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Shara Lessley

Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife (Wisconsin UP, 2018), winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues, 2012), and coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades, 2018). A former Stegner Fellow, her awards include an NEA Fellowship, “Discovery”/The Nation prize, Mary Wood Fellowship, and Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship, among others. Lessley’s work appears in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She is Editor-at-Large and Associate Nonfiction Editor at West Branch.

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Keep the Faith

 I should have locked it up when I had it | hauled itin my Holly Hobbie lunch box | kept itin the carport, cubbyhole, brass flask, bunker | slammed itin my locker and tossed the combination | I should havegifted it vespers, backhanded compliment [...]