Taking its title from an Audubon painting, American Flamingo shares with the artist an exquisite attention to detail and the suggestion of a larger sense of time and place through depictions of the intimate interactions between creatures and their habitats. In his fifth collection of poetry, Greg Pape melds memorable images from the natural world with the drama of ordinary experience to capture small transformations of human character in American settings from Arizona’s Sonora Desert to the icy streets of Washington, D.C. Through elegies, character sketches, and lyric and narrative evocations of family and place, Pape offers lucid and startling poems that bridge the spaces between the past and the present, men and women, and urban and rural landscapes.

Greg Pape’s books include Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern, and Sunflower Facing the Sun. His poems have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, Colorado Review, Missouri Review, and numerous other publications. The recipient of the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award, he teaches in the writing program at the University of Montana and in the brief-residency program at Spalding University. He lives with his family in the Bitterroot Valley.