Christopher Nelson was born in Heber City, Utah, and studied at Dixie College and Southern Utah University. He is the author of Blood Aria and three chapbooks: Blue House; Capital City at Midnight, recipient of the 2014 BLOOM Chapbook Prize; and Love Song for the New World. He is the founder and editor of Green Linden Press and the journal Under a Warm Green Linden, named by Entropy Magazine as one of the best journals of 2017, and three times a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award.
Among his honors are fellowships from the Poetry Society of America and the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, and inclusion in the Best New Poets series. His poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Image, Long Poem Magazine, The Missouri Review, RHINO Poetry, Salamander, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere.
Work
Fidelity
Fidelity
Night comes first to the innermost
branches of the elm, then hedgerows, then entire lawns.
My neighbor gets ready for bed, her one lit window and the red pulse
of a radio tower above the bay. Our backyards are small
and touch each other along one side.
___
From Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021)
Certainty
Certainty
How one inch beneath the surface the roots
make a kind of net, which I break
so that I can put you in, royal catchfly, so that
I might attend to your growing—given rain, given
light, luck, and, most difficult, my constancy—
so that I might look up from the dishes or
daydreaming and be a little stunned by
your shock of red, as on a stroll we come across
the aftereffects of a fistfight. And maybe,
with more summers, you’ll be established,
and the hummingbirds will duel for your nectar
so that we can mistake it all for a dance—
a few more summers, which we should have.
___
Originally published in RHINO Poetry (2020)
Winterseed
Winterseed
what could have been
still shining
in the broken
bast and baddened blooms
what might yet be
abides
with little room and no conception
of hope worthless
and practically invisible
you are
already found
___
From Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021)
Bibliography
Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021)
Love Song for the New World (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019)
Capital City at Midnight (BLOOM, 2016)
Blue House (Poetry Society of America, 2009)
Links
"Hallucination with Four Fathers"
"This Time Thistles"
"Imbolc"
"Landscape with Parallax"
Reading at the University of Arizona Poetry Center
Speedway & Swan: A Conversation with Brian Blanchfield
