I’m hoping to make excellent poetry a regular feature here at the new Looking Closer. I can’t promise it will be a weekly event, but I’ll accept submissions and show them to a jury of poets I know and trust. Those that get a “thumbs up” from them will be lined up for publication here.
And I am thrilled to begin with a poem by Abigail Carroll. I heard her read this poem at a writer’s retreat at the Gove Hill Retreat Center in Vermont a couple of weeks ago. I am grateful that she’s given me permission to publish it here. As I have been writing about “play” in various articles and reviews lately, this one seemed timely and inspiring.
Enjoy Abigail Carroll at play…
Read “In Gratitude” by Abigail Carroll. (PDF file)
In order to preserve the poem’s formatting I’m attaching it as a PDF file. For some reason, when I drop the poem into the WordPress format, the poem’s unique spacing is disrupted.
I encourage you to read it aloud.
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Abigail Carroll has published prose in the New York Times, Winterthur Portfolio, and The Journal of Food, Culture and Society and is currently authoring a popular history of the American meal for Basic Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Midwest Quarterly, River Oak Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Dappled Things, Grey Sparrow Journal, Numinous, Clapboard House, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, and Flourish. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University and lives in Vermont. She can be contacted at carroll.abigail@gmail.com.