"They look back at the leopard like the leopard."-Randall Jarrell, The Woman at the Washington Zoo
Penned: Zoo Poems gathers English-language poems from around the world, spanning more than a century of captivation with the worlds inside the cage and out. Our guides on this journey, at times nostalgic, haunting, whimsical and provocative, include eminent and emerging poets-Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Crozier, Countee Cullen, Emily Dickinson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes, AA Milne, Marianne Moore, Al Purdy, AK Ramanujan, and Matthew Sweeney. The poems themselves are as rich and varied as the species they corral. We wander through the poems of this eclectic anthology as through a zoo, looking back at the animal, to paraphrase Randell Jarrell, like the animal.

Stephanie Bolster’s first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Signal/Véhicule), won the Governor General`s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award in 1998 and will appear in French with Les Éditions du Noroît in autumn 2007, translated by Daniel Canty. She has also published Two Bowls of Milk (McClelland & Stewart), which won the Archibald Lampman Award and was shortlisted for the Trillium Award, and Pavilion (McClelland & Stewart). Her work has appeared in literary journals internationally and has also garnered her the Bronwen Wallace Award, the Norma Epstein Award, and The Malahat Review`s Long Poem Prize. Her several chapbooks include, most recently, Biodôme (above/ground) and Past the Roman Arena and the Cedar of Lebanon (Delirium). She is the editor of The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems (McGill-Queen’s) by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner and is currently editing an anthology of poetry and prose excerpts pertaining to zoos. Raised in Burnaby, B.C., she now lives in Montréal, where she teaches in the creative writing programme at Concordia University.

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