Moons of August

DANUSHA LAMERIS lives in Santa Cruz, California, where, after completing a B.A. in Fine Arts at U.C. Santa Cruz, she studied at the Squaw Valley Writers Workshops and with the poet Ellen Bass. Her poems have been published in: American Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, The SUN, and Rattle, among other journals. Her work has also been included in several anthologies, including The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Her poem, "Riding Bareback," was selected by Gary Young as the winner of the 2013 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry, while another poem, "The God of Numbers," received a special mention in the 2015 Pushcart Prize anthology. The Moons of August, her first book, was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Bingham University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. She teaches ongoing, independent writing workshops, as well as working with individual writers.

"These poems are sensuous and lyrical; the poet is passionately present in the fleeting moment 'listening carefully with the body’s rapt attention'. . . . And they are also elegiac, haunted by impermanence and past sorrow, always aware that 'the gods do not like to dole out too much honey.'"