William Greenway
IN HEAVEN IT IS ALWAYS AUTUMN
after John Donne It all seemed to happen that same year we lived in England, every hill golden with the turning beeches, crimson apples in the orchard by our cottage muted pink by the mist rising off the river reflecting the upside down palette of it all. In Italy, the vineyards wore the yellow, plaited hair of harvest, every barn breathing out the warm crush and gush of grapes like the winey kisses of a long luncheon tryst. Time had stopped. The change we couldn’t see coming stalled for a while, an Indian summer before the stroke. Had it happened while we were hiking the paths of fallen leaves, miles from help, we’d have thought, though not said, we hoped for any afterlife to rival this heaven—color box of plum, ochre, cinnamon, lemon— and the blood-red beauty of the dead gone on before us.
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William Greenway’s tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection, Ascending Order. Both are from the University of Akron Press Poetry Series. His newest book, The Accidental Garden, is forthcoming from Word Press, and Selected Poems is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press, both in 2014. Greenway’s critical work, The Poetry of Personality: The Poetic Diction of Dylan Thomas, is forthcoming from Rowan and Littlefield in 2014. His publication credits include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. He is the recipient of the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer’s Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Greenway was named Georgia Author of the Year. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University.
Sebastian H. Paramo’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The North American Review, The McNeese Review, Canary, Lunch Ticket, The Oklahoma Review, and others. He is an editor for the online journal, The Boiler, and was recently awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. He lives in Dallas.
Katharine Johnsen studies and teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is the recipient of the Bernice Kert Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was recently awarded a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and earned her BA from Emory University.
In addition to Mixed Diction (Mammoth books, 2009), Jeff Schiff is the author of Anywhere in this Country (Mammoth Press), The Homily of Infinitude (Pennsylvania Review Press), The Rats of Patzcuaro (Poetry Link), Resources for Writing About Literature (HarperCollins), and Burro Heart (Mammoth books). His work has appeared internationally in more than eighty periodicals, including The Alembic, Grand Street, The Ohio Review, Poet & Critic, The Louisville Review, Tendril, Pembroke Magazine, Carolina Review, Chicago Review, Hawaii Review, Southern Humanities Review, River City, Indiana Review, Willow Springs, and The Southwest Review. He has been a member of the English faculty at Columbia College Chicago since 1987.