Saint Mary's College is a Poetry Powerhouse
Brenda Hillman, Faculty
Brenda Hillman is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). She received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2012 and currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Read Brenda's Work
Matthew Zapruder, Faculty
Matthew Zapruder is curerntly the Poetry Editor for New York Times Magazine, and the author of four collections of poetry, including Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2011, and Sun Bear, published in 2014. An associate professor in the English department and the director of the MFA program in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, Zapruder is also editor at large at Wave Books.
Read Matt's Work and New York Times Magazine Selections
Gabe Gomez, MFA Poetry '00
Gabe graduated from SMC in 2000. His first book of poems, The Outer Bands, won the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from the University of Notre Dame Press in 2006. His second poetry collection, The Seed Bank, was published by Mouthfeel Press in 2012. He has taught at the University of New Orleans, Tulane University, the College of Santa Fe, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Gabe currently works as a marketing and communications consultant in Santa Fe, N.M.
"Sweetwater" by Gabe Gomez
Towards the end, it appears blue
An infinite, and then some,
Closing up the west
Imagine it’s out of reach…
Save the draw for deer
To tear into the mouths
Of our cars at dusk
The four elements
Stir in their foraging snouts
Compels them forward
We think the same way
The lurch of our sentences sound alike
When programmed to run
We think of lines
Or roads where our thoughts meet
But they never do
Instead, we meditate
On the violent impact
Of together knowing nothing
A crown in the west
Bowing towards the highway
Disappears each night
With or without us
Soon enough, light will appear
Drawing our shadows
Longer than our bodies
Painting our napes
Into the shoulders
A perpetual slouch
Divided and scored
Driving in darkness
Towards a place we no longer
Call home; not knowing why we can’t
Stop ourselves from running
Lily Brown, MFA Poetry '07
Lily Brown lives and teaches in the Bay Area. She is the author of Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and several chapbooks, including The Haptic Cold (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013). She holds an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary's College of California, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia.
"COMMUTE" by Lily Brown
Pass through bombed-out
shrubs, extrusions
of feather, greenish metal
cut to square and sky.
Is this the jungle?
A rain-wide paddock
gathers water,
the word Up’s thumbed
onto a pilement
beside a grove
of eucalyptus graves.
The hand, the arm,
the shoulder—stumps
or system? For talk,
for love,
for love
the blood goes.
Paul Ebenkamp, MFA Poetry '09
Paul Ebenkamp is author of The Louder the Room the Darker the Screen (Timeless Infinite Light, 2015), "Seizured in the Ease"(Mondo Bummer, 2013) and everything at afterundisclosedrecipients.blogspot.com. With Andrew Kenower, he curates the Woolsey Heights reading series in Berkeley, and with strings and devices makes music as Position. His editorial works include Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology (co-edited with Robert Hass, Counterpoint, 2014) and Particulars of Place by Richard O. Moore (co-edited with Brenda Hillman and Garrett Caples, Omnidawn, 2015).
"Homage to Your Politics" by Paul Ebenkamp
Not so much decision as how
the choices dilate and flurry out.
Daylight for centuries now.
Then this, the present
that almost resembles the present.
Life has taken hold and falls away,
delectation’s buckled underbrush.
There's no other end of the earth.
Today you beat yourself up over something,
whatever; you’ll never know what happens when a song ends:
nothing writes back!
And yet said daylight’s what finds me there still,
throat to the people, eyes to the brightness/
tint/contrast settings menu
whose exurb sprawl from the nest-days voiceover
that hugs these feedback slopes
might show me my good hand at last.