Always This Falling - Tapa blanda

Carolyn Locke was born and grew up in Hudson, New Hampshire. She graduated from Bates College in 1971 and from the Goddard College Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing in 1996, and has had poems published in The Cafe Review, Puckerbrush Review, and Off the Coast, among others. Her poems were cited in the 2000 and 2002 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance competitions. A teacher of English and humanities at the secondary level, she has lived in Troy, Maine since 1974.

In the spirit of Mary Oliver, Always This Falling takes the landscapes of the familiar gardens, jazz, baking, aging parents, New England winters and transforms them for us. Locke reminds us again and again of the ineffable relationships between family and place through some insight into one of the book s central concerns: You will know these women as yourself. And yet, she is never satisfied with simple disclosures, admitting I must not let you know how I would wake this hibernating body. And finally, these poems lead us to the foreign intoxicating banks of the Seine to lose it all in that brief moment in the black void and feel the quiver of stars. --Kathleen Ellis, author of Vanishing Act and Entering Earthquake Country

Carolyn Locke's poems are crystal clear, and while they forage a kind of territory that has something to do with nature and silence and the human being in all of this, she is also a poet of rare intelligence when it comes to writing about relationships. Her poems make me serene. They are as clear as water and as sturdy as pre-war apartment buildings on Riverside Drive. --Michael Klein, author of 1990, Track Conditions, and The End of Being Known

In Always This Falling, Carolyn Locke trains her clear gaze at the earth and the body: muscle and flesh, flower and root. Her questing spirit interrogates everything, unearthing the rich life beneath what we can see and taste. She celebrates our seasons of abundance and loss what we risk and what we reap. Above all, these lucid, truthful poems shine with love. --Joan Larkin, author of My Body: New and Selected Poems, Cold River, A Long Sound, and Housework