BIO: Andrea Potos’ poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Women's Review of Books, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Green Mountains Review, Greensboro Review, Calyx Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Rosebud, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Cairn, Women, Period (Spinsters Ink), Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women's Poetry (Beacon Press), A Fierce Brightness (Calyx Books) Mothers & Daughters: A Poetry Celebration (Random House), and I Feel A Little Jumpy Around You (Simon & Schuster). Her collection of poems titled Yaya’s Cloth received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. She is also the recipent of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review, and the Sow’s Ear Review Poetry Prize.

PUBLICATIONS:
A full-length collection, We Lit the Lamps Ourselves (Salmon Poetry [Ireland], 2012) $21.95

Abundance to Share With the Birds
(Finishing Line Press, 2010) $14.00
order from Andrea, apotos@gmail.com, or from finishinglinepress.com
Yaya’s Cloth
, Iris Press, 2007 - $14.00 (softcover), $24.00 (hardcover)
The Perfect Day, Parallel Press, 1999 - $10.00

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POEMS
HOW TO FIND KEATS
Hampstead, London

Take Hampstead High Street before dusk,
then left on Downshire Hill, one block until
St. John’s Church where you'll veer to the right,
follow the narrow stone-flagged walk
to Wentworth Place, gated and locked for renovation
for much too long now, but still you must come
because it happens on this street—the living year, the year
of the great odes—the blue darkening turns fluent
with birdsong, everywhere their notes
become like cursive crisscrossing,
inscribing the air, ancestral
nightingales—they have taken up his song.

—Andrea Potos


EACH SELF

My six-year-old daughter stares into the purpling
copper sky and names it dusk, a just-learned word
she is happy to declare, comparing it to evening
and afternoon. We talk of how the earth turns away
from the sun each night,
a motion so encompassing,
our bodies cannot know it.
I don’t tell her how the child
part of me still disbelieves it—that this globe
actually spins while we breathe, while my daughter
changes invisibly before my eyes,
her infant body submerged inside her
with her toddler waddle and her four-year-old skip,
each swallowed within the other
like the nesting dolls she keeps
on her new desk, each self
perfectly preserved, forsaken
for the one that must come after.

—Andrea Potos

Published in North American Review and Yaya's Cloth, (Iris Press, 2007).