Jean Gallagher is the author of This Minute (Poets Out Loud Prize, 2004) and Stubborn (FIELD Poetry Prize, 2005). She is a Professor of English at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, and lives with her husband and daughter in New York City.

Other poems by Jean Gallagher in Verse Daily:
September 5, 2006:   "No Place But" " There is no place but this sharp edge..."

Books by Jean Gallagher:

Other poems on the web by Jean Gallagher:
Three poems
Two poems

About Start:

"Jean Gallagher plunges us into the mystery-shrouded chthonic rites of Demeter and Persephone in a stunning postmodern Homeric hymn, stepping into the company of other reinventors of the ancient myths like H.D., Anne Carson, and Louise Gluck. In her haunting, spare, mystical enactments of ancient rites of loss, descent into the earth and underearth, and ecstatic return, she leaves readers like one of the initiates at Eleusis who 'came out of the mystery hall feeling like a stranger to myself.' We're ungrounded by these poems, cast among the mysteries and ecstacies: reading Start, I felt--as Gallagher's Persephone herself says--'the ground I never knew / could open did.'"
—Bruce Beasley