This Sharpening

Poetry. Vivid, propulsive, and compelling, Ellen Doré Watson's THIS SHARPENING maps with unflinching attention the unraveling of a marriage and the persistence of longing, the pain of loss and the persistence of pleasure in motherhood, and the stuff of everyday life--whether indulging fantasies of revenge, reveling in a child's kisses, or deconstructing a first date in 25 years. "Ellen Watson is an eloquent, passionate poet; tender, wildly inventive, with the wonder of childhood and a grown woman's comic sense. Watson's poetry is the real thing"--Robert Pinsky. "I am stupid with awe of Ellen Doré Watson. Reading her work does that to you, makes you a little drunk on the world, a little tipsy and stumble-tongued"--Claiborne Smith.

Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, Ellen Doré Watson is the author of DOGGED HEARTS (Tupelo Press, 2010), THIS SHARPENING (Tupelo Press, 2006), LADDER MUSIC (Alice James Books, 2001), and WE LIVE IN BODIES (Alice James Books, 1997), as well as Broken Railings (Green Lake Chapbook Prize, Owl Creek Press, 1996). She is also the translator of twelve books from Brazilian Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), and serves as Poetry Editor of The Massachusetts Review. Watson's poems have appeared widely in journals, including The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. Among her awards and honors are the Bullis-Kizer Prize from Poetry Northwest, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and a 1990 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant. Library Journal named her one of "24 Poets for the 21st Century."