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fROM THE AUTHOR:
I have always taken to heart Sarah Orne Jewett’s writing advice to Willa Cather: “. . . you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.” Gathering work for a new collection of my own poems, I noticed how they clustered around the places where I had lived and worked for most of my professional career. I have had the good fortune of living the last fifty years of my life in Kansas, then Indiana, then Minnesota, then North Dakota, and then back to Minnesota, with brief detours in Nebraska and Winnipeg, Manitoba—most of the moves prompted by career changes in academia. For Aurora, I have gathered poems that were conceived, born, raised, and sent out into the world from these times and places. Looking at these poems from the arc of my writing life, I realize how much they are “image-driven.” I suspect this has something to do with the way in which I’ve grown to write over the years. The notebooks that I carry are mostly filled with words and phrases quickly jotted down for future reference. I also engage in an exercise I call “sensory inventory,” whereby I list words or phrases of the things I see, hear, smell, touch or taste. Later, when I return to my notebooks, some of those images find their way into poems. Seasonal names and references often appear in poems. Perhaps I unconsciously learned this from reading the haiku poets?
ISBN: 978-1-946163-74-5
Page Count: 96
Paperback
Publication Year: 2026
