Day Unto Day

Founder of the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College until 2007, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.

Her awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as an Anisfield-Wolf Award, two Ohioana Awards, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes.

She has also published three collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry—

the author of six volumes of poetry,

waves of frozen foam

I’m trapped in a room my

friends accuse me I hide my sheets I cannot

tell them I’m dying and then awaking I’m

hurting (why these dreams?) my betraying self

then

morning grays again, aged

back, writing died . . . of age

trees with tints of red, t

each night I grow

young, my friends are well

again, my life is all

before me,

Into the other side

of town we ride in the back

seat, streets narrowed

by windowless concrete

walls, windshield covered

with thick paper, driver

speaking a language no one knows