Carolyn Maisel—admired by Marvin Bell, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many of America’s finest poets—has kept vigil on a fearsome landscape reminiscent of the Southern gothic vein in American fiction. An introvert, intimate in emotion, rather like Akhmatova, Maisel charts this eerie terrain with cool monastic grace, a cartographer of the known interlaced with astonishing half-glimpsed, unknown things. She loved “this green planet” intensely, but was curious about what might lie on the other side.
—Lynn Strongin
Carolyn Maisel was born in Mississippi in 1942 and lived much of her life in Louisiana. She received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Iowa and taught briefly at the University of New Orleans. Her poems were widely published in journals and magazines, including The New Yorker and The North American Review; and, in 1978, L’Epervier Press published Witnessing, her only other full length collection of poems. During 1985 she was poet Laureate of Louisiana. Carolyn Maisel died in March, 2006, in Austin, Texas, after a brief battle with lung cancer.