Katie Schmid is a poet living in Nebraska. Her work has appeared most recently in The Nation. Her debut book of poems, Nowhere, is out from the University of New Mexico Press.

Books by Katie Schmid:

Other poems on the web by Katie Schmid:
Three poems
"The Boatman"
"The Holiness of Degradation"
"My Death"
"Where I Was Born"
Two poems
Two poems

Katie Schmid's Website.

Katie Schmid on Twitter.

About Nowhere:

"There is a complexity of feeling, consideration, and language in Katie Schmid's Nowhere, a work that carries the weightiness of elegy and the defiant hopefulness of incantation as she writes the hard things: of the body, the painful legacy of family, and the dangerous force of desire. In 'At the Bus Stop' she captures with characteristic self-awareness and grace the spirit of her collection: 'Here is the grief / at the heart of my language' In poems of great technical mastery and vulnerability, Schmid's Nowhere announces the arrival of a beautifully unsettling and sensual voice in American poetry."
—Kwame Dawes

"Honeyed, ambrosial, but with an underlying threat of decay, the poems in Nowhere are a tangle of grief and longing at the place where elegy meets aubade, where a girl 'is trying to climb into another girl / through her mouth' and a monster 'hung his grief // like curtains in the air.' . . . Morbidly funny, sexy, blistering, and vulnerable, Nowhere is a triumph, a wound that glistens in the dark."
—Emily Skaja

"Nowhere is the gut-punch, roller-coaster study of a psyche forged from absence and longing. I'd call it haunting, but that's a bit too Vanity Fair for the gritty-pretty tones that temper Katie Schmid's unflinching poems. Nowhere is actually haunted. Traces of the "ghost father's" signature traits--recklessness, addiction, and