Abby Chew is the 2013 winner of the Orlando Prize for poetry and the author of one previous collection, Discontinued Township Roads. Her poems have appeared in journals including Camas: The Nature of the West, Cincinnati Review, Heartwood, Sou'wester, and Sweet Tree Review. An Indiana native, she teaches English at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California.

Books by Abby Chew:

Other poems on the web by Abby Chew:
Three poems
"Storm"
"Rhona's Nighttime Story"

Abby Chew's Website.

About A Bear Approaches from the Sky:

"With acute, earth-bound diction and wind-stained tones, Abby Chew's poems evoke a sensory world that is not quite human, one that feels remnant of our more richly animal past, when we were 'never without the hunting teeth.' Her composite, self-possessed voices—half man, half coyote; half crow, half bear—lope and swoop their waste spaces, smelling the air, catching the scents of prey and danger. Their collective act is to subtly and miraculously mark, and transform, the distance between us and our broader relations, seeking and recovering 'what it is that holds us all, the stranglehold / of home, of loneliness, of love.'"
—Emily Wilson

"Forget the past. History is the story of the present, and A Bear Approaches from the Sky is a creation myth of our present, of our presence in the world. Abby Chew, I see your Bear, I see Coyote and Oolie, I see tricksters mingling with Einstein and Mother and winter coat pockets full of tobacco dreams, but this isn't a dream: this is the story that happens today, so full of heart I might not make it through. The landscape is incredible—I'm recognizing things I've never seen before, under a patina of fossilized sunlight. The world we share is no less for wear; what's that chestnut from Leonard Cohen? 'There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.' I love this book for the way it roughs me up, almost as much as it loves me back. It gives me courage, and dignity. It's our friend."
— Broc Rossell