Pray Me Stay Eager (Paperback)

"These are wonderful, witty, wise poems in love with language and singing the music of the world with all its pleasures and piquancies, its oddities and tragedies. Ellen Doré Watson's vision is agile with quick shifts in direction and vivid juxtapositions. The poems in pray me stay eager contain multitudes!" —Ellen Bass

A dreamy voice turns dark and gritty as Ellen Doré Watson interrogates personal purpose in the face of looming mortality. Poems sway comfortably, fluidly through associative discourse, radiating and championing love and adoration, indulging in simple pleasures with high magnitude and deep resonance. These poems are musical and sing in a different register for Watson in her fifth collection.

Ellen Doré Watson is the author of four full-length collections of poems, most recently Dogged Hearts from Tupelo Press. Watson's journal appearances include APR, Tin House, Orion, Field, Ploughshares and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Watson serves as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review and core faculty at Drew University's Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Poetry and Translation. She is the director of the Poetry Center and the Poetry Concentration at Smith College.

Ellen Doré Watson is the author of four full-length collections of poems, most recently, Dogged Hearts from Tupelo Press. Earlier works include This Sharpening, also from Tupelo, and two from Alice James Books, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award. Watson’s journal appearances include APR, Tin House, Orion, Field, Ploughshares and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated nine volumes from Brazilian Portuguese, most recently The Mystical Rose, from the UK poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books. Watson serves as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review and core faculty at Drew University’s Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Poetry and Translation. She is the director of the Poetry Center and the Poetry Concentration at Smith College.