Press Bio: I received my MFA from Georgia State University, where I received the Gerard Manley Hopkins Award. My poetry has appeared widely in magazines including Five Points, Prairie schooner, The North American Review, The Cortland Review, Agenda, and Ars Interpres. In 2009, my work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I teach writing at the University of New Hampshire and live with my wife and dog in Exeter, NH.

"Blackberries"

It may in the end come to this: memory
the tongue will not abandon to fact,
the dark fruit bobbing in sugared cream. . .
We made our shirts into baskets, dawn
hung dew-luminous on branches,
cricket-thick glade abuzz with rising heat,
our young hands among thorns. It is enough,
perhaps, to have lived this, to have known
the summer air stung ripe, to hold
up against all that is leaving us
these berry-stained t-shirts, fingers
purpled sticky-sweet, the warm cream
dribbling our chins, and this mouth
still bruised with what it can’t say.

— James Rioux