ALIKI BARNSTONE is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. Among her recent books are Blue Earth (Iris, 2004) and Wild With It (Sheep Meadow, 2002), The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation (W.W. Norton, 2006), Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Development (University Press of New England, 2007), and Dear God, Dear Dr. Heartbreak (Sheep Meadow Press, 2009). Her poems and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, New Letters, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Missouri.


"For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable and necessary as breathing or eating . . . pleasure, wonder, anger, and moral passion are here, and the imagination can write a poem called 'Love Poem' and make it fresh."—Robert Pinsky

"All of a sudden I understand why I like Aliki Barnstone’s poems so much. They remind me of the one she has studied most—shall we call her her master—Emily Dickinson. Not in the forms, not, as such, in the music, and not in the references; but in that weird intimacy, that eerie closeness, that absolute confession of soul . . . . In Barnstone, too, the two worlds are intensely present, and the voice moves back and forth between them. She has the rare art of distance and closeness. It gives her her fine music, her wisdom, her form. She is a fine poet."—Gerald Stern