Laura McCullough is the author of several books, including The Wild Night Dress (selected by Billy Collins in the Miller Williams Poetry Contest, University of Arkansas Press), Jersey Mercy (Black Lawrence Press), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (BLP), Panic (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books), and Speech Acts (BLP). She has edited two anthologies, A Sense of Regard: essays on poetry and race (Georgia University Press, 2015) and The Room and the World: essays on Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press, 2014). Her poems and prose have appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, Guernica, and many other journals and magazines.
The net that keeps the herons & hawks from a plunge attack froze in the late fall cold spell, early for New Jersey, unexpected worrying auger for the winter to come, & the weight of ice—two inches in spots— pulling it down to where your fish already huddle. First, I broke the surface repeatedly with a hammer not knowing until… Read more →