Brenda Hillman has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, and EmPress; she is the author of eight full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005) and Practical Water (2009). With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003). Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College of California where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2022
[untitled tableau]
The soul sits beside its box of oranges. The century goes along, the tyranny, the dazzle, the executions of butterflies — life molecules make memory shapes, adorned broken or blunted . […]
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2022
Escape & Energy
The hills are burning; they have burned & will burn. Sheets of lightning over introduced grasses whose arc is low, trees leap across highways . . . , young men […]
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2022
::[untitled]::
i asked unknown dark energy that pulls the furry light between stars back to the start of time if everyone has to meet again killers who enter houses without knocking […]
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2022
Escape & Logic
i hear tonight the great horned owl, four gray notes superior to beauty. Come to the window, i say; (my love can’t hear & i can’t see; we trade senses […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2019
The American Burying Beetle
lives under only six states. With its faceted black & orange head, it resembles those outfits in the 1920s when the tombs at Karnak were explored. The bug belongs to […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2015
[& heard a humming, like the]
—& heard a humming, like the start of time … & when the wind agreed, the knobs of song molecules fit into the frog, a knowledge heard the humming, without […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2015
On a Day, in the World
We had a grief we didn’t understand while standing at the edge of some low scrub hills as if humans were extra or already gone—; what had been in us […]
Poetry
Fall 2013
Very Far Back in This Life
Rublev, the great painter of icons, is buried under one of his own churches; infinity stretches in all directions. Under the bricks, he hears the carriages move. Visitors from countries […]
Fall 2013
The Elements are Mixed in Childhood
Our mother was baptized on a kerosene box, our father was baptized in a creek, & we were baptized in a plaster pool while turquoise ripples played around our feet & desert air poofed up to make the long black robe a nylon buffalo.