Christianne Balk

Updated on Nov 18, 2023

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Name Christianne Balk Awards Walt Whitman Award Books Bindweed		Education Grinnell College Role Poet

"The Kitchen Shears Speak" by Christianne Balk NATIONAL POETRY MONTH DAY 29!

Christianne Balk (born 1953) is an American poet.

Life

Balk graduated with honors in biology from Grinnell College and taught at the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared in Pequod, Crazy Horse, Sulfur, The Centennial review The Missouri Review, Sonora Review, Prairie Schooner Harper's, and The New Yorker. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and daughter.

Awards

1985 Walt Whitman Award

1994 Verna Emory Award

Alaska Council on the Arts travel grant

Poetry

Linda Svendsen, ed. (1990). "Elegy; How Stories Get Started". Words we call home. University of British Columbia Press. ISBN 978-0-7748-0367-0.

"Lauds for St. Germaine Cousin". The Atlantic Monthly. September 2002.

Bindweed. Collier Books. 1986. ISBN 978-0-02-627660-3.

Desiring Flight. Purdue University Press. 1995. ISBN 978-1-55753-062-2.

Anthologies

William J. Walsh, Jack (INT) Myers, ed. (2006). "Lauds for St. Germaine cousin; Dusk Choir; Dear Hippopotamus". Under the rock umbrella. Mercer University Press. ISBN 978-0-88146-047-6.

Reviews

Bindweed...shows some of the awkwardness and tentativeness characteristic of younger poets, but it also introduces an artist resonant with talent. Ms. Balk writes poems that stay close to nature, tapping the rhythms of the changing seasons for metaphors of the human life cycle and rounding out nature's powerful processes with the human qualities of joy, loss and grief.

Among the many pleasures of Christianne Balk’s Desiring Flight, two stand out. First, Balk has – as she showed in her Walt Whitman Award–winning Bindweed – a biologist’s precise knowledge of the natural world, and consequently her poems convey, at times, the comforting authority of a field guide. But there is much more than that: It is as if Balk has held all the objects of her world, turned them over, and spoken their names until they have transcended the scientific into the poetic.

References

Christianne Balk Wikipedia

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