Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Laure-Anne Bosselaar Poems

Laure-Anne Bosselaar Biography

Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator and professor. She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, A New Hunger (Ausable Press, 2007). Her collection, Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions), won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. She is the author of Artémis, a collection of French poems, published in Belgium. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and journals including Ploughshares, The Washington Post, AGNI, Harvard Review, and in anthologies. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Bread Loaf Writers Conference fellowship, and she was a Writer in Residence at Hamilton College in NY State, and at the Vermont Studio Center. Bosselaar has edited many anthologies, including Never Before: Poems about First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005), Outsiders, Poems About Rebels Exiles and Renegades, and Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars, co-edited with her husband, poet Kurt Brown. Her translations include The Plural of Happiness, Selected Poems by Herman de Coninck, co-translated with Kurt Brown (Oberlin College Press, 2006). She grew up in Belgium, and moved to the United States in 1987. She earned her M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers She taught poetry workshops in Colorado and co-directed the Aspen Writers' Conference from 1989 to 1992. She is fluent in four languages, and has published poems in French and Flemish. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College, and also in the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College. She currently lives in Santa Barbara, CA where she teaches in the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.)

The Best Poem Of Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Stillbirth

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:
No, Laetitia, no.
It wasn't my train—the doors were closing,
but I rushed in, searching for your face.

But no Laetitia. No.
No one in that car could have been you,
but I rushed in, searching for your face:
no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

No one in that car could have been you.
Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.
No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:
I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:
I was told not to look. Not to get attached—
I sometimes go months without remembering you.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

I was told not to look. Not to get attached.
It wasn't my train—the doors were closing.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.
On a platform, I heard someone calling your name.

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