Realm Sixty-Four

Kristi Maxwell

An extended bio from the author.

I was a child who talked to wire strung between fence posts and to an imaginary friend who eventually ran away. Born in 1981 in Cleveland, Tennessee, I lived the first decade and so of my life in a house conjured up by my father and also at his farm, and by the ocean near my maternal grandmother’s home in St. Augustine, Florida. I was once a caretaker to three dead crabs and an undertaker to two cockatiels. My favorite word has long been Nova Scotia.

I have learned things at the University of Tennessee, where I received bachelor’s degrees in journalism and English; the University of Manchester; the University of Arizona, where I received an MFA in poetry; and the University of Cincinnati, where I’m currently pursuing a doctorate in English. I have learned things outside of these places, too—in kitchens; in courtyards; in Slovenia; in Armory Park; in close reading; in a pair of scissors and some hair.

In 2005, I began taking kung fu classes with another poet; experiencing kung fu has changed the way I think about and approach language and has spurred my interest in the notion of relentlessness and how this notion might be (and is) enacted in (and through) language and in the poetry that most expands my thinking. Poets to whom I return to have my brain wrecked and rebuilt include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Alice Notley, Eleni Sikelianos, Christine Hume, Christian Bök—followed by many and’s.

A reader of poetry; a maker of asparagus soup; a passport owner; a collector of boxes—I’m currently at work on new and old projects, and I keep an eye on my right arm and the ink there—how little lasts, and how long—because it reminds me.