Malinda Markham
Malinda Markham received an MFA from the University of Iowa
Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver. After
teaching full-time in the Linguistics Department at Daito Bunka
University in Tokyo for several years, she won a Blakemore Fellowship
to attend Stanford University’s Inter-University Center for Japanese
Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan. Her first book of poems, Ninety-five
Nights of Listening, won the Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize and was
published by Houghton-Mifflin. Her poetry has appeared in journals
such as Conjunctions, Colorado Review, American Letters &
Commentary, Paris Review, Volt, Fence, and Antioch Review and has
been included in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and
Deep Travel. She has also published translations of post-war and
contemporary Japanese women’s poetry. She lives in New York and works as a Japanese-to-English financial translator.
Also by Malinda Markham
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Having Cut the Sparrow's Heart
 Having Cut the Sparrow's Heart
$15.00 paper | 62 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-930974-89-0
Publication Date: April 5, 2010
Buy: Amazon.com | spdbooks.org
Winner of the 2009 Green Rose Prize
"Although I learned to read Malinda Markham by reading fairy tales, the categories to which these new poems belong
are more nearly those of an imagined crystallography — read
from the right angle, an intense interior bursts with light; I am
continually pushed up against a beautiful danger of the world
by this work, and yet the whole book is about a most amazing
quietness. Here, for instance, is what can happen: ‘He folds
each day to a boat that seams across water almost too narrow
to hold it.' No one else writes poems anywhere near these in
felt intelligence, in glorious sensuous detail."
—Bin Ramke
"In a masterful work of startling possibilities, Markham layers
gleaming phrases into a testimony to the world’s particularities,
which she reveals as also, paradoxically, eternal. Nothing here
is limited by history, but instead attains the kind of simultaneity
that drives myth. And like myth, her world is populated by
creatures that mean, irreducibly, only themselves. Her ready
attention to animals and birds is indicative of a compassion that
demands of the world an inventive intelligence, and offers it one
in return."
—Cole Swensen
"What might one do if one finds him- or herself in a fairy tale?:
‘There is no danger, only the trick/of time passing,' says Malinda
Markham in her long-awaited and much-anticipated second
collection of poetry that is both an invitation to immerse and an
invocation of metamorphic language-worlds that are fashioned
from the dreams of children and birds; hells and hungry ghosts;
and fairies and familiars. This elegant, image-rich verse provides
ancient, gnostic remedies that ‘keep the fear-songs at bay.'"
—Martine Bellen
Poem
To Understand Flight
Wet hands work quickly, cartilage shines into light.
No need to repeat what you’ve seen
Of me, but yes I would anchor this house
To the ground if I could. One day,
The grass said to the rain, Do not leave.
Outside this house of memory and bricks, I plucked
A wing to see the mechanics of flight. How could
Anyone have moved with skin
Exposed like that and waiting? Don’t think that the pull
Didn’t hurt or the sound. I feared the sky
Ready to answer in rain. To loosen feathers,
first close the eyes to spare them.
That day, gray light spilled into crevices,
Covered my hands in down. I was warm.
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