Since Carol Potter’s Alice James books, Before We Were Born, (1990) and Upside Down in the Dark, 1995, Potter has published three more volumes of poetry: Short History of Pets, winner of the Cleveland State Poetry Center Award in 1998 as well as the Balcones Prize; Otherwise Obedient, Red Hen Press, 2008, a finalist for the Lambda Prize in LBGBT poetry ; and finally, Some Slow Bees, 2014, winner of the FIELD poetry prize from Oberlin College Press. Other publications include poems in Poetry, New England Review, Los Angeles Review, Agni, The Massachusetts Review; Poetry Daily, FIELD, The Journal, The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner and several anthologies including most recently, the Best of the Los Angeles Review, and Roads Taken: Vermont Poetry Anthology. Potter won a Pushcart prize in 2001, and was granted residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Funcacion Valparaiso (Mojacar, Spain), Villa Montalvo, and Centrum. Other awards include the 2015 Ekphrasis Poetry Award, the 2015 Northampton, MA Biennial Poetry Contest, and a Writer in Residence month at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio 2002. Potter is on the faculty of the Antioch University low-residency MFA program, and teaches part-time at the Community College of Vermont as well as conducting private workshops and individual mentoring and book manuscript consulting. More info can be found at cwpotterverse.net

“Whether she tells of a lover’s body, childhood on a farm, a separation, or a trip to dentist, Carol Potter’s concern is human mystery. Giving equal weight to inner and outer landscapes, she evokes a woman’s memories, dreams, and sensual experience. The poems in this original first collection intimate, lyrical, quizzical, surreal. My favorite among them have the vulnerability and eroticism of skin.”
—Joan Larkin

“I admire the power of Carol Potter’s dry, dreamy, country voice, its joyful sexuality, its insights, its understated humor. This is an odd and shrewd and most valuable book.”
—Jean Valentine