Joanie Mackowski

Joanie Mackowski is assistant professor of English at Cornell University and author of the poetry collection The Zoo. Her awards include the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Grant, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Mackowski’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2007 and 2009, the Yale Review, Poetry, the American Scholar, New England Review, Raritan, Southwest Review, the Kenyon Review, and other journals.

View from a Temporary Window

By Joanie Mackowski

“Joanie Mackowski's hypnotizing View from a Temporary Window is filled with Kafka-like transformations and metamorphoses and haunted by a sense of the body's strangeness. She writes in a relaxed and lucid manner that pays scrupulous attention to both the imaginary and the real, and to what is uncanny in each.”—John L. Koethe

The Zoo

By Joanie Mackowski

Joanie Mackowski’s debut collection of poetry is meditative, vivid, sometimes weird. Turning an idiosyncratic eye to the inhabitants of zoos and fish tanks, cafes and cemeteries, she illuminates details that make the familiar seem strange. An egret stands “still as a glass of milk”; iceberg lettuce is a “vegetable leviathan” that “extends beneath the dinner table / an unseen, monstrous green”; a bald eagle may “love a jet?— / or worship them all, or mock them, rigid / freaks that never linger.”