Karen Elizabeth Bishop's the deering hour pushes against the edges of lyric to find the moments and spaces where the natural, object, and human worlds meet. The voice is a decidedly female, at times maternal, engagement that repositions the lived center so that the margin, the edge, and the boundary become rich, inhabitable spaces. These are lush, layered poems that deal in the porosity of multiplying questions, fluidities, and transformations from plant, mineral, and animal to the human. They trade in wings, beaks, and feathers; orogeny, rocks, and subduction zones; the moment when the animal and plant take over. Language becomes its own marker, so that what we know of the human animal is a pause, a call, a limb, and a bloom in the world and on the page.

Karen Elizabeth Bishop is a UK/US poet, translator, and scholar. Born in Birmingham, England, she grew up along Scotland's Moray Firth and in Southern California. She holds a B.A. in Literature from the College of Creative Studies and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Former Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard, she is currently Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and chairs the Critical Translation Studies Initiative at Rutgers University. Her scholarly work includes The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror (SUNY Press, 2020) and Cartographies of Exile: A New Spatial Literacy (Routledge, 2016). Current creative works include the book-length elegy Winter, Burn and a hybrid collection of pseudotranslation, essay, and original painting titled Salt. She is the publisher of Lampblack Press and divides her time between the wilds of New Jersey and Sevilla, Spain.