In this quiet, clear-eyed collection, Townsend meditates on loss—childhood bereavement, depression, divorce—to arrive at the realization that it is through loss that we come to possess some of life's most profound gifts.
About the Author
Alison Townsend is the author of two books of poetry, Persephone in America, which won the Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), and The Blue Dress (White Pine Press, 2003; second edition, 2008), which received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. She also has two limited edition chapbooks, And Still the Music (Flume Press prize winner, 2007), and What the Body Knows (Parallel Press, 2002). Her poetry and creative nonfiction appear widely, in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, Margie, Rattle, Arts & Letters, Fourth Genre and Southern Review.
She has won many awards, including a Pushcart Prize, publication in Best American Poetry, airing on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac and literary fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Virginia Center for the Arts, among others. She teaches English, creative writing and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. A walker, hiker, and gardener, she lives with her husband on four acres of prairie and oak savanna in the farm country outside Madison. She is currently working on two projects, This is the Scent of Always, a memoir in the form of interrelated personal essays, and Mapping Home Ground, a collection of lyric essays meditating on place and the role that the natural world plays in our lives, our memories, and our imaginations.