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Published: Tue Apr 15 2003
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
For Trakl

Plocks of rain smite the sidewalk.
Evening tightens its hood, lowers its eyes.
The girl enters, shakes a shower
from heavy hair, turns, and passes

into an inner room. In the park, the pond shivers,
reflecting night into night. The path leads downhill.
Ilexes cringe where brother and sister met under the mass of leaves.
Toads hop out around the fountain pool,

the satyr’s blind marble eyes gleam.
A small body has been misplaced among the leaves, in sand.
Smoke taints the air, smoke and damp ash and the memory of fire
where someone burned an ex-voto of a burned and blistering hand.

See what's inside AGNI 57

Rosanna Warren is a member of AGNI’s Advisory Board. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections: So forth (2020), Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), Departure (2003), Stained Glass (1993), and Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984), all from W. W. Norton & Co, and one chapbook of poems (Snow Day, Palaemon Press, 1981). Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters (2020) and Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (2008), a book of literary criticism, have also appeared from Norton. She edited and contributed to The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern University Press, 1989), and has edited three chapbooks of poetry by prisoners. With Stephen Scully, she translated Euripides’ Suppliant Women for Oxford University Press (1995).  She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Fund, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.  Stained Glass won the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has also won the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lavan Younger Poets’ Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Award of Merit in Poetry from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize from Suffolk University. She was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2004–2005 she was president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. In 2009 she was appointed Secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. (updated 10/2023)

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