Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2014). Find her at www.nancevanwinckel.com.
Poetry
Fall 2008
You Take It from Here
Thousand-year-old dead girl fished from the bog. Sickly queens in ornate throne rooms.—We want the next story before the this-one's done. Lupine and arias flail for attention outside an open […]
Poetry
Fall 2008
My Weight in Ants
2,700,500,000. And I had my shoes on. Was full from a big lunch. Was watching the ants on their side of the glass: building bridges, covert passages, carting off the […]
Poetry
Winter 2007
I Leaned over the Railing
and was quite awake. A fierce-minded down-below. Even the tilted jonquils—some you'd plucked for me in a by-gone OK year— were set in this same light dimmed by fledgling shadows […]
Poetry
Summer 2004
Simone Weil at the Renault Factory (1935)
A thread in a line of threads, she stands at the far end of herself. Eyelets and inlets, divots for ingots. Migraines are the grain of the day. In the […]
Poetry
Winter 2004
Let Me Remind You You Are Still under Oath
Out of marsh out of the bronchial tree limbs out of low clouds we grow up to be President, we emerge as nurses or green grocers or red lips waiting […]
Poetry
Spring 2000
These Days
In the mausoleum lies the corpse of a man who rode in a black limo, burgundy velvet over the windows, who drank grape brandy and griped about his liver, griped […]
Poetry
Spring 2000
Celsius
Gold tassels shaking, the captain ordered an old man to go check the prayer books on the stoop. Like steaks on a grill. Psalms in the sun. Tired of the […]
Summer 2012
Loyal Order Of
Butte, MT 1927
The sky’s traffic is cumulus, but not too.
Our elk’s an arch across Main. Eighty feet high
and just as wide. Beneath its copper-gilded withers
pass boys with tubas, teen twirlers, wreathed
ponies, and the miners’ widows—in turn
and on time. Elk of extended thanks.
Spring 2009
Head Case
Large, loud birds. Hot salty breezes. I kept drifting off, dreaming of snow. I felt I wasn’t where I should be, but I didn’t know where “should-be” was. Except, as […]