Julie Agoos

Julie Agoos is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Above the Land (Yale University Press, 1987) and Calendar Year (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996).

She received a BA from Harvard University, and an MA from The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University. She was the 1989 poet in residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH.

Agoos taught for eight years as a lecturer in the creative writing program at Princeton University. She also taught in the English department and MFA program in poetry at Brooklyn College since 1994.[1] She teaches courses that cover various subjects including Victorian Poetry, modern British & Irish Poetry, as well as special courses designed as tutorial courses in reading and writing.[2]

Her area of expertise is in the dramatic and narrative modes of poetry, and in lyric strategies for the long poem.[2] Agoos is also interested in exploring, in book form, the ways in which poems overlap and infiltrate each other to create a sustained form beyond the forms of individual lyrics.[2]

She lives in Nyack, New York.

From Library Journal:

Using images that sometimes startle the reader, this 30-year-old poet reevaluates her own "land" through travel (London, Florence) and close observations. Agoos pays careful attention to a place's ghoststhe impressive lead poem traces in 10 stanzas the history of a farm through its inhabitants and the weather. She reveals an adept juggling of rhythms"delighted, self-invited, second-sighted" for end-rhymes; occasional brilliant reversals"Oh my darling, look: how life/ imitates art in the afternoon"; and a tuning of the senses, as in "shy grey as those feathers." There is a sure presence and considerable skill here, as one would expect from the latest winner of Yale's "Younger Poet" series.

Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, English Dept., Indiana University of Pennsylvania[3]

From Partisan Review about Property written by Julie Agoos:

Her language is simple, sensuous, and concrete, with a quiet lyricism that approaches radiance.

Copper Canyon Press[4]

Linda Gregerson, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, on Property written by Julie Agoos:

Form too is an ethical choice. Forced speech, broken speech, mixed agendas, disrupted lines of thought and realms of discourse: these often have more to say about the dispositions of power and bad conscience among us than do any number of explicit revelations... The shadows of racial hatred, domestic dysfunction, and ostracism haunt the page [In Property]. The push and pull of forensic inquiry assumes its own kind of violence, depriving speakers of their natural refuge in silence and private sorrow. Reticence mingles with concealment, good faith with bad, 'benefit of the doubt' with hypocrisy. No one is exempt... The deep brilliance of this book is indistinguishable from its ethical subtlety. Agoos distills the simplest contours of human speech—fragile, imperfect, impeded—to render a complex portrait of human community. Her speakers are sometimes capable of startling penetration; they are often inarticulate: both states become in the hands of this remarkable poet a species of eloquence.

Copper Canyon Press[4]

• Robert Frost Place Residency Fellowship. 1989[2]
• Tow Professorship Award, Brooklyn College. 2008[2]
• Creative Achievement Award, Brooklyn College. 2006[2]
• Towson State University Prize for Literature. 1988[2]
• Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. 1987[2]
• Briggs Literary Fellowship for one year of travel to Florence, Italy. Department of English, Harvard University. 1979[2]
• Grolier Poetry Prize, Grolier Book Shop, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Awards and Honors) 1979[2]
• Lloyd McKim Garrison Poetry Prize, Department of English, Harvard University. 1979[2]

Collections

• Above the Land. Yale University Press. September 10, 1987. ISBN 978-0-300-03861-3.
• Property. Ausable Press. May 1, 2008. ISBN 978-1-931337-37-3.

List of poems

• Language and Space in Julie Agoos Poetics