Mary Gilliland is the author of Ember Days, The Devil’s Fools (winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and the CNY Book Award), and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Prize). Honors include the 2023 International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry and a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant. Mary is a poet, ecologist, and occasional essayist in New York’s Finger Lakes Region where she has transformed a rocky acre of Six Mile Creek into a fawn-filled woodland garden. https://marygilliland.com/
In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder is a multi-vocal poem with parts spoken by Marie Curie, the Radium Girls, and a mysterious fisherman. A grieving sister’s encounters with a 19th century metal sculpture originally made in Fukushima and its associated legends of the sea prompt memories of her deceased brother’s activist years ensuring addition of LGBT to the state’s hate crimes law. He and his life partner converse about their lives in the high desert of the Southwest amid the nuclear industry's benchmarks of Los Alamos and Church Rock. The radiance of these voices has no half-life, no half-measures.