About

Siobhán Scarry is a poet and scholar. She is the author of Pilgrimly (Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions, 2014). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, Mid-American Review, The Missouri Review, New Letters, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She also publishes scholarly essays on 20^th-21^st century poetries. Her current manuscript “For the Green & Signifying Fields” was selected as a semifinalist for the 2023 Interim Test Site Poetry Prize and finalist for both the 2023 Tupelo Press Helena Whitehill Award and the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize.

She earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. in English from the Poetics program at SUNY Buffalo. She is currently professor of English at Bethel College in Kansas, where she teaches literature and creative writing, runs a visiting writers series, and serves as faculty mentor to the undergraduate literary magazine YAWP! She is the recipient of fellowships from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the Brown Foundation. She lives near Wichita, Kansas with her son.

Book

These are luminous, complicated poems. Crystalline. Turn them one way, they are full of blackberry brambles, ecotonalities, the banks where water laps with land. Another way and they are dusts and yet whale songs too. Yet another, women and words. They are written mainly in sentences. They are quiet and they enthrall.

— Juliana Spahr, one of the authors of Army of Lovers

Attentive to telling detail. The metallic bloom of bright silences. Hieratic: Instructions for a vigil. Augury: We could ruminate, luxuriate, and divinate in the language of these exquisite poems. They give the light with their own eyes. There is gold on their tongues. Their words marry, or refer. Lure or long. In the alchemical brilliance of Siobhán Scarry’s stunning debut collection, we walk the page as if the earth, feeling each word a footstep, and each footstep marking our Pilgrimly progress. How surely the poems move us to their spacious pilgrimage. Offer proof of Presence. Fiery. Cerebrally.

— Cynthia Hogue, author of Or Consequence and Flux

Pilgrimly exposes our hidden attachments to things and places, seasons and weather. Even our most sentimental passions turn startling and strange when rendered by Scarry’s exacting syntax, her crisp images also gifting them with photographic accuracy. “A yellow swing and a root cellar with jars,” she writes, “Not everything had a language.” This lack of language makes relations to the world of objects both comforting and perplexing, home and unheimlich, and what I love about this book is how profoundly we encounter, by virtue of Scarry’s masterful phrasing, the feel of the small scale of that world where “dead bolts turn . . . over in their brass beds.” This is a book to which we must put an ear.  

— Brian Teare, author of Companion Grasses

Press for Pilgrimly

Review: “Pilgrimly,” Kimberly Ann Priest, New Pages | May 4, 2015.

Review: “‘Captured, Tortured, and Biting a Stick’: Fourteen First Books of Poetry,” William Doreski, Harvard Review | September 25, 2015.

Interview: with Tony Trigilio, discussing Pilgrimly. Radio Free Albion podcast | August 11, 2015.