Tanya Larkin was born in Montebelluna, Italy and raised in Pennsylvania. She attended Columbia University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and teaches at The New England Institute of Art. Her poems have appeared in Conduit, Quarterly West, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Other poems by Tanya Larkin in Verse Daily:
April 25, 2008:   "Baby Epic" "Gird your mysterious loins, I am trying to think..."

Books by Tanya Larkin:

Other poems on the web by Tanya Larkin:
Four poems

About My Scarlet Ways:

"The poems in Tanya Larkin's MY SCARLET WAYS spin and dive into myth, our sacred places, and the psyche, while weary of the 'suckhole of sincerity.' Her work is fierce and peculiarly profound, engaged and authentic; her syntax stretches like a tightrope upon which her surprising imagery dips and then balances most skillfully. Larkin is a poet of intelligence and intuition, of wily and wicked wisdom."
—Denise Duhamel

"'I was this pink sun-cradled snake,' sings the battered figurehead strapped to the prow of this violently beautiful, heartbroken book. Full of Energy and Agony—Dickinson's own presiding spirits—the lines of these poems pursue their scarlet ways to the hungry heart of Eros with an urgency and relentlessness that crosses into the metaphysical. Again and again, as the speaker appears to retreat behind a veil of gorgeous style, the veil parts and we behold a steady gaze, staring into the mirror, 'the mirror where I practice how to kill / and spare a life in one look.' This is a passionate and excoriating book; prepare to swoon."
—Suzanne Buffam