Inspired by nineteenth-century engravings for the Webster’s Dictionary, Engraved explores a fantastic land at the edge of obsolescence and loss. The poems teem with whaling schooners, passenger pigeons, a bayonet, cupola furnace, clavichord—words and objects at the brink of extinction, placed in and around the death of the poet’s father. But these poems also create, or recreate; through illustration, music, and myth, the imagination here allows the dead to reappear, mostly, and sometimes also lets them go. Located at the intersection of art and grief, these poems honor anyone who has set down lines and vanished from the earth.

Anna George Meek has published in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Seneca Review, The Missouri Review (where she was awarded the Tom McAfee Discovery Prize), Water~Stone, Crazyhorse, and dozens of other national journals. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, two Minnesota State Arts Board fellowships, and an Academy of American Poetry Prize. She has also been a finalist for the National Poetry Series (three times), the Minnesota Book Award, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her first book, Acts of Contortion, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry; her chapbook Engraved won the 2011 Snowbound Chapbook Competition from Tupelo Press. Meek lives with her husband and daughter in Minneapolis, where she sings professionally with the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers and is a professor of English.