Burning After Dark

Product Description The poems in Burning After Dark unfurl an ''ebony canopy / of dark melodies'' between the speaker and a beloved whose passion ''burns in spite of the laws we've made,'' so its expression is as oblique as it is urgent, both in the flesh and on the page. The need for circumspection lends a darkly simmering fervor to the language, which gives itself over fully to metaphor no distancing diffidence of simile here! Each embrace is ''a wall laden with stars,'' the beloved's voice is ''a circle of sighs,'' even the realm the lovers create between themselves is an ''island / inhabited by unanswered prayers.'' These poems sear themselves darkly into our psyches, so that like the speaker and her beloved, contending with the fires that consume them nightly - ''we are illumined.'' -- Carolyne Wright, Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation 25th Anniversary Poetry Prize Judge About the Author Susan R. Williamson is a Virginia native whose poems appear in The Connecticut Review, Crab Orchard Review, Smartish Pace, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, among others, and have been anthologized in Letters to the World (Red Hen Press), and on Poetry Daily. She has served on committees for the Virginia Festival of the Book, the board of The Charlottesville Writing Center, and as editor-in-chief of Streetlight Magazine. She is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, holds a BA in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia, and an MFA from New England College, where she was a Joel Oppenheimer fellow. Williamson lives in Boca Raton, Florida and serves as the Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.