Poem of the Week | July 16, 2013

This week we’re featuring a wrecking ball of a poem by Aaron Baker from our hot-off-the-press spanking-new summer issue, 36.2. Baker’s first collection of poems, Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin 2008), won the Bakeless Prize in Poetry and the 2009 Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. He has been awarded fellowships by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and has published work in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, and Post Road.  He is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing program at Loyola University Chicago.

Author’s Note:

My first collection dealt fairly directly with my experiences as a child of missionaries, but my newer work—while it does revisit some of those earlier subjects and themes—has more to do with my thoughts, feelings, attitudes, etc.  about things beside my own childhood.  Many of the new poems in the book in progress (titled Posthumous Noon)  deal with my father’s death. These are elegies and so difficult to write for a number of reasons. One thing I’ve found myself doing, and I think that some of the poems this batch reflect that, is to write about my father by writing about the physical environments I mostly strongly associate with him—the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.