Where We Think It Should Go

Poetry. "Poems should go to where we think, which means that they often end up in the loneliest, most impossible places. (California'll do, but there are others.) Once, when I was a little kid, I burned my hand with our car's cigarette lighter while my mom was busy paying for the gas she'd just pumped. I remember the meaty stench, the little crop circle in my palm, but mostly I remember wanting badly to know a thing, a thing that sped off as quickly as it came, maybe quicker. Claire Becker's poems seem both driven by that impulse and in love with that result. They've got a throb at which it's hard not to wonder and, like more than one of us, an aching oddball soul"—Graham Foust.

Claire Becker teaches high school students at the California School for the Blind and co-edits the online journal RealPoetik. She is the author of WHERE WE THINK IT SHOULD GO (Octopus Books, 2010) and the chapbooks Young Adult (Boxwood Editions, 2010), Get You (Duration Press, 2009), and Untoward (Lame House Press, 2007).