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Hat on a Pond

By Dara Wier
Publication Date: December 1, 2001

ISBN# 9780970367266 (5.5x8.5 128pp, paperback)

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The ones with the softest hearts divide
Their time between nearly dead and almost alive.

“Recalling at moments the philosophical comedy of Wallace Stevens and Wislawa Szymborska, many of Wier’s colloquial stanzas draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence.”—Harvard Review
Wier's exuberant poems often organize themselves as catalogues or lists—of actions, of things, of sights, of related adverbial phrases—so that any one poem in this thick, eclectic eighth book of verse can include almost anything.
Publishers Weekly
Dara Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including In the Still of the Night (forthcoming from Wave Books, 2017) You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013), Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009), Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005, 2006 SFSU Poetry Center Book Award), Hat On a Pond (Verse Press, 2002), and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). Also among her works are the limited editions (X In Fix) in Rain Taxi’s Brainstorm Series, Fly on the Wall (Oat City Press), and The Lost Epic, co-written with James Tate (Waiting for Godot Books, 1999). Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the American Poetry Review. In 2005 she held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.

Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, The Fairytale Review, Hollins Critic, jubilat, New American Writing, slope and Volt, among other magazines.

She teaches workshops and form and theory seminars at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-directs the University of Massachusetts’ Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. Each June she teaches a poetry workshop for the Juniper Summer Institute. Her editing work includes publishing limited edition chapbooks and broadsides with Factory Hollow Press, North Amherst, Massachusetts, a small independent press she co-edits with Emily Pettit and Guy Pettit. Along with James Haug and James Tate she has edited the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Series for poetry.