Linda Gregerson’s most recent book, Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2015. She is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan.
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2022
Bearded Iris
1 A sort of synesthetic pun: the purples smell like grapes when grapes still had a smell, and remnants of fertility, which we in an excess of ever-more-ease have banished […]
Sept/Oct 2021
A Knitted Femur
First evidence that one who ought to have died first, of hunger of thirst in the jaws of something hungrier, lived long enough to heal. Not pottery not crafted tool but simply […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2021
Uncorrected Vision
As in the floating interim before the last sweet wash of anesthesia . . . as in childhood when it’s not your fault . . . as when the one […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2020
Environmental
I had the right of way — on foot — and therefore by definition was able to pause without braking, resume without a burst of petrochemicals, besides the day was mild and all […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2020
Saint Sorry
1 Because she had no money and because they called it a charity shop, the woman whose ten- week-old baby had finally died though of what and why it couldn’t […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2020
Love Poem
Once, my very best darling, the sea and the land were all one mass and the light was confused and hadn’t found a place to rest. And Emma, love, my […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
Heliotrope
I was his favorite, simply that. And you can see for yourself why it might have been so: the lushest, least likely to weary the eyes of all the serried […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
The Dolphins
You think these powers began with you? We were men before this happened. We could run and stand. We couldn’t drink the water but we built the ships that made […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
The Wrath of Juno
It’s the children nail your heart to the planet, so that’s how you nail them back. Alcmena in labor for seven days. Think of the man who thought up the […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
The Wrath of Juno
A wandering husband peopling the earth with my humiliations which the narrative requires. At least I shall never be out of work. I’m not immune to loveliness myself, in fact, […]
Nonfiction
Spring 2012
Handedness
A warhorse of a revival at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Terence Rattigan, a Royal Air Force base in Lincolnshire, nighttime bombing raids over Nazi Germany. Mark Dexter playing a Polish […]
Poetry
Winter 2009
Dido Refuses to Speak
For Susan Boti 1. The forestays, the sternsheet, the benches, the yard, the wooden pins to which the oars arebound with strips of leather, he explained this, tholeand loom, I thought the words were […]
Poetry
Spring 2007
Prodigal
Copper and ginger, the plentiful mass of it bound, half loosed, and bound again in lavish disregard as though such heaping up were a thing indifferent, surfeit from the table […]
Poetry
Spring 2007
Over Easy
Cloud cover like a lid on. Thwarted trees. And three more hours of highway to be rid of. My darlings don't want a book on tape. They want a little […]
Poetry
Summer 2006
The Burning of Madrid as Seen from the Terrace of My House
(Juan Muñoz, sculptor, 1953-2001) Sometime later or maybe just before, I mentioned I’d been reading on the busthat very morning while returning from the Nymphenberg… though now that I consider […]
Poetry
Summer 2006
Bicameral
1. Choose any angle you like, she said,the world is split in two. On one side, health and dumb good luck (or money, which can passfor both), and elsewhere… well, […]
Nonfiction
Spring 2006
Rhetorical Contract in the Lyric Poem
Dryden once wittily described Donne’s love poetry as calculated to “perplex the minds of the fair sex.” Part of the pleasure of the witticism, of course, lies in its cutting […]
Poetry
Winter 2001
Cord
O.T.G. 1912-1994 Dearest, we filled up the woodroom this week, Karen and Steven and I and Peter's truck. You would have […]
Poetry
Winter 2001
Cranes on the Seashore
For Thomas Lynch 1. Today, Tom, I followed the tractor ruts north along the edge of Damien's pasture. I missed all the dung […]
Nonfiction
Winter 2001
The Sower Against Gardens
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,Still in a tree did end their race.—Andrew Marvell Louise Glück is one of those enviable poets whose powers and distinction emerged early and were […]
Poetry
Summer 1996
With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath
In payment for those mornings at the mirror while, at her expense, I'd started my late learning in Applied French Braids, for all the mornings afterward of Hush and […]
Poetry
Summer 1996
Luke 17:32
1. Remember, he said, Lot's wife, which is as much as to say, Look back, and at your peril, on the rigors of the backward look. Two men in […]
Weekend Reads
Luke 17:32
From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Summer-Autumn 1996, Vol. XIX, No. 3/4 1. Remember, he said, Lot’s wife, which is as much as to say, Look back, and at your […]
Linda Gregerson
A Conversation With Linda Gregerson by KR poetry editor David Baker Linda Gregerson is one of the most original and vibrant of contemporary American poets. Born in 1950 and raised […]