In her third collection, Geri Doran continues to seek a quieter poem in a more natural form. Against the immediacy of troubled times, these poems retain a belief that long thought, solitude, restraint, and immersion in the world given to us (not made by us) are a means of passionate, even radical, devotion. And yet—what happens when a poet begins to doubt her singular reliance on poetry? When the only way to speak is in a language poised to evanesce? Modal, flexible, sonorous—the lines and tones of these meditative lyrics trace one route back.

Geri Doran is author of three books of poems, Epistle, Osprey (Tupelo Press, 2019), Sanderlings (Tupelo Press, 2011) and Resin (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), winner of the 2004 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been recognized with a Stegner Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, an Oregon Arts Commission fellowship, and residency fellowships from the James Merrill House, Maison Dora Maar, Lighthouse Works, Millay Colony and Vermont Studio Center. Individual poems have appeared in The Yale Review, New England Review, New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, Ninth Letter, Southwest Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Doran currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.