Award-winning author and the co-founder/Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars, a Mellon sponsored literary journal for incarcerated writers and artists, Beth Gylys is the author of five books of poetry—the last two (The Conversation Turns to Wide Mouth Jars—co-written with Cathy Carlisi and Jennifer Wheelock—and Body Braille) were both named Books All Georgians Should Read. Her work has recently appeared in West Branch, The James Dickey Review, and on the Best American Poetry blog. Her father died in 2021 of Lewy Body dementia.
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Beth Gylys’s After My Father: a Book of Odes is stunningly elegiac and celebratory. The poet lovingly describes a father of bourbon, bacon, butter who in the end is “thin as a ballerina.” These poems demonstrate grace, intimacy, and transcendence.
--Denise Duhamel
"Now, I am the one buried," Beth Gylys writes to close the first poem of After My Father: a Book of Odes. Buried-- that is us too. As we read each poem, we are buried in the abundant love of a daughter for her father, happy memories, and the not so, but always the love. Gylys, the villanelle queen, shows us the power of the ode.
- Dustin Brookshire, author of Never Picked First For Playtime