Meditative Poems That Ask, What If “We Change and Change / But Don’t Change Back?” 

Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father’s new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A familiar chair once owned by a now absent family appears in a field of wild parsnips. Meditative and richly imaginative, these poems cast and recast the self and its relation to other selves, and to memory, history, power, and the natural world. 

Corey Marks is the author of Renunciation, a National Poetry Series selection, and The Radio Tree, winner of the Green Rose Prize. He’s received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute for Letters, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review. A University Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of North Texas, he directs creative writing for the Department of English.