Discipline: Literature – poetry

Sarah Arvio

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: Annapolis, MD
MacDowell Fellowships: 1998
Sarah Arvio is an American poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of Visits from the Seventh, Sono: cantos, and night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis (all from Alfred A. Knopf) and a combined edition of Sono and Visits from the Seventh, from Bloodaxe. She has won the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Bogliasco fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and other honors. Arvio has been widely published in journals and magazines. Her work has also appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2015, The Best American Poetry 1998, The Best American Erotic Poetry, Women’s Work, the FSG Book of 20th Century Italian Poetry, the Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, and Ariadne’s Thread: A Collection of Contemporary Women’s Journals. The poet and philosopher John Koethe, in his citation for Arvio’s Boston Review prize, said this: “The idea of the distinctive poetic voice…seems central to Sarah Arvio’s poetry, which sounds like no one else’s. Yet the voice in her poems seems to emanate from a kind of psychic doppelganger, originating from an imagined self somewhere outside her and passing through her on the way to the reader. It writes the self from which it issues, rather than the other way around, and is constructed out of wordplay and verbal associations… The results are poems that possess both an eerie psychological presence and a blunt verbal materiality.”

Studios

Banks

Sarah Arvio worked in the Banks studio.

Banks, an ell on the north end of the Lodge dormitory, was first used as an artist’s studio in 1970. Since then, it has played host to an extraordinary list of writers working in several disciplines. In all seasons, Fellows have enjoyed the pastoral view through the French doors facing a field…

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