August is an insatiable month. Whether it is a dry spell, drought, or simply parched with want, or filled with thunderstorm, deluge, destruction of property or ideals, it is the place of scarcity or cloudburst, beginnings, or endings. The month of August is the focal point of what this author describes as insatiable. In these poems, she identifies the numerous places in our human experience where we face insatiability, where we are ravenous with desire for greatness, passionate for education, even if, like Vesalius, we get it wrong. We lust after partners we cannot have; yearn for true love; we are voracious for sex. We fall in love with language, buttons, umbrellas, light, and silence. We live in agony and rage at the death of a loved one, or even obsession with a child lost in the mountains whose body is never found. We are insatiable in religious belief, even when it drains us of our time, our creativity, even our own souls. Our appetites direct our lives even if we think we have a foundation of basic beliefs to keep us afloat. In these poems, what we know and what we think we know come down to a thin string of possibility.

Maureen Clark is a writer and poet living in Bountiful, Utah. She has recently retired from the University of Utah where she taught writing for twenty years. During that time, she spent four years as the director of the University Writing Center. She received her BFA at Westminster College in 1995 and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah in 2003. She was the president of Writers @ Work from 1999–2001. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Southeast Review, and Sugarhouse Review.