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Penumbra
The Hollis Summers Poetry Prize
GENERAL EDITOR: DAVID SANDERS
Named after the distinguished poet who taught for many years at Ohio University and made Athens, Ohio, the subject of many of his poems, this competition invites writers to submit unpublished collections of original poems. The competition is open to poets who have not published a book-length collection as well as to those who have.
Full and updated information is available on the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize web page: ohioswallow.com/poetry_prize
Meredith Carson, Infinite Morning
Memye Curtis Tucker, The Watchers
V. Penelope Pelizzon, Nostos
Kwame Dawes, Midland
Allison Eir Jenks, The Palace of Bones
Robert B. Shaw, Solving for X
Dan Lechay, The Quarry
Joshua Mehigan, The Optimist
Jennifer Rose, Hometown for an Hour
Ann Hudson, The Armillary Sphere
Roger Sedarat, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic
Jason Gray, Photographing Eden
Will Wells, Unsettled Accounts
Stephen Kampa, Cracks in the Invisible
Nick Norwood, Gravel and Hawk
Charles Hood, South × South: Poems from Antarctica
Alison Powell, On the Desire to Levitate
Shane Seely, The Surface of the Lit World
Michelle Y. Burke, Animal Purpose
Michael Shewmaker, Penumbra
Penumbra
Poems
Michael Shewmaker
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2017 by Michael Shewmaker
All rights reserved
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Printed in the United States of America
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shewmaker, Michael, author.
Title: Penumbra : poems / Michael Shewmaker.
Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, [2017] | Series: The Hollis Summers poetry prize
Identifiers: LCCN 2016051640| ISBN 9780821422724 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780821422731 (pbk : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780821446041 (pdf)
Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General.
Classification: LCC PS3619.H486 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051640
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the journals in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form: Yale Review (“The Lepidopterist,” “Ink,” “End of the Sermon”), Virginia Quarterly Review (“Horoscope for My Dying Father”), Unsplendid (“The Orchard,” “The Devil in Grand Saline”), storySouth (“Harvest”), Southwest Review (“Winter Ghazal,” “The Baptist”), Sewanee Review (“The Lover,” “Diorama,” “Advent”), Sewanee Theological Review (“The Choice”), Parnassus (“Babel”), The Paris-American (“Doppelgänger”), Oxford American (“The Pastor”), The New Criterion (“The Illusionist”), Narrative (“Photo Found on a Dead Man’s Phone,” “Intersection”), Measure (“The Artifact,” “Crop Circles”), Hopkins Review (“Auguress”), Hayden’s Ferry Review (“Overheard”), The Freeman (“La Llorona”), The Dark Horse (“On a Chinese Festival Scene Carved into the Casque of a Helmeted Hornbill”), Crab Orchard Review (“The Pastor’s Wife”), Columbia (“The Somnambulist,” “The Mime of Thermopylae”),
