BIO
Jennifer Reeser is the author of six collections of poetry. Her first was the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize. X.J. Kennedy wrote that her debut ‘ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer.’ Her third, ‘Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems’ was a finalist for the Donald Justice Prize. Her fourth, ‘The Lalaurie Horror,’ debuted as an Amazon bestseller in the category of Epic Poetry.
Her poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in *POETRY, Rattle, The Hudson Review, Recours au Poeme, LIGHT Quarterly, The Formalist, The Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse* and elsewhere. Her poetry has been anthologized in Random House, London’s *Everyman’s Library* Series, in Longman’s *Introduction to Poetry*, in *The Hudson Review’s* historic, *Poets Translate Poets*, and in others.
She was born in Louisiana, a bi-racial writer of Anglo-Celtic and Native American Indian ancestry. She studied English at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and also in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her former home.
She is the former assistant editor of *Iambs & Trochees*, as well as a former moderator, manuscript consultant, and mentor with the West Chester Poetry Conference.
Her translations of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova are approved by Akhmatova’s living heir, and authorized by her agents in Moscow. She received her first writing award from the Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert Olen Butler, while in high school. She has received the Poets Respond Prize from *Rattle*, the Innovative Form Award from The World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, as well as The Lyric Memorial Prize and the New England Prize. Her work has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize, and numerous times for the Best of the Net anthology. Her work has been set to music by the classical/art song composer, Lori Laitman, for her tribute to writer Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her poems have been translated into Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and Czech. Her website is www.jenniferreeser.com
Fourth Terrace
(Cahokia Indian Mounds, Illinois)
As I approached the fourth and final terrace
Atop Monks Mound, with skeptic and devout
Alike, a stirring current shot throughout
My limbs.
No one beside me to embarrass
With tears, I stood there – merited, fair heiress
To all its heritage, beyond a doubt,
Whose half-bred father slept there as a scout.
I scanned the land below, and thought about
The energy which, through one thousand years
Of native adoration, is amassed.
At once, the clear, inevitable tears
Appeared, to drop upon the lushly-grassed
Pavilion, like a sudden flood appears,
Whose storm that shrine to Nature shall outlast.
The Words the Birdman Spoke
Through fog and vapor lasting eighty miles,
his spirit journey leads him in the night;
through clouded canyons, momentary, white,
and gossamer in flow as wedding aisles.
The hazes take the shapes of crocodiles,
and elk whose paths he’ll cross at morning light;
the cautionary omens of snakebite.
Yet he emerges safely from these trials,
as one who conquers cowardice by jest,
becomes triumphant through a seeming joke;
as one who — through a farce — defeats unrest,
draws power from the mirth he may evoke;
as one whose fugue above the falcon’s nest
depended on the words the Birdman spoke.
Down Tsali Boulevard
(Cherokee Indian Reservation, North Carolina)
Down Tsali Boulevard we tread,
Trying to see what lies ahead
Beyond the rising, roadside signs
Whose letters speak in greens and wines,
To lead where grassy lanes once led.
As we begin our ramble, Red
Paint stands in feathered, heavy thread,
And trails his tribal, bright designs
Down Tsali Boulevard.
There, Wildcat says today, fry bread
Is on some menu – so, unfed,
we pass the gamblers’ false gold mines,
dilapidated shop homestead,
arriving where the native dines
Down Tsali Boulevard.
*****
