Christian Anton Gerard is the author of Holdfast (C&R Press, 2017) and Wilmot Here, Collect For Stella (WordTech, 2014). His work appears widely in national and international magazines. Gerard has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Prague Summer Program, Pushcart Prize nominations, an Academy of American Poets Award, and the 2013 Iron Horse Literary Review Discovered Voices Award. Gerard holds a BA from Miami University (OH), an MFA from Old Dominion University, and a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee. He lives in Fort Smith, AR, where he’s an Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith.
"But how poetry can touch this utmost experience of being, before which language falters, I do not know, and can’t know, I am unable to know–unless I turn to poetry again...”
"I think most contemporary poets occupy a fairly humble place in the universe, that we have few Byronic illusions about our fame. The act of reading my poems to an audience will always be a bit scary."
These poems often resist the reader in the same way his speaker resists his father, but the book’s exploration of such distance creates a closeness between the reader and the…