Diamonds

She holds an MFA from Brown University and a BA from Vassar College, and she has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and the Yaddo Foundation. Currently, she is the Director of Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College. Born in Seattle, she moved to Pittsburgh at twelve, then later lived in Brooklyn for many years. Now she lives in rural Vermont with her two children.

Her poems have appeared in such publications as At Length, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Poem-a-Day, Tin House, as well as in several anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2019 & 2020 (Scribner) and Art & Artists: Poems (Everyman’s Library).

Camille Guthrie is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois (2013), In Captivity (2006), and The Master Thief (2000)—all published by Subpress

Laura Sims, thank you for your friendship, help, and cheer in this writing life.

My heartfelt thanks to Peter Conners for choosing my book and for inviting me to be a part of the history of BOA Editions—and to the entire BOA team for their support, warmth, and skill: Ron Martin-Dent, Sandy Knight, Daphne Morrissey, Genevieve Hartman, Richard Foerster, Aimee Conners, Jennifer Rampe, and Zack Gilbert.

My gratitude to the Yaddo Foundation and to Elaina Richardson for the blissful time to begin these poems. I am also very thankful to MacDowell for a residency to complete this book in the Kirby cabin among the pines.

I’m truly grateful to the editors who published poems from this book: Beth Anderson, Erin Adair-Hodges, Izzy Casey, Alex Dimitrov, Timothy Donnelly, Camille T. Dungy, Jonathan Farmer, Regan Good, Stefania Heim, Cathy Park Hong, Major Jackson, Claudia Keelan, Karla Kelsey, David Lehman, Jenny Molberg, Emily Pérez, Elizabeth Powell, Nancy Reddy, Paisley Rekdal, Elizabeth Robinson, Laura Sims, Ron Slate, Michael Slosek, Devon Walker-Figueroa, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and Winniebell Xinyu Zong. Many thanks to the poet and journalist Alissa Quart who wrote about my poems in The Guardian.

I was thinking in “” of this lovely part of William Carlos Williams’s poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:

My heart rouses

thinking to bring you news

of something

that concerns you

and concerns many men.

In addition to Ashbery’s perfect line, I had Angus Fletcher’s Allegory (1970) in mind while I wrote “.” Fletcher taught me that a sestina is a battle of words for dominance. William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” also stayed in my thoughts: “Being so caught up / So mastered.”

In all this historical confusion and colonial violence, with all these daughters, who is the Pict Daughter? To the European fantasies of sexy, native women, whitewashed and available through
time and space, this painting adds yet another layer of incongruity.

”: This miniature painting (c. 1585) preoccupies me because of