Winter Dogs

"From Chicago to Moscow, from the Mississippi to Mt. Hood, Drew Blanchard furnishes his landscapes with stories of things people consume (''blackberry pie'' and ''ice buckets full of Blatz'') and the things that consume them (''absence'' and ''sage advice''). He creates a world that is intensely felt, where, ''Words thrown like barroom bottles/ break in evening air''." Kathleen Rooney, Rose Metal Press"In Blanchard''s poetry, personal stories become universal stories in the same way that ''two bison become an electric fence''. It feels like magic, but also breathtakingly real. Never a bird when it can be a sparrow, never a creek when it can be Trout Creek. And magic of this sort should not be missed."Erica Wright, Guernica MagazineDrew Blanchard holds a BA in Journalism from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University. He is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he has twice been awarded The Academy of American Poets Prize. In January of 2009 he received a university research grant to work with the novelist Iván Thays in Lima, Perú and in the summer of 2010 he was a graduate student scholar at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, a scholarship provided by the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures. His writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Notre Dame Review, Guernica / a magazine of art & politics, Blackbird, Meridian and elsewhere. Winter Dogs is his debut collection.