Kim Bridgford

Kim Bridgford Poems

Kim Bridgford Biography

Kim Bridgford is an award-winning poet, editor, college professor, fiction writer, and critic. In her poetry, she writes primarily in traditional forms, of which the sonnet is her form of choice. She is the director of the West Chester University Poetry Center. As editor-in-chief at Mezzo Cammin, a journal of poetry by women, she founded The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, which is designed to become the world's largest database of women poets. Kim Bridgford was born in 1959. She grew up in Coal Valley, Illinois. She received both her bachelor's degree and master's in fine arts from the University of Iowa. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois . Bridgford joined the faculty of Fairfield University in Connecticut in 1989. In 1994, she moved to Wallingford, Connecticut with her husband Peter Duval, also an award-winning author of fiction and who later became a professor at Fairfield University as well. In 1996, their son, Nick, was born. In August 2010, she became the current director of the West Chester University Poetry Center in Pennsylvania, moving to the state with her family. She had been a professor of English at Fairfield University for 21 years.)

The Best Poem Of Kim Bridgford

For the female suicides

You thought it would be different from then on.
The others, every day, would think of you.
Yet loved ones felt betrayed, and they went on.
They didn't weigh the heft of each flat stone,
Or feel the murky brilliance of the blue.
You thought it would be different from then on;
You thought they'd understand your deep impression.
You thought they needed proof to make it true.
Yet loved ones felt betrayed, and they went on.
What happened in the oven of depression
Was that you eked away: Assia too.
You thought it would be different from then on,
And so it was, as well, for your friend Anne:
Your taxi-driver, death, charged up your ego.
Yet loved ones felt betrayed, and they went on.
When you leave people, there is a realization:
They're less important than your need to go.
You thought it would be different from then on.
Yet loved ones felt betrayed, and they went on.

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