Elise Paschen's new poetry collection, Bestiary, will be published by Red Hen Press in February, 2009. She also is the author of Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have been published in The New Republic, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies. She is editor of The New York Times best-selling anthology Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks, Poetry Speaks Expanded, Poetry in Motion, and Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is the co-founder of "Poetry in Motion," a nation-wide program which places poetry posters in subways and buses. Paschen teaches in the Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reginald Gibbons is a poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic, and artist. He is also the co-founder of TriQuarterly Books, and the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Creatures of a Day (LSU Press, 2008), which was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award in poetry. In 2008 he also published a volume of new translations of Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments (Princeton). Other poetry collections include Sparrow: New and Selected Poems, Homage to Longshot O'Leary, and It's Time. He is the author of a collection of short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches; and a novel, Sweetbitter. Gibbons is an eminent translator, whose works include the Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda; Guillen on Guilen; Euripides' Bakkhai and Sophokles' Antigone. He has also published numerous other books, held Guggenheim and NEA fellowships in poetry, and won the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, the Carl Sandburg Prize, and other honors, among them the inclusion of his work in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize Anthologies. In 2004 Gibbons won the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison, Jr., Poetry Prize. He is currently a columnist for American Poetry Review.

Monarch

From milkweed to lupine a woman shadows
a monarch. Slowly makes her way, conveys

her weight with care. Inside the womb her son
flutters, then butterfly-kicks against walls.

The woman tracks a trail of burnished wings,
migrating into the heart-notch of forest,

then settles on a lichened tree-trunk where
underground rivers flowing out of snow-

mountain lakes rumble the decree of her
unborn son: "Journey farther, journey deeper."

Into darker woods she transports a monarch
ruling, even now, unnamed territory.

                                                                  Elise Paschen