” Irreantum 12.2 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Shannon Castleton. “Telling My Husband His Death,” Northwest Review 39.2 (2001). Used with permission of the poet.
Tyler Chadwick. “Fruit,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 39.2 (2006). “On Stand of Trees by J. Kirk Richards,” Wilderness Interface Zone (29 Oct. 2009). “Two Poems on Fatherhood,” Irreantum 9.2/10.1 (2007 – 8). “For the Man in the Red Jacket,” Mormon Artist C1 (Nov. 2009). Used with permission of the poet.
Elaine Wright Christensen. “Tornado,” The Comstock Review (Fall 2000), Winner, Muriel Craft Bailey Award. “Sermon on Manchac Swamp,” Encore: Prize Poems of the NFSPS 2000, ed. Budd Powell (Dallas, TX: Great Impressions, 2000). “Still Life,” The Comstock Review (Spring 2001). “A Little Night Music,” The Comstock Review (Fall 2000). Used with permission of the poet.
Michael R. Collings. “For Grace Isabella,” Strong Verse (28 July 2005). “Pomegranates,” Strong Verse (7 March 2007). “Damon Again,” Irreantum 11.1 – 2 (2009). “At Midnight” and “Cosmology,” In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, & Horror (Rockville, MD: Borgo/Wildside Press, 2009). Used with permission of the poet and Borgo/Wildside Press.
Judith Curtis. “Maybes at Sixty,” Exponent II (Winter 2003). “Building on Ruins,” Passages: The Maricopa County Community College Creative Writing Competition (2005 – 6). “Reflections on Darkness and Light,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 39.4 (2006). Used with permission of the poet.
Melissa Dalton-Bradford. “Early Harvest,” Segullah 4.3 (Fall/Winter 2008). “Sailing to Manti,” Segullah 3.2 (Summer 2007). “Pieta,” “Bottled Fruit,” and “House for Rent,” Irreantum 12.2 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
William DeFord. “St. Teresa of Avila as Middle Manager” and “A Story of Two Raindrops and a Wooden Frame,” Red Rock Review 15 (Spring 2004). Used with permission of the poet.
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky. “Legacy,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 37.3 – 4 (2001). “The Meadow” and “Descent,” Persephone Awakened (Parowan, UT: Woodhenge Press, 2003). Used with permission of the poet.
Sarah Duffy. “Oceanside,” Tar River Poetry 48.2 (Spring 2009). Used with permission of the poet.
Sarah Dunster. “Gaius,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 44.2 (2011). Used with permission of the poet.
Deja Earley. “I Teach Six-Year-Olds about Jesus in Sunday School,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40.3 (2007).“In the Hall While They Take Chest X-rays,” Diagram 10.4 (2010). “The Unfortunate Marriage,” Shampoo 32 (2008). Used with permission of the poet.
Simon Peter Eggertsen. “Felucca at Maadi,” Irreantum 12.1 (2010). “poetry on the ”fridge door,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40.1 (2007). “Lisa Gherardini Might Be Pregnant,” New Millennium Writings 20 (2010 – 11). “Twelve Questions in One Long Sentence,” Salt River Review 11.2 (2008). “Things Missed,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43.3 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Kristen Eliason. “The User’s Guide to Onomatopoetic Elegies,” Juked (Jan. 2008). “abandonment for two,” The Bend 4 (2007). “Arms upon arms to an earth,” Diagram 9.1 (2009). Used with permission of the poet.
Lisa Ottesen Fillerup. “To Kent, My Brother,” Irreantum 3.2 (2001). “The Blue Jacket,” Irreantum 12.2 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Elizabeth Garcia. “Adjusting” and “God as Intern,” Irreantum 12.2 (2010).“In the Mountains of Gilead: Jephthah’s Daughter,” Segullah 5.1 (2009).“The Semantics of Blessings,” Segullah 4.2 (2008). Used with permission of the poet.
Sharlee Mullins Glenn. “Raison d’être,” Irreantum 3.1 (Spring 2001). “Ye Shall Be as the Gods,” Irreantum 7.3 (2005). “Somewhere,” Segullah 1.2 (Fall 2005). “Blood and Milk,” The Mother in Me :Real-World Reflections on Growing into Motherhood, ed. Kathryn Lynard Soper (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2008). Used with permission of the poet.
