Mary Szybist

Mary Szybist Poems

Mary Szybist Biography

Mary Szybist is an American poet. She grew up in Pennsylvania, and earned her B.A. and M.T. (Master of Teaching) from the University of Virginia and attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. Szybist's Incarnadine (Graywolf Press, 2013) is the recipient of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry, and her collection of poems, Granted (Alice James Books, 2003) won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, the 2004 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. In a feature covering the NBCCA poetry finalists, the Christian Science Monitor wrote: "...with her intelligence and understated grace, Szybist may become one of the best-known writers of her generation." Szybist's poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, AGNI Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Tin House, and The Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry 2008. Szybist is an assistant professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon and a member of the faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She also has taught at Kenyon College, the University of Iowa, the Tennessee Governor’s School for Humanities, the University of Virginia’s Young Writers’ Workshop and West High School in Iowa City.)

The Best Poem Of Mary Szybist

So-And-So Descending From The Bridge

It is so and so and not the dusty world
who drops.

It is their mother and not the dusty world
who drops them.

Why I imagine her so often
empty-handed

as houseboats' distant lights
rise and fall on the far ripples—
I do not know.

I know that darkness.
Have stood on that bridge
in the space between the streetlights
dizzy with looking down.

Maybe some darks are deep enough to swallow
what we want them to.

But you can't have two worlds in your hands
and choose emptiness.

I think that she will never sleep as I sleep,
I who have no so and so to throw

or mourn or to let go.

But in that once— with no more
mine, mine, this little so, and that one—

she is what

out-nights me.

So close. So-called

crazy little mother who does not jump.

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