The Fruiting Year, by Bridget Meeds

Prose poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The Fruiting Year is a collection of prose poems full of mothers and children, forests and fruits, candles and moonlight. Studded with echoes from other languages, its subjects think about God, plant gardens, wait for lovers, and bury children.

The prose poem is a strange creature, too short to be a story, too dense to be a poem. Bridget Meeds uses this form to layer image upon image, creating a rich world of nature and human love.

Bridget Meeds has published poetry with Faber and Faber, the American Poetry Review, and many small presses. Among her creative projects, she was a poet-in-residence at the Wilson Laboratory Synchrotron; co-wrote lyrics to a song cycle that premiered at Carnegie Hall, and collaborated on an experimental film that premiered at MoMA. She is co-founder of Ithaca City of Asylum, a non-profit that hosts dissident writers, and the founder of Widows and Orphans Books, a poetry chapbook press. She has degrees from Lancaster University and Ithaca College.