Laura Van Prooyen is author of three collections of poetry: Frances of the Wider Field (Lily Poetry Review Books) Our House Was on Fire (Ashland Poetry Press) nominated by Philip Levine and winner of the McGovern Prize and Inkblot and Altar (Pecan Grove Press). She is also co-author with Gretchen Bernabei of Text Structures from Poetry, a book of writing lessons for educators of grades 4-12 (Corwin Literacy). Van Prooyen is the Managing Editor for The Cortland Review and is the founder of Next Page Press: www.nextpage-press.com. She lives in San Antonio, TX.

Other poems by Laura Van Prooyen in Verse Daily:
March 13, 2015:   "Revision" "Understand, this is a story. You are gone..."
September 15, 2007:   "October" " It must be October, when the bones..."

Books by Laura Van Prooyen:

Other poems on the web by Laura Van Prooyen:
Two poems
"Frances of the Cadillac"
"Lines Speak to Each Other"
"Avenue F"
"As Always, Thirty Years Between Us"
"Location: Frances"

Laura Van Prooyen's Website.

Laura Van Prooyen on Twitter.

About Frances of the Wider Field:

"Frances of the Wider Field is about mothers, daughters, time, mortality—the loss of memory and meaning. Van Prooyen's poems have clarity and ferocity, a wild imaginative grace that captures the joy and strangeness of our most intimate and familiar experiences. Frances appears part god, part curious child, part the small solitary voice inside. Van Prooyen asks ' Is a sigh a word? Is a body a word? / Is a tongue the beginning?' She tells us 'Memory cannot undo the future. Frances, if I said, /tonight I thank the seven sisters, it's really / the blue dust of God between them. Or you.' This beautiful book cracks us wide open and leaves us charged and changed."
—Sheila Black

"One concern of Laura Van Prooyen's marvelous, many-layered Frances of the Wider Field is the painful loss of memory, but just as urgent rises the physical action of re-membering, gathering the corporeal body back to wholeness via meditative inquiry and attentive detail: 'Miss you is a street full of pecans that roll under/ my feet.' And later, 'against the fog / a bright orange on a neighbors tree/ tells me where I am not.' The world we travel when visiting these pages is richly populated with peacocks and sisters, the gods of childhood and the dogs of a new town. Frances too serves a location of both memory and geography, both wider field and fellow traveler, demonstrating the myriad ways we both are and aren't where we come from, as when 'what defines me is constancy / of place, and my urge against it.' These are vivid, original, unflinching, and ultimately transformative poems."
—Jenny Browne