Spotlight on Blas Falconer and his new poetry collection, “The Foundling Wheel” (Four Way Books)

Blas Falconer is the author of  A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press, 2007), and The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press, 2006). He is also a co-editor for The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona Press, 2011), and Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010).

An associate professor at Austin Peay State University, he serves as the coordinator of the Creative Writing Program and the poetry editor of Zone 3 Magazine/Zone 3 Press. In January of 2012, Falconer also began teaching for the low-residency MFA program at Murray State University.

Falconer’s awards include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, the New Delta Review Eyster Prize for Poetry, and the Barthelme Fellowship.

Born and raised in Virginia, Falconer earned an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland (1997), and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston (2002). He currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his family.

Falconer’s newest book is the poetry collection, The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books, 2012). The publisher describes the collection: “Centered on the adoption of Blas Falconer's son, The Foundling Wheel creates an emotional mosaic that explores the decision to become a parent. In ‘The Annunciation,’ Falconer imagines Gabriel’s visitation: ‘Faith, he might have said, / as the cells of disbelief began to multiply: a son/ who'd face great pain? Certain death?’ The book begins as the desire to have a child is first realized, and while it certainly rejoices in the bond between father and son—‘my body, tuned / to hear you cry before you cry, stirs’—it also grapples with fears that accompany parenthood, loss of the former self, and the transformation from manhood into fatherhood.”

Praise for The Foundling Wheel:

“The pastoral is the lyric of a landscape. Blas Falconer's landscapes—and the people he places in them—elevate the pastoral to a level where the music has the force of an idea, in a language at once symbolic and probic. His ‘Field Marks for Birds,’ his ‘Warm Day in Winter,’ his ‘Bluffs of Pico Duarte’ become interiors of association and moral conviction, and the book they appear in, The Foundling Wheel, a force in itself.” —Stanley Plumly

For a complete list of upcoming readings, visit Blas Falconer’s events page.