Poetry in America

Acknowledgments

79 acKnoWledGMenTS I would like to thank the editors of the following publications, in which some of these poems first appeared: Alaska Quarterly Review (“Gravity Hill” and “Oral Tradition”); Avatar Review (“Batboy, Break a Leg,” “Double the Digits,” “Gravity Hill,” “Letter to Dad from New Danville, PA,” “Oral Tradition”); Books and Culture (“The Materiality of Language at Lincoln”); Broadside (“Veterans Day, Greene County, PA, 2004”); Christianity and Literature (“Feast of the Epiphany”); Central PA (“Nights Like This”); Centre Daily Times (“Swallows over Bellefonte ”); Conrad Grebel Review (“’78 Chevy”); Common Review (“The Day,” “English 213: Introduction to Poetry Writing,” and “On an Oregon Mountain I Remember the Hebrew Mystics”); Dragonfire (“Garlic”); English Journal (“Mrs. Bailey Turns Up at a Poetry Reading at Hemingway’s Café in Pittsburgh”); Evansville Review (“Landscape with Desire”); Handprint Identity Project (“Summer of the 17-Year Cicada”); Image (“Across from Jay’s Book Stall in Pittsburgh,” “The Girl in the Backseat Returns to Pittsburgh ,” “Hens and Chicks,” “Sometimes It’s Easy to Know What I Want,” “Westmoreland,” and “Years from Now When You Are Weary”); Journal of the Motherhood Initiative (“Cardio-kickboxing in a Town of 6,000,” “Elegy Against ——, Ten Years Later” and “Gerard Manley Hopkins on the 6 Train”); Journal (“After Birth, a Conversation with Myself,” “This Side of Paradise,” under the title “By Paradise”); Mennonite (“The Baby Screaming in the Backseat”); Mystic River Review (“Gettysburg, 1996,” “Tissue Balloon”); Paris Review (“Double the Digits”); Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage (“Rachel on the Threshing Floor”); Pleiades (“Poetry in America”); Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (“Veterans Day, Greene County, PA, 2004”); Rhubarb Magazine (“Hen,” “Return to Bern”); Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review (“Batboy, Break a Leg”); Smartish Pace (“Wild”); Women’s Review of Books (“Mother with Toddler in War Time”); Witness (“Letter to Dad from New Danville, PA”). “The Beauty Line,” under the title “On Beauty,” first appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly 108:1, pp. 115–17. Copyright 2009, Duke University Press. “The Girl in the Back Seat Returns to Pittsburgh” appeared in Pushcart Prize XXVIII, edited by Bill Henderson, et al. “Nights Like This” appeared in Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple. 80 “The Baby Screaming in the Backseat” appeared in Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers, edited by Peggy Rosenthal, and on the web site Poets Against War. “Poetry in America” appeared in A Capella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry , edited by Ann Hostetler. “Batboy, Break a Leg” appeared in Strongly Spent: 50 Years of Shenandoah , edited by R. T. Smith; and on the web site Poetry and Verse Daily. “Rachel on the Threshing Floor” was written for Quietly Landed, a collaborative musical performance piece composed of narratives about women from Anabaptist traditions created by Carol Ann Weaver, Carol Penner, and Cheryl Nafziger-Leis, which premiered at the “Quiet in the Land?” conference at Millersville University in 1995. “Summer of the 17-Year Cicada” was written in conversation with David Reif as part of the Handprint Identity Project, a traveling exhibition of art and poetry, directed by Milt Friedly, Leslie McGrath and E. Ethelbert Miller and sponsored by Elizabethtown College in 2008. I thank the institutions that provided me with support and employment during the years when these poems were written and revised: The National Endowment for the Arts, The Institute for Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, the Fetzer Institute, Messiah College, The Pennsylvania State University’s College of Liberal Arts, and especially Penn State English Department Heads Robert Caserio and Robin Schultze. I spent a productive semester as a visiting poet at the University of Pittsburgh, and I thank Lynn Emanuel for that; Jan Beatty, Sharon Dolin, and Nancy Krygowski were wonderful readers of my work there. Mary Lou Weaver Houser at Herrbrook Farm and Nancy Linton at the Oregon Extension provided gorgeous spaces and time to write when I sorely needed it. Ed Ochester’s encouragement and refusals made the book grow. I also thank C. S. Giscombe, Shara McCallum, Philip Ruth, and Peter Oresick for their attention and suggestions that improved the collection; Jeff Gundy read many of these poems in early draft and finished forms. Kimberly Q. Andrews made one last, brilliant pass at the final manuscript. Mary Vollero, Jane Juffer, and Nancy Locke—good cooks, beloved babysitters, and wise advisors—offered essential help and friendship as I completed the project. Finally, I thank Nicole Cooley, sister writer, comrade mother. ...