Life

Julie Agoos is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Above the Land (Yale University Press, 1987) and Calendar Year (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996).

She received a BA from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, and an MA from The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University. She was the 1989 poet in residence at The Frost Place

The Frost Place

The Frost Place is a museum and nonprofit educational center for poetry located at Robert Frost's former home in Franconia, New Hampshire, USA....

 in Franconia, NH.

She taught for eight years as a lecturer in the creative writing program at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, and, since 1994, in the English department and MFA program in poetry at Brooklyn College

Brooklyn College

Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...

. She lives in Nyack, New York.

Works

• Primogeniture, poets.org
• Overnight, Ploughshares, Winter 1997-98
• Man at the Piano, Ploughshares, Winter 1997-98
• In a New Climate, Ploughshares, Winter 1984

Review

From Library Journal

Using images that sometimes startle the reader, this 30-year-old poet reevaluates her own "land" through travel (London, Florence) and close observations. Agoos pays careful attention to a place's ghoststhe impressive lead poem traces in 10 stanzas the history of a farm through its inhabitants and the weather. She reveals an adept juggling of rhythms"delighted, self-invited, second-sighted" for end-rhymes; occasional brilliant reversals"Oh my darling, look: how life/ imitates art in the afternoon"; and a tuning of the senses, as in "shy grey as those feathers." There is a sure presence and considerable skill here, as one would expect from the latest winner of Yale's "Younger Poet" series.

Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, English Dept., Indiana University of Pennsylvania

External references

• Language and Space in Julie Agoos Poetics