Emily Van Kley grew up on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and received her MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Georgia Review, Mississippi Review, and Prairie Schooner, and in editions of Best American Poetry and Best New Poets. She currently lives in Olympia, Washington, where she teaches and performs aerial aerobics. (Author photo by Allison Eby)
"This book is hard hitting-hitting: it is, says, and knows well the hard-hit. If there's a poetry of power and music to be found amid powerlessness and silence, it's here."
—Brenda Shaughnessy
"With exquisite, insistent skill, reminiscent of her Lake Superior's gales shaping shore pines, snowdrifts, and lives, Emily Van Kley crafts stark and graceful phrases you don't see coming until they move over you with the inevitability and truth of winter's first, sudden flurry."
—Jonathan Johnson
Persea Books