Ander Monson grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where it snows . . . a lot. He lived briefly in Saudi Arabia, Iowa, and in the Deep South, where he got his MFA from the University of Alabama. He edits the magazine Diagram and the New Michigan Press, among other projects. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including The North American Review, Fence, FIELD, Gulf Coast, The Bellingham Review, Ploughshares, and others. His fiction collection, Other Electricities, is published by Sarabande Books. He teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

Other poems by Ander Monson in Verse Daily:
January 14, 2004:  "Muster" "This is what you got me up for? Cats..."

About Vacationland:

"From the wreckage of accident—snowmobiles, cars, bodies through the air and below the ice—Monson at once upends and refreshes the relationship between damage, loss, and memory, all to dizzying, inventive effect."
—Carl Phillips

"Reading Ander Monson's work is like ripping the back off and looking into a radio able to receive and broadcast the longings of a new nation. The insides spark and shine with a dark brilliance—there's electricity, intrictive cicuitry, incalculable emotional physics. The poems receive, like Whitman's, 'the young man's heart's complaint' answering questions about grief and weather and love we didn't know we asked. The work is something new, in the best sense, and index of our astonishment."
—Bruce Smith