Debra Nystrom

Biography

Debra Nystrom is the author of Night Sky Frequencies and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2016), Bad River Road (Sarabande, 2009), and Torn Sky (Sarabande, 2003). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Kenyon Review, and the New Yorker. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Virginia.

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/faculty/nystrom.html

See Work

CRITICISM / Winter 2016

Ecstatic Sorrow

By Debra Nystrom

Claudia Emerson, who died in December 2014, had come to be known as a poet capable of revealing startling discoveries inside quiet, quotidian circumstances. Her poems are set mostly in Southern rural and small-town scenes, moments in...
CRITICISM / Summer 2015

Carol Muske-Dukes and the Art of Empathy

By Debra Nystrom

Muske-Dukes has written poetry, fiction, and essays addressing a broad range of subjects—from John Keats’s “This Living Hand” to Hollywood life on the inside—but what concerns her most is discovering how language used with precision and...

POETRY / Fall 2006

My Mother Wanted It All to Be Beautiful

By Debra Nystrom

The land was for bunchgrass, for cattle
grazing against the wind—not color, not
contented gazing. She dragged hoses,

POETRY / Winter 1991

The Faithless

By Debra Nystrom

These evening hours of blank heat I feel
utterly alone, until the air ripples a bit
and I think of everyone luxuriating in its
 gift
at once, like a congregation. I live, after all,

POETRY / Winter 1991

In Girls’ Cabin B

By Debra Nystrom

At rest-hour a rhythmic
faint squink, squink
in the top bunk
farthest from the counselor:

POETRY / Summer 1993

Mary Before the Pageant

By Debra Nystrom

Pinned in to the scratchy scarf
and curtain-gown, she tries seeing herself
from a long distance-beyond her parents’

POETRY / Spring 2002

The Girl Without Hands

By Debra Nystrom

Sure enough, I hear the old
I told you so:
Now that you have a child—

POETRY / Spring 1988

Silk

By Debra Nystrom

Typing paper and white-out bought, sacked,
and clutched to my breast as if with purpose,
I find myself still shopping: is it the wish to be,
or the feeling of being already no one at all
that lures me through the aisles and aisles of racks
of...

POETRY / Spring 2002

Leukemia

By Debra Nystrom

My mother’s given up on her dream
of a brand new house. What’s wrong
with what we’ve got, my father doesn’t
say, exactly. “Go ahead” is what he says,

POETRY / Winter 1991

At Ocracoke

By Debra Nystrom

This silver light could dissolve everything
into one substance. Already the borders
of sand and ocean and air are unclear,