Penumbra. Michael Shewmaker

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      Penumbra

      The Hollis Summers Poetry Prize

      GENERAL EDITOR: DAVID SANDERS

      Named after the distinguished poet who taught for many years at Ohio University and made Athens, Ohio, the subject of many of his poems, this competition invites writers to submit unpublished collections of original poems. The competition is open to poets who have not published a book-length collection as well as to those who have.

      Full and updated information is available on the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize web page: ohioswallow.com/poetry_prize

      Meredith Carson, Infinite Morning

      Memye Curtis Tucker, The Watchers

      V. Penelope Pelizzon, Nostos

      Kwame Dawes, Midland

      Allison Eir Jenks, The Palace of Bones

      Robert B. Shaw, Solving for X

      Dan Lechay, The Quarry

      Joshua Mehigan, The Optimist

      Jennifer Rose, Hometown for an Hour

      Ann Hudson, The Armillary Sphere

      Roger Sedarat, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic

      Jason Gray, Photographing Eden

      Will Wells, Unsettled Accounts

      Stephen Kampa, Cracks in the Invisible

      Nick Norwood, Gravel and Hawk

      Charles Hood, South × South: Poems from Antarctica

      Alison Powell, On the Desire to Levitate

      Shane Seely, The Surface of the Lit World

      Michelle Y. Burke, Animal Purpose

      Michael Shewmaker, Penumbra

      Penumbra

       Poems

       Michael Shewmaker

      OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

      ATHENS

      Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

       ohioswallow.com

      © 2017 by Michael Shewmaker

      All rights reserved

      To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at [phone] or [phone] (fax).

      Printed in the United States of America

      Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

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       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Shewmaker, Michael, author.

      Title: Penumbra : poems / Michael Shewmaker.

      Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, [2017] | Series: The Hollis Summers poetry prize

      Identifiers: LCCN 2016051640| ISBN 9780821422724 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780821422731 (pbk : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780821446041 (pdf)

      Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General.

      Classification: LCC PS3619.H486 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.6—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051640

       Acknowledgments

      Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the journals in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form: Yale Review (“The Lepidopterist,” “Ink,” “End of the Sermon”), Virginia Quarterly Review (“Horoscope for My Dying Father”), Unsplendid (“The Orchard,” “The Devil in Grand Saline”), storySouth (“Harvest”), Southwest Review (“Winter Ghazal,” “The Baptist”), Sewanee Review (“The Lover,” “Diorama,” “Advent”), Sewanee Theological Review (“The Choice”), Parnassus (“Babel”), The Paris-American (“Doppelgänger”), Oxford American (“The Pastor”), The New Criterion (“The Illusionist”), Narrative (“Photo Found on a Dead Man’s Phone,” “Intersection”), Measure (“The Artifact,” “Crop Circles”), Hopkins Review (“Auguress”), Hayden’s Ferry Review (“Overheard”), The Freeman (“La Llorona”), The Dark Horse (“On a Chinese Festival Scene Carved into the Casque of a Helmeted Hornbill”), Crab Orchard Review (“The Pastor’s Wife”), Columbia (“The Somnambulist,” “The Mime of Thermopylae”), Birmingham Poetry Review (“Tenebrae,” “A Summer Primer,” “The Neighbors Upstairs”), and American Arts Quarterly (“The Curlew”).

      “The Baptist” was selected as the winner of the 2013 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. “Auguress” was also published online at Poetry Daily. “Harvest,” “Crop Circles,” and “The Choice” also appeared