PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Colette Inez

PoetryMagazine.com

Colette Inez
USA

Colette Inez, of French origins, was Belgian-born and reared in a Catholic Home for Children in Brussels. She was brought to the U.S. as a youngster just before the outbreak of World War II. After graduating from Hunter College in 1961, she taught in New York City public schools as well as in Poets-in-the Schools programs. She has since authored ten books of poetry and a memoir, been published in more than seventy anthologies and textbooks, and read her work in over 150 colleges and universities. Inez also won Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, two NEA and Pushcart prizes and other awards. A long-time faculty member of Columbia University, she has taught at Cornell, Ohio, Bucknell and Colgate universities, instructed at leading writer’s conferences, and appeared on public radio and TV. Her latest collection, Horseplay from Word Press, will be followed in 2014 by The Luba Poems released by Red Hen Press.

All poems appear in the book by the author, Horseplay:

THE LETTER BFORE A

The letter-before-A carries an absence

waiting to be born

out of radio waves and ghosts of lost rhymes

unnameable as god in the void.

Carrying a presence dense with text,

the letter-after-Z, waits to be born

into nothingness--phantom dispatch of anonymous

names blown at the illiterate fair

attended by every invisible child doing nothing

and the little brown fox jumping and scrambling.

Aleph's ox horns, an "A" upside down,

and zed on a sled to oblivion.

Read me twigs blown in the dirt, veins

of porphyry, cranes in a line.

That alphabet of cracks on our lips, and in dust

lightly written, signaling hunger.

Lean flesh of words unspoken wait to unfold.

Meaning dances as we spin words, mysterious, reciprocal,

linked in marked conglomerations,

the alphabet of ashes in the absence-before-A

evolving to clouds

and the letter-after-Z buzzing with hypothesis.

Appeared in Barrow Street

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