Louise Mathias was born in Bedford, England and grew up in England and Los Angeles. She is the author of Lark Apprentice, chosen by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize and published by New Issues Press in 2004, as well as a chapbook, Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest, which won the Burnside Review Chapbook contest. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Massachusetts Review, Octopus, TriQuarterly, and many other journals. She splits her time between Joshua Tree, California, a small town in the Mojave Desert and Northern Indiana.

Other poems by Louise Mathias in Verse Daily:
July 6, 2004:  "Agapornis Personata (Masked Love Birds)" "It's their use of color that gets me: languid..."
June 4, 2004:  "Stark Heaven" "Each winter has its inopulent day...."
October 24, 2003:  "Mute Swan" "(no trumpet) & (no keeper). Save the loyal..."

Books by Louise Mathias:

Other poems on the web by Louise Mathias:
"The 10:15 to Cambridge"
Two poems
"Sea Crimes"
Three poems
Five poems
Three poems
"Memento Mori"
Two poems

Louise Mathias on Twitter.

About The Traps:

"Cruelty is the secret to these blinding, delicate poems, a secret preserved by melodrama of the subtlest kind, untold, except by the operations of language turning away from itself: cutting, circling, fainting, breaking, lulling, binding. Scenes of indirection captivate, posing the enigma of cruelty in our own age: spoilage, compulsion, a teenage relic, a mystery play restaged in the post-urban deserts of Los Angeles. Mathias sets a snare in these poems from which the reader, once caught, struggles in vain to release herself."
—Daniel Tiffany

"The poems of Louise Mathias's The Traps are grounded in the brief, frozen moments that precede being unsettled, startled, unhinged—but they're not so preoccupied as to forget that speakers need listeners, poems company. Their hard stares bring with them outstretched arms."
—Graham Foust