Illinois Authors

Pine Row Press Ft. Mitchell, KY : 2021

ruce Guernsey, a native New Englander, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University where he taught for twenty-five years. He was awarded seven faculty excellence-in-teaching awards, and in 1992-93 was selected as the State of Illinois Board of Governors’ “Professor of the Year,” the highest award in that state system. He has also taught at William and Mary, Johns Hopkins, and Virginia Wesleyan College where he was Poet in Residence for four years. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, The American Scholar, and many of the quarterlies. His essays have found a home over the years in such journals as The Virginia Quarterly, War, Literature and the Arts, Dappled Things, and Chronicles. He is a former Editor of The Spoon River Poetry Review. Several of his poems have been featured in American Life in Poetry edited by former Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser. The recipient of Fellowships from the NEA, The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, and the Illinois Arts Council, Guernsey has been honored with two Fulbright Senior Lectureships in American Poetry to Portugal and Greece. He has also twice sailed around the world as a faculty member with Semester at Sea.

Ecco Qua Press Beverly, Mass. : 2012

In simple, spare language the poetry in FROM RAIN: Poems, 1970-2010 examines the common objects around us as if they were clues to solving some kind of mystery. Ice, glass, stones, moss, and similar inanimate things take on meaning as the poet seeks to answer who and why we are. These poems are the detective's magnifying glass to examine our profound connection to the natural world and its disruption by war and loss. In particular, the poet reflects on the disappearance of his father from a V.A. hospital in 1987. Suffering from Parkinson's disease, he vanished out the door one spring day and was never found. His wandering ghost haunts this collection. "The physical world of field and forest that I learned from my father, the very world he shuffled off into, I have been trying to grasp in these signs and symbols shaped into lines." Arranged thematically into four sections, the poems in this collection have been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, American Scholar, The Nation, and many of the quarterlies, as well as in less traditional publications such as Fly Rod & Reel, The Journal of Medical Opinion, and War, Literature and the Arts.

University of Pittsburgh Press 1982

Wordtech Communications Cincinnati, OH : 2008

Water Press and Media Flower Mound, Tex. : 2003

The first full-length collection from Bruce Guernsey since the award-winning January Thaw. This collection is Homeric in every sense. With such detail to line and the music of language, you almost forget the struggle of the search and the sorrow of loss.

Water Press and Media, Argyle, Texas : 2005.