Aaron Guile. “Tonkas,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 39.3 (2006). Used with permission of the poet.
Laura Hamblin. “Celibacy at Forty-two (III),” “Red-tailed Outside Scipio,” and “To Baptize,” The Eyes of a Flounder (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2005). Used with permission of the poet.
Nicole Hardy. “Mud Flap Girl on Being Hard To Get” and “Mud Flap Girl on Birth and Venus,” Mud Flap Girl’s XX Guide to Facial Profiling (Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2006).“Living Alone,” “Made for TV,” and “Lost and Found,” This Blonde (Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2009). Used with permission of the poet and Main Street Rag.
Warren Hatch. “The Fine and Dying Art of Shaping Light into Words,” “Northern Cross,” and “The Voice of Water Here,” Mapping the Bones of the World (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2007). “Red Shift” and “Sparrows and Boys,” Irreantum 12.2 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Michael Hicks. “Faith Healing” and “Family Tree,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38.4 (2005).“Jesus’ Final Oration at The Last Supper,” Literature and Belief 26.1 (2006). “Museum of Ancient Life,” BYU Studies 43.2 (2004). “Deluge.” BYU Studies 41.2 (2002). Used with permission of the poet.
E.S. Jenkins. “Weary,” The Fob Bible (El Cerrito, CA: Peculiar Pages, 2009). Used with permission of the poet and Peculiar Pages.
LaVerna B. Johnson. “Tonight you Died,” Panorama 19.1 (May 2000). “Oleander Snow from yucca Flat,” Encore: Prize Poems of the NFSPS 2009, ed. Valerie Martin Bailey (San Antonio, TX: NFSPS, 2009).“Memorial Service,” Panorama 26.1 (May 2007). Used with permission of the poet.
Helen Walker Jones. “The Holding Room,” “Guest Room,” and “Sheep Ranch Near Hillspring,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 39.1 (2006). “The Accompanist,” Timber Creek Review 9.2 (2003). “Restaurant in Naples,” Timber Creek Review 8.3 (2002). Used with permission of the poet.
Patricia Karamesines. “The Pear Tree,” Victorian Violet Press Poetry Journal 3 (2010). “Glaucus,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41.3 (2008). “The Orchid Grower,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38.4 (2005). “The Peach,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38.3 (2005). Used with permission of the poet.
Karen Kelsay. “In Spite of Her,” In Spite of Her (Flutter Press, 2010). Used with permission of the poet and Flutter Press.
Lance Larsen. “Vineyard,” In All Their Animal Brilliance (Tampa, FL: The University of Tampa Press, 2005).“To the Lost One-third,” Backyard Alchemy (Tampa, FL: The University of Tampa Press, 2005). “Why Do you Keep Putting Animals in your Poems?” The Best American Poetry 2009, eds. David Wagoner and David Lehman (New York City: Scribner Poetry, 2009).“To the Ode,” Prairie Schooner 83.4 (2009). Portions of “Backyard Georgics” were published in Poetry (November 2010). Used with permission of the poet and The University of Tampa Press.
Timothy Liu. “The Model,” For Dust Thou Art (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). “Elegy for a Poet Whose Books I Didn’t Think Were Worth Re-Reading, Not Until Now,” AGNI Online (2010). “Sunnyside Road,” AGNI Online (2008). “Next Day,” Shampoo 4 (2001). Used with permission of the poet and Southern Illinois University Press.
P.D. Mallamo. “Salt Lake City Cemetery, Jewish Section,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41.4 (2008). “Oz Chronicle #3” and “Oz Chronicle #4,” Otoliths: A Magazine of Many E-Things 16 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Casualene Meyer. “Earth Writing,” BYU Studies 39.1 (2000). Used with permission of the poet.
Alan Rex Mitchell. “Road to Carthage Sonnet,” “Joseph’s Soliloquy,” and “Stephen Markham’s Complaint,” The Road to Carthage (Vernon, UT: Greenjacket Books, 2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Danny Nelson. “The Short Books” and “Jacob to Esau,” The Fob Bible (El Cerrito, CA: Peculiar Pages), 2009. Used with permission of the poet and Peculiar Pages.
