This collection contains the first published and publicly appreciated poems of Elizabeth Socolow's life as a poet. They led up to her writing and winning the Barnard Poetry Prize in 1987 for Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton. Many of them are in the voice of known characters (persona poems)- Jocasta, Ophelia, Cleopatra-or addressed to famous figures such as Homer. These pieces move back and forth between a kind of easy, mostly celebratory address to friends, the "Summer Porches" of the title and the unfinished meditations on public characters or statues or situations. A few, such as "If Augustine Had Been a Woman" or "Why Call a Dog Brooklyn, He Asked" turn the received world around, so that there is a playfulness and surprise the reader comes to expect.
About the Author: Elizabeth Socolow won the Barnard Poetry Prize in 1987, and her ms. Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton was published by Beacon Press in 1988. Her second short book of poems, Between Silence and Praise, was published in 2006 by Ragged Sky Press of Princeton, New Jersey (in a run of 500). She is a winner of the Isotope Magazine Poetry Prize and of the Canadian CV2 Two Day Poem Prize in 2006. Her care for her ailing sister, her father, and her robust students, teaching as an itinerant adjunct only, often at four institutions at once, accounts for the long gaps between publications. She was educated at Vassar College and at Harvard University, where she completed her doctoral work on Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama in England. After winning the Barnard Poetry Prize, she was a guest poet at Barnard College and at Vassar for two years. In 1990-91, the year after Dead Poets Society was filmed at St. Andrew's School, she taught there (a living poet, in contrast to Robin Williams). She has taught at a community college in Pennsylvania and at high schools and universities in Michigan, as well as working as a teaching poet for The Writer's Voice and for Terry Blackhawk's astonishing public school program, Inside/Out. She worked as a poet in the schools in New Jersey, whose Council on the Arts twice gave her grants; she has lived most of her adult life in the Garden State after a New York City childhood. Her essay about horses and Sir Philip Sidney appeared in The Horse as Cultural Icon, edited by Peter Edwards, Karl A. E. Enenkel and Elspeth Graham (Brill, 2011). She is the mother of two sons and the grandmother of three young children.