Larissa Szporluk was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and received her BA from the University of Michigan. She studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received an MA in Literature at the University of California Berkeley, and an MFA from the University of Virginia where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow. She began her full-time teaching career at Bowling Green State University in 2000 and has since become an associate professor of Creative Writing and Literature. In 2005, she was a visiting professor at Cornell University. She is the author of four previous books of poetry: Embryos & Idiots (Tupelo, 2007), Dark Sky Question, winner of the Barnard Poetry Prize (Beacon Pres 1998), Isolato, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (Univ of Iowa, 2000), and The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind (Alice James Books, 2003). Her work is included in Best American Poetry 1991 and 2001, New American Voices, and numerous other anthologies. In 2003, she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to work on Embryos and Idiots.

Other poems by Larissa Szporluk in Verse Daily:
May 29, 2007:   "Cukoo" " I nudge the eggs..."
May 15, 2007:   "Gargoyle" " A hunter's sickness..."
October 24, 2006:   "Windmill" " I can't cry so I..."
February 1, 2006:   "Judges" " There is nothing beautiful about us...."
September 24, 2005:   "Cuckoo" " I nudge the eggs..."
September 14, 2005:   "Loosely Related Sheep" " Jump, uncle, jump...."
March 27, 2003:  "Matsukaze" "All that is built falls at night..."

Books by Larissa Szporluk:

Other poems on the web by Larissa Szporluk:
Two poems
"Ladybirds"
"Dark Eros"
"Witch-Catalogue"
"Villian Horizon"
Five poems
"Isolato"
"Orrido"

Larissa Szporluk According to Wikipedia.

About Traffic with Macbeth:

"Like Emily Brontë, whose work, her sister Charlotte claimed,'was hewn in a wild workshop,' Larissa Szporluk is no coward soul, and her poems have always taken dark, unflinching, daring risks, thematically and linguistically. The turf of Traffic with Macbeth is part heartland noir, part merciless domestic surreality, part fabular theater, in which the players – mothers, ruminants and other creatures, harpies, weird sisters, gargoyles – move through time in bodies prey to all the economies of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, that 'desert place' of ambition, violence, desire, terror, envy, filicide, cruelty, and revolt. This is the world as it is, where the battle is both 'lost and won': 'love and hate — / same track, same train,' Szporluk writes in 'Rogue’s March.' In 'Edgepeople,' the speaker, perhaps a mother watching her child beside the sea, muses on mortality: 'From where I sit, / my liquored perch, // I love your death, / its far-out nerve — // and then, on cue, / I swoop headfirst // and all our puzzle pieces, / like a million bloody // feathers, come home / in full to roost. In the / jigsaw of eternity, / dying is the glue.' This book does 'mouth honor' to the entire spectacle of “come what may,” from the “blood at war / within a self” to the 'ghost-waves' of whatever music we can make of even our most brutal hours."
—Lisa Russ Spaar

"Szporluk’s fifth collection evokes an atmosphere as darkly portentous as that of Shakespeare’s play: the book is a wild, clever assembly of lyrics that work through a world of molder and rot, entrapment and transformation, love and—unabashedly—hate. The hallucinatory delight of many of the monologues in this book comes from the poet’s assumption of a variety of speakers who are not psychologized but rather realized at the level of language: in the poem ‘Gargoyle,’ we hear the strange dimeter of the speaker’s ‘feeble dream/ of a mauve wet gut/ of a unicorn-dove,’ or, in ‘Windmill,’ the circling music of heavy enjambment: ‘I can’t cry so I/ smack the extent/ of my face but I/ can’t so I hate/ the oblique of my/ vanes.’ Throughout the collection, Szporluk’s verse, which ranges from dreamy to strange to grotesque, sounds like neither Shakespeare’s pentameter, the rhythm of natural speech, nor like the free verse favored by most contemporary poets, but rather most resembles the clipped, rollicking incantation of the charm of Macbeth’s three witches. Desperate, dense, horrible, and lovely, Szporluk’s work is, to use those witches’ words, a similar ‘charm of powerful trouble.’"
—Publishers Weekly