Lynne Knight, a former fellow in poetry at Syracuse University, taught high school English in Upstate New York, then moved to California where she taught part-time at San Francisco Bay Area community colleges and began writing poetry again. She now devotes herself full-time to writing. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections, three of them prize winners, and four chapbooks, three of them also prize winners. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Kenyon Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review. Her other awards and honors include publication in Best American Poetry, the Prix de l'Alliance Francaise 2006, a PSA Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, the 2009 Rattle Poetry Prize, and an NEA grant.

Other poems by Lynne Knight in Verse Daily:
May 22, 2007:   "Afterbirth" " There's a look of panic on his face...."
June 13, 2006:   "Cell Talk" " I ate and ate, all mouth...."
September 27, 2005:   "Vermont Barn" " The barn is so weathered it may collapse..."
February 16, 2005:  "Letter To An Old Lover" "What kind of quarrel would go on so long..."
February 6, 2005:  "A Sentimental Education" "Then I thought all I had to do was close my eyes..."
May 24, 2004:  "First Year of My Mother's Dementia" "I opened the door and flicked on the lights..."
April 16, 2004:  "To a Friend Unable to Write" "It looks like nothing much, a scene..."
August 2, 2003:  "Body in Late Meditation" "An hour from now the river will be grey..."
June 13, 2003:  "Driving Through the Valley" "Nothing all that strange about the scene..."
February 18, 2003 (Quarter 2 favorite):  "Letter After the Diagnosis" "This is the window I love best. It looks down..."
December 10, 2002:  For a Friend Whose Love Has Left "For a week now, the deer has been roaming...."
November 25, 2002:  Letter After the Diagnosis "This is the window I love the best. It looks down..."

Books by Lynne Knight:

Other poems on the web by Lynne Knight:
"Against Order"
"The Twenty-year Workshop"
Five poems
Three poems
Four poems
Six poems
Ten poems

Lynne Knight's Website.

About The Persistence of Longing:

"?I love these poems, love how they sweep me along, sweep me up into the arms of the kind of longing that seems unsayable, untranslatable, impossible to describe in any language, with any words—the words turning back into breath, as this poet says, as she creates the sense of that longing, itself, in words, in these sometimes-breathless lines, sometimes against the restraint of form, the sweet ache of rhyme, creating that sense of urgency that's so like desire, itself, and the sense of danger that infuses even the deepest pleasure, especially the deepest pleasure. I've never read poems that seem to me more accurate about love and desire and sexual relationships and their almost-inevitable shattering—darkly gorgeous and expertly-crafted poems, with a white-hot lyric intensity and a narrative pull that becomes cumulative, an erotic veering toward doom. And yet, the persistence of longing is the life force, too, refusing to exhaust itself: How could anything in the universe be undying / when everything rushed forward, trailing light?"
—Cecilia Woloch