Poet Spotlight: Christina Pugh

August 15th's Rush Hour Concert features poems inspired by Bach's Two-Part Inventions. As a special treat, we are posting some of the poems that will be read during the concert. For insight into the process that led to this groundbreaking concert in partnership with The Poetry Foundation, please read our Artistic Director's earlier post.

Christina Pugh won the Word Press First Book Prize for Rotary (2004). Her poems have recently appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. Pugh’s criticism has appeared in Poetry, Verse, Boston Review, and Herspace: Women, Writing, Solitude. She is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Journals Award in Poetry, a Whiting Fellowship for the Humanities, and a residency fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. A professor at UIC, she is currently completing a volume of poems entitled Restoration.

Arc Away, for Invention 7

Love is bad
brio: why
do you stoke
its adrenaline
engine, its humming-

bird emblem
all microscopic
motor, dusty
blues dispersing
in a whirl: do you see

how hysteria
trumps hue?
How the heart
has sublimed
the wings,

eaten every instinct
for solitary
distances? A bird
should arc
away, not

hover here
ex machina,
plum above
the runoff, creature
evaporate and still:

do you hear
his motor humming
like a stone?
Are you
sand-blind?

What ails you?
The vanishing
point’s there,
beckoning
and blue.