The Diminishing House [Paperback]

In Nicky Beer's The Diminishing House, birds are disemboweled, a father is mourned, and a basement fills with snakes. This first book of resonant lyric poetry meditates on such subjects as animals, art, and anatomy, and transforms the familiar and mundane into something strangely mythic. Beer explores the exhilaration and frustration of living in a sensuous, unstable world filled with grief and desire.

NICKY BEER is from the Long Island town of Northport, NY. She holds degrees from Yale University, the University of Houston, and the University of Missouri-Columbia. She has received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Louis Untermeyer Tuition Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a Discovery/The Nation Award. She is married to the poet Brian Barker, and teaches at the University of Colorado, Denver.