David Nielsen. “Internship at a Large Firm,” Tar River Poetry 44.2 (2005). “My Daughter’s Favorite Bedtime Story” and “Working a Turkey Pen,” Willow Springs 57 (2006).“To Rosie, Not yet Three,” Garbanzo! 6 (2009).“After This Life,” The Cream City Review 28.2 (2004).
Marilyn Nielson. “Marie Curie, Dying,” Inscape (2002). “After Eden.” BYU Studies 41.2 (2002). “Sheep,” BYU Studies 44.2 (2005). Used with permission of the poet.
Jon Ogden. “Creationism: Five Theories,” Inscape (Fall 2006). “Prayer Cap,” Inscape (Winter 2006). “Benediction,” Folio (Spring 2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Sarah E. Page. “Coring the Apple,” Mormon Artist C1 (Nov. 2009). Used with permission of the poet.
Jim Papworth. “Postcard” and “Above Henry’s Lake: Mid-November,” Perspective 3.1 (2003). “Above the Aspen,” Perspective 6.2 (2006). “Welder: Falling,” Irreantum 12.1 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
David Passey. “City Dog,” BYU Studies 49.4 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Steven L. Peck. “Sage,” Red Rock Review 22 (Spring 2008).“Winter Gifts,” Victorian Violet Press Poetry Journal 5 (2010). “The Slaying of the Trickster God,” Wilderness Interface Zone (17 Nov. 2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Jonathon Penny. “The Soil’s the Earth’s Best Mother,” Wilderness Interface Zone (11 Jan. 2011).“Thorns and Thistles and Briars,” Wilderness Interface Zone (28 Mar. 2011). Used with permission of the poet.
Elizabeth Pinborough. “A Sister Shaker’s Hymnal,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 42.2 (2009). Used with permission of the poet.
Joe Plicka. “True Love,” Inscape (Winter 2006). “Hymn to a thing that I knew and still know to some degree,” Anti-poetry 4 (2009). Used with permission of the poet.
Elisa Pulido. “Dog Walking at Night in a New Neighborhood,” Zocalo Public Square (19 April 2010). “On the Mormon Trail, June 1848,” Tor House Newsletter (Winter 2008). “Herman and Laurie in Retrospect,” The New Guard 1 (2011). “Revelation,” National Writers Union, Chapter 7 (2006). Used with permission of the poet.
Jim Richards. “Cleave,” Literature and Belief 23.1 (2003). “A Few Questions— Involving Pears—for My Newborn Son,” BYU Studies 39.1 (2000). “To a Pear” and “Some,” Meridian Magazine Online (2003). “Blind Man to the Healer,” Perspective 5.2 (2005). Used with permission of the poet.
John W. Schouten. “Runaway” and “Dead Horse Point,” Consumption Markets and Culture 12.4 (2009). “I Dream of Lima,” Consumption Markets and Culture 10.4 (2007). “The Dogs of Juxtlahuaca” and “The Spider Woman of Teotitlán,” Consumption Markets and Culture 6.2 (2003). Used with permission of the poet.
N. Colwell Snell. “Vienna 1965,” Weber Studies 23.3 (2007). “Wild Asparagus,” California Quarterly 26.4 (2000) and Oasis Journal (2004). “Withdrawal,” Encore: Prize Poems of the NFSPS 2001, ed. Budd Powell (Dallas, TX: Great Impressions, 2001). “Run Sheep Run,” Finalist, 2005 Faulkner-Wisdom Poetry Competition. Used with permission of the poet.
Laura Stott. “The Fall,” Weber Studies 22.1 (2004). “Blue City of Rajasthan” and “Across the Mojave Desert,” Literature and Belief 31.1 (2011). “Ganpati Guest House,” ReDactions 12 (2009). “The Girl with No Hands,” Eclipse 21 (2010). Used with permission of the poet.
Sally Stratford. “Inheritance” and “The Right Place,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36.3 (2003). “Mukuntaweep” and “Distance,” Tar River Poetry 40.1 (2000). “The Empty Cistern,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36.1 (2003). Used with permission of the poet.
