Deborah Flanagan’s prizewinning new chapbook is populated by a menagerie of historic personages — celebrities and scientists, political and artistic luminaries, including George Washington, Houdini, Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, Francis Bacon, Casanova, and Lord Byron’s daughter, the mathematician Ada Lovelace. Juggling voices as she romps among her personae, the poet revisits and revises our complicated connections to the past in ways orthodox history can’t possibly do: coding and decoding her stories while bursting out of the boxes into which we try to fit meaning.

Deborah Flanagan’s poems have appeared in publications including The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Pleiades, The Southern Review, and Drunken Boat, and AGNI recently nominated her for a Pushcart Prize. She served as Director of Development for the Academy of American Poets before establishing the Center for True Health. In addition to working with patients at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, she has appeared as a wellness expert on national television, in print, and online. Deborah lives with her husband in New York City.