Dorsey Craft : part one

Dorsey Craft’s debut collection, Plunder (Bauhan 2020), won the 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She is also the author of a chapbook, The Pirate Anne Bonny Dances the Tarantella (CutBank 2020). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Greensboro Review, Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, Southern Indiana Review, Thrush Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She lives in Lake City, Florida and serves as a poetry editor for Southeast Review.

What are you working on?

I’ve been writing poems about the mourning dove. It’s a cliché kind of bird, but I love the way that it pops up in literature and mythology. I grew up hunting doves, so I paid a lot attention to the way they fly, the shape their bodies make in the sky, what they sound like, and I’m interested in writing poems that put that experience in conversation with the dove as archetype. I was talking to my writing group on Zoom recently and we agreed that the quarantine feels like it’s coming into the poems no matter what.