Mary Szybist is the author of Incarnadine (Graywolf Press, 2013), winner of the 2013 National Book Award. She teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Mary Szybist Introduces Alicia Wright
In her essay “On Writing About Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journal,” Alicia Wright wonders: What if, yes, we can source a kind of ecocritical origin in The Grasmere Journal, distinct […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
I was wrestling with the lilac
reaching up to bend down its branches so I could clip them—the bush fartaller than me, still fragrant, leaveshalf-dead, never uglier, I washalf-inside it—*At the sound of himmaking the sound […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2020
During the Mammogram I Close My Eyes
And see a caravan . . . Onto the cool plastic, I lift my right breast. It was my mother’s right breast where her dying started. Don’t, I mutter to […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2020
We Think We Do Not Have Medieval Eyes
Many are working to scrape Chartres’ high windows of their scalelike soot. It’s hard to match, in this dimness, the pictures I’ve held in my mind with what they are […]
Poetry
Fall 2011
Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle
Are you sure this blue is the same as theblue over there? This wall’s like thebottom of a pool, itscolor I mean. I need adarker two-piece this summer, the kind […]
Poetry
Fall 2011
Annunciation as Right Whale with Kelp Gulls
The gulls have learned to feed on the whales. …The proportion of whales attacked annually has soared from 1% in 1974 to 78% today. —BBC News I tell you I […]
Poetry
Fall 2011
On a Spring Day in Baltimore, the Art Teacher Asks the Class to Draw Flowers
I. I can begin the picture: his neck is bent, his mouth too close to her ear as he leans in above her shoulder—to point to poppies shaded in apricot, […]
Poetry
Fall 2008
Yet Not Consumed
But give me the frost of your name in my mouth, give me spiny fruits and scaly husks— give me breath to say aloud to the breathless clouds your name, […]
Fall 2008
Yet Not Consumed
But give me the frost of your name in my mouth, give me spiny fruits and scaly husks — give me breath to say aloud to the breathless clouds your […]