Whether they're graveside tourists in Rome or lovelorn girls on a bus, the characters in Dawn Potter's ravishing second collection of poetry, "betray a fatal longing" for love's complications. By turns comic and melancholy, hungry and euphoric, these poems surrender again and again to the passions and panics of experience.
Dawn Potter is associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, held each summer at Robert Frost's home in Franconia, New Hampshire. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2004) and How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010).
Dawn's latest book is a memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). It tells the tale of her strange project of copying out all of Milton's Paradise Lost word for word while living in the Maine woods. Biographer Charlotte Gordon calls it "my new favorite book," and says, "Why don't more people know about this book?" Other people, however, have said, "That's crazy."
Dawn lives in the small town of Harmony, Maine, which has a lovely name but is not near anything in particular. Here, with her husband, photographer Thomas Birtwistle, she reads, writes, and raises lettuce, chickens, and boys.
