Spotlight on Blas Falconer and his new poetry collection, “The Foundling Wheel” (Four Way Books)

To contact us Click HERE

Blas Falconer is the author of  A Question of Gravity and Light(University of Arizona Press, 2007), and The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: ALiterary Press, 2006). He is also a co-editor for The Other Latin@: Writing Against aSingular Identity (University of Arizona Press, 2011), and Mentor & Muse: Essays fromPoets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010).
An associate professor at Austin Peay State University,he serves as the coordinator of the Creative Writing Program and the poetryeditor of Zone 3 Magazine/Zone 3 Press. In January of 2012, Falconeralso began teaching for the low-residency MFA program at Murray StateUniversity.
Falconer’s awards include a 2011 National Endowment forthe Arts Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets& Writers, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, the New Delta ReviewEyster Prize for Poetry, and the Barthelme Fellowship.
Born and raised in Virginia, Falconer earned an M.F.A.from the University of Maryland (1997), and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing andLiterature from the University of Houston (2002). He currently lives inNashville, Tennessee with his family.

Falconer’s newestbook is the poetry collection, The Foundling Wheel (Four WayBooks, 2012). The publisher describesthe collection: “Centered on the adoption of Blas Falconer's son, The Foundling Wheel creates an emotionalmosaic that explores the decision to become a parent. In ‘The Annunciation,’Falconer imagines Gabriel’s visitation: ‘Faith, he might have said, / as thecells of disbelief began to multiply: a son/ who'd face great pain? Certaindeath?’ The book begins as the desire to have a child is first realized, andwhile it certainly rejoices in the bond between father and son—‘my body, tuned/ to hear you cry before you cry, stirs’—it also grapples with fears thataccompany parenthood, loss of the former self, and the transformation frommanhood into fatherhood.”
Praise for The Foundling Wheel:
“The pastoral isthe lyric of a landscape. Blas Falconer's landscapes—and the people he placesin them—elevate the pastoral to a level where the music has the force of anidea, in a language at once symbolic and probic. His ‘Field Marks for Birds,’his ‘Warm Day in Winter,’ his ‘Bluffs of Pico Duarte’ become interiors ofassociation and moral conviction, and the book they appear in, The Foundling Wheel, a force in itself.”—Stanley Plumly
For a complete list ofupcoming readings, visit Blas Falconer’s events page.