~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Sandra Meek, Featured Poet

Sandra Meek has published six books of poems, most recently Still (Persea Books, 2020), named a “New & Noteworthy Poetry Book” by The New York Times Book Review. Of Still, The New York Times writes: “Meek’s prescient poetry has long dwelled darkly on humanity’s environmental impact; in this book, her sixth, the tone has grown urgent, even apocalyptic.” 

Other titles include An Ecology of Elsewhere (Persea, 2016), Road Scatter (Persea, 2012), Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo 2008), Burn (2005), and Nomadic Foundations (2002), as well as an edited anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark 2007), awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. 

A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has three times been awarded Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry and twice the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry—she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991. Co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, poetry editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, she teaches at Berry College in northwest Georgia, where she is the Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing.

Visit her at sandrameek.com.  

Hoodoo Flock, n. (in O)

Grotto

of rock not

Gorgon-

got; low

loch

to loft, form’s

soft rock

frost-shorn,

monsoon-

torn, hoods

of horn

top. Noon-

shot gold,

tooth

to tooth; how

thorns

blossom: O

how blossom

thorns.

Coda: Flashback-Gloss, v. (in Oa)

Colorado, 1970. All crag

and tor, brow’s loft

blacktop tops off at as marmot

backroad, a plow-drawn slash

among snowbanks’

marshmallow foam a frost

born of May’s noon-

dark loop—thaw

to cold’s clot to

thaw—fondants. Road

both portal and soar, all

platoons, all larval broods

dormant and no

stray match. O gallop

of shadows, O annals

of ash, blow back

that world that was

and wasn’t, so all glow’s

moon: all spark,

astral.

Umlaut-Trauma, n. (in Au)

Says what abuts

mutts. Anschluss

at gun-clutch.

Rural guards

suburban,

suburban handcuffs

urban. A plural

that blurs, an add

that subtracts:

a brutal burst—

that scab,

mutual.

Hindsight, v. (in I)

Splicing

film strips, wisps chitin-crisp,

I gild this dim

in blinks, in wing-

flicks—clipping light in which

I visit wish

within wish: wind

brimming his ribs, wind swirling

his shining

shirt, silk scrim

milking diminishing light till I’m

skirting cliffs, driving

blind in drizzling

night. Swimming in miss, in might,

I limn drift

with flight; blink

within blink, in iris, I mint

finis, pitching spirit

in mist,

divining sign

in spin.