University of Massachusetts Amherst

Visiting Writers Series Fall Events: Poet Dara Wier

The Visiting Writers Series at the University of Massachusetts Amherst invites you to a poetry reading by Dara Wier.

Dara Wier is the author of ten books of poetry, including Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, Hat on a Pond, and Voyages in English. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, the American Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Visiting Writers Series events are sponsored by the MFA Program for Poets and Writers and made possible in part by grants from the Amherst Arts Council, UMass Arts Council, and UMass Alumni Association.

Events are free, wheelchair accessible, and open to the public.

Come one, come all.

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Invisible in the Torn Out Interiors

by Dara Wier

A man looked at us across his little dish

Of watercress and peas and said he’d wasted

Five years. We couldn’t ask him doing what?

He said he knew he’d let some thing alive die

And didn’t know how to get it back again now

That it was gone. He looked as if he were

About to cry, as if a fresh death wanted him

To mourn. He talked as if the place he’d been

Had so unwelcomed him it had ruined his soul,

As if it were a place into which drained an

Absolute dead air. He said he’d left no friends

Behind, no one who’d notice he was gone.

And here he was without a job, no place his to

Live, no one his to love. We said welcome home.

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