Paul Swenson. “Passion Play” and “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Iced at the Ward, Burned at the Stake (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2003). Used with permission of the poet.
John Talbot. “Middlesex Eclogues: March,” Atlanta Review 13.1 (2006), as “III (from Middlesex Calendar).” “Nightjar,” The Yale Review (Forthcoming). “After the Latin,” The New Criterion. “An Expulsion Eclogue,” Literary Imagination 12.1 (2010), as “Eclogue I: Virgil.” Used with permission of the poet.
Doug Talley. “Finding Place,” Irreantum 11.1 – 2 (2009). “Call to Repentance,” Ancient Paths 14 (2007). “Parable for the Pulse of the Wrist,” Meridian Magazine Online (January 2005). “Confession of the Sometime Lost,” Literature and Belief 23.2 (2003), as “Confession.” “Devotion to the Inexplicable,” Bellowing Ark 25.5 (2009). Used with permission of the poet.
Javen Tanner. “Eden,” “Two for Samuel Beckett,” “Snow,” and “Sudden Music,” Curses For Your Sake (New York City: Mormon Artists Group, 2006). Used with permission of the poet.
Arwen Taylor. “Capitulation: Forbidden Squirming” and “Lingua Doctrinae,” The Fob Bible (El Cerrito, CA: Peculiar Pages, 2009). Used with permission of the poet and Peculiar Pages.
Holly Welker. “Dig,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 34.3 – 4 (2001). “Last Night’s Fire,” Image: Art, Faith, Mystery 64 (2009 – 10). “The Anvil of Desire,” Literature and Belief 26.1 (2006). “Vertigo First Thing in the Morning,” The Cream City Review 28.2 (2004). “Self-Portrait as Burnt Offering,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 42.4 (2009). Used with permission of the poet.
Philip White. “A Moment Ago,” Slate (31 Oct. 2006). “All That Time,” Ploughshares 36.4 (2010 – 11). “The River,” The Cincinnati Review 5.1 (2008). Used with permission of the poet.
Laraine Wilkins. “Breaking Bread above the Waters,” “Make yourself at Home,” and “How Long,” Weber Studies 17.3 (2000). “Soul Retrieval,” Irreantum 8.1 (2006). Used with permission of Lena Schoemaker, the poet’s daughter.
Sunni Brown Wilkinson. “Acrobats,” Weber: The Contemporary West 25.2 (2009). “Some News about the Soul,” Exponent II 27.3 (2005). “Wake,” Weber Studies 22.3 (2006). “Some Kind of Beginning,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 42.2 (2009). Used with permission of the poet.
Darlene Young. “Patriarchal Blessing,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40.4 (2007). “Postpartum” and “How Long?” Irreantum 9.2 (2007). “Angels of Mercy,” Segullah 3.1 (Spring 2007). “Washing Mother,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 39.3 (2006). Used with permission of the poet.
The following list includes names of people associated with Mormonism who have published poems in various places since 2000. It is by no means a comprehensive list; but, when taken with the names of the poets published in Fire in the Pasture, it represents an expansive index of published Mormon poets.
A
Absher, J.S.
Adams, Linda Paulson
Anderson, Dorothy S.
Anderson, Leah
Anderson, Paris
Anderson, Sharon Price
Anderson, Susan Noyes
Astle, Randy
B
Baldwin, Cindy
Barthel, Mildred
Beaman, Helen Keith
Bell, Shayne
Bentley, Elizabeth Petty
Berbert, Anne Elizabeth
Bergevin, Heather L.
Birch, Mark
Bowen, Leah
Bowkett, Norma S.
Bradford, Mary Lythgoe
Brady, Jane D.
Brannigan, Erin
Brimley, Dawn
Baker Brown, Marilyn
Burnett, Kimberly
Burton, John
C
Call, Jolayne
Cannon, Ann Edwards
Cannon, Melonie
Card, Orson Scott
Carlstrom, Cheryl
Carter, Noelle
Chapman, Liz
Chidester, Leon
Christmas, R. A.
Clark, Bessie Soderberg
Clark, Dennis Marden
Clark, Harlow Soderberg
Clark, Maureen
Clement, Kathryn
Clement, Krista
Colby, Sarah Thompson
Cook, Helen Mar
Corcoran, Brent
Cornett, Johnna
D
Davis, Joyce Ellen
de Rubilar, Lisa M.
Dillard, Davey Morrison
Dominguez, Nicole Hall
E
Eddington, Cassie
Edwards, Darren M.
England, Eugene
Evans, Kathy
F
Farias, Joann
Freeman, Max
Frost, David
G
Garfield, Lisa Meadows
Grabowski, Rita
Gregory, Ellen Kartchner
Gunnell, Elisabeth S.
H
Hadden, Rose E.
Hall, Stanton Harris
Hallstrom, Angela
Haltiner, Maurine
Hancock, Joanna
Hancock, Kim
Handley, George B.
Hastings, Samantha
Hatch, Beth
Haubrock, Ken
Hawkins, Lisa Bolin
Hemmert, Matthew Wynn
Herrick, Heather
Hodges, Sapphire
Horne, Lewis
Howe, Allie
Howlick, Gail
Hunt, Emma
Hunter, Donnell
Hunter, Rodello
I
Isom, David K.
J
Jeffries, Linda
Jenkins, Don W.
Jensen, Amy E.
Johnson, Kimberly
Johnson, Robert
Jolley, Clifton Holt
Jorgensen, Bruce W.
Judd, Michael
Justham, Janean
K
Kearl, Candace
Kennington, Justin L.
Kimball, Linda Hoffman
Knowlton, David Clark
L
Lavers, Michael
Lewis, Rynell
Livingston, Scott
Lorimer, Jessica
Lund, Christopher
Lundquist, Suzanne
Lyman, Eric Paul
M
Madden, Patrick
Markham, Tony A.
Mauss, Armand
McKinnon, Ellie
McKnight, Karen
Melville, Candace
Miles, Henry L.
Milner, Emily
Moore, Jennifer
Moorehead, Russell
Morris, Dan
Moyer, Anna
Munger, MaryJan
N
Naylor, Jamie
Nelson, Julie
Newey, Melody
Niedermeyer, Lara
O
Ottesen, Carol Clark
P
Parker, Katie
Parker, Michael
Partridge, Dixie
Pearce, Jared
Pearson, Carol Lynn
Peel, Kevin
Petsco, Béla
Q
Quist, Carol
R
Raines, Ken
Rees, Robert A.
Richards, Reed
Richardson, Krista H.
Robbins, Leslie Lords
Robison, Lee
Robison, Nathan
Rubilar, Lisa
Russell, Robin
S
Schulzke, Cheri
Sexton, Paul W.
Sillitoe, Linda
Skouson, Sandra
Skurnick, Lizzie
Spackman, N. Andrew
Stacy, Andrea
Steed, J.P.
Stone, Ann Gardner
Summerhays, Emily
Swaner, Ruth Harris
T
Tanner, Anita
Terry, Tanya
Thayne, Emma Lou
Tice, Richard
Tracy, Kristen
Turley, Kylie
W
Wagner, Elaine Rumsey
Wagner, Johanna
Wahlquist, Jen
Warnick, Quinn
Warnock, Caleb
Watts, Craig
Weed, Annette
Weed, Joshua Stewart
White, Jared
Whitney, Lani B.
Wilcox, Ronald
Williams, Evertt
Williams, Valerie
Wilson, Cathy Gileadi
Wolfe, Elizabeth
Woodmansee, Emily
Y
Young, Lon
Young, Melissa
20 POEMS FROM Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets
Copyright © 2011 by Peculiar Pages
Preface copyright © 2011 Tyler Chadwick
Foreword copyright © 2011 Susan Elizabeth Howe
Afterword copyright © 2011 Ángel Chaparro Sáinz
All poems copyright © 2011 Individual contributors
Additional poem credits are listed in the Acknowledgments and Contributor Notes sections, which should be considered an extension of this copyright page. Every effort has been made to correctly attribute the materials reproduced herein.
Cover art: Curious Workmanship by Casey Jex Smith
Copyright © 2008 Casey Jex Smith
Initiated by Eric W Jepson
Book design by Scott Hatch
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Digitization by Elizabeth Beeton
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