In the Tempered Dark - Paperback

by Lisa Fay Coutley (Author)

Historically poets have explored no two themes more than love and grief because they are opposite sides of the same emotional coin that we will all experience in unique and often unexplainable ways. While other anthologies validate the necessity of the elegy, none examine the relationship between the body in grief and the body of the poem a poet crafts to recreate an individual, visceral experience of grief. By pairing contemporary poems with micro-essays, wherein each poet considers briefly the connection between their included poem(s) and their corresponding grief, In the Tempered Dark initiates a dialogue designed to engage teachers, students, readers, and writers. This collection doesn't instruct poets how to craft grief poems but illuminates the bond between bodies in grief and bodies of poems.

In the Tempered Dark brings together contemporary work and voices that demonstrate the range of grief which feels urgent to twenty-first century poets from diverse backgrounds, at different stages in their careers, confronting assorted losses through various styles and forms. Poems coupled with micro-essays offer intimate and inside insights appealing to novices and veterans of all genres. This book will allow readers to identify with poets and poems to grieve and to heal, and it will also consider the relationship between poet and poem. Such an examination of content and form will show how poets manipulate craft, giving voice to what can seem unsayable, transcending elegy.

Author Biography

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series), tether (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois University, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, 2024). She is also the editor of the grief anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2024). Her poetry has been awarded an NEA Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, chosen by Dana Levin, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose & poetry appears in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Barrelhouse, Brevity, Copper Nickel, North American Review, and Gulf Coast. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry & CNF in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.