Chelsea Rathburn is the author of one previous collection, The Shifting Line, which won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, New England Review, Five Points, and many other journals, and her honors include a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Originally from Miami, she attended Florida State University and earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband, the poet James Davis May, and their daughter, Adelyn.

Other poems by Chelsea Rathburn in Verse Daily:
March 29, 2011:   "How it Happened" "I blame that little village in Spain..."
June 25, 2009:   "Bats in the Attic" "By day, God how we hated them hanging there..."
September 10, 2006:   "To a Crumbling House" " Not yet unlivable, your ceiling sags..."

Books by Chelsea Rathburn:

Other poems on the web by Chelsea Rathburn:
"What Was Left"
"Firworks"
"English Sonnet"
"Unused Lines"
"Teaching Poetry at the School for the Blind"
"A Raft of Grief"

Chelsea Rathburn's Website.

Chelsea Rathburn on Twitter.

About A Raft of Grief:

"In her excellent A Raft of Grief, Chelsea Rathburn probes the varieties and nuances of love and relationships with unsparing lucidity. “Maybe it’s not the eye/but the mind that can take only so much beauty, or solitude, or pleasure,/ maybe we travel both to find and forget ourselves,” she says in this book set in places as varied as Paris, Florida, Krakow. I love how she’s able to affirm what can happen between two people, while asking if a story-teller sometimes has to “sacrifice lovers and selves to the narrative arc?” She’s willing to, which is one reason why her narratives are so persuasive – her allegiance throughout is to the poem as a whole. She will not let her fine moments overwhelm, as lesser poets often do; her limpid, yet complicated phrasing is always part of the poem’s fabric."
—Stephen Dunn