Poem of the Week | September 17, 2013
Jennifer Atkinson: "Good Friday, 1989”
[This text is also available online as part of our TextBox anthology.]
This week we’ve dug up a poem by Jennifer Atkinson from our Fall 2007 30.3 issue. Atkinson is the author of four collections of poetry. “Good Friday, 1989” is from her third, Drift Ice (Etruscan Press). The fourth and most recent book, Canticle of the Night Path, which won Free Verse’s New Measure Prize, came out in the winter of 2012 / 2013. Individual poems have appeared in various journals including Field, Image, Witness, New American Writing, Terrain, Poecology, Cincinnati Review, and, of course, The Missouri Review. She teaches in the poetry MFA and BFA programs at George Mason University in Virginia.
Author’s note:
Nowadays when I read this poem, I often add to the end either a comment or an extra line about other oil spills—the Gulf spill and whatever one has occurred most recently and/or nearest to the place where I’m reading. The undergraduates and many graduate students weren’t even born yet when the Valdez hit Bligh Reef in Alaska.
Good Friday, 1989
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