Geraldine Connolly is the author of three poetry collections, Food for the Winter, Province of Fire, and Hand of the Wind. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including Poetry, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, and The Gettysburg Review. She is the recipient of two NEA fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and a Cafritz Foundation grant. Her work has been broadcast on WPFW radio and featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writers Almanac. She was executive editor of Poet Lore from 1994 to 2000 and has taught workshops for the the Maryland Poetry-in-the-Schools Program and the Graduate Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. She now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Other poems by Geraldine Connolly in Verse Daily:
January 12, 2010:   "Chinook" "Come January, let winter unweave..."
July 4, 2005:   "Mourner" "I love how you push aside the light's invasion..."
September 14, 2004:  "Regrets" "Out of their secret places..."

Books by Geraldine Connolly:

Other poems on the web by Geraldine Connolly:
Five poems
"The Summer I Was Sixteen"
"Legacy"
"New House"
"Dear Tomato"
"Lydia"
"Face Lift"

About Aileron:

"Open this book at random and find a trove of thrilling images and unexpected metaphors: tiny bells jingling like sins, 'a cool lake of indifference,' 'an impossible wheel of hunger.' Read this book beginning to end and discover a dark trajectory, the work required to integrate one's family of origin with a wider consciousness and responsibility. As have those in Geraldine Connolly's previous books, these poems fly. But equipped with the acute sensitivity of an aileron, they fly higher and more daringly—exposing for us our own 'beating heart, its thump and clamor.' This is the work of a gifted poet at the height of her powers."
—Natasha Sajé

"Geraldine Connolly's Aileron sensuously evokes the plenty of life--the "spiky chestnut grenade" of the buckeye tree, the "buttery sweetness" of the Seckel Pear--while moving through various landscapes, each precisely tuned to "this one small thing that lives along the road of my mind." Yet, amid these riches, a perspective of loss is ever present in "a landscape/ whose immanence turns / to ashes beneath my gaze." In poems marked by vivid language of the natural world and mindful of ecological loss, the poet invites the reader "to turn and tilt, to stay aloft."
—Rebecca Seiferle

"In Geraldine Connolly's Aileron an inheritance proves to be a "raft of broken bread," yet memories of piercing beauty linger. So much of the sensuous world settles into these poems: lizards, starlings, quail, a chestnut "polished as a mahogany piano." Brilliant images are backlit with emotions that resemble acute homesickness. What's most loved may vanish--but not without first coming to vivid life in these remarkable, fully realized poems."
—Lee Upton