Sally Keith is the author of four collections of poems, most recently River House. Her first, Design, was the winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Allen Grossman. In 2004, Dwelling Song was selected by Fanny Howe for the Contemporary Poetry Series, and The Fact of the Matter was published by Milkweed Editions in 2012. Individual poems have been widely published in journals including Kenyon Review, A Public Space, Colorado Review, and New American Writing. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and is currently a member of the MFA Faculty at George Mason University. She lives in Washington, D.C.
These are poems of absence, written in the wake of terrible loss. Addressing death, art, travel, and beauty—assembling a guide to survival in the face of the seemingly insurmountable—this collection finds, in mourning, what it means to survive.
This collection shows the self as a crucible of force—that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. From Robert Smithson’s colossal Spiral Jetty to a train hurdling along the west-reaching railroad, these poems reimagine things great and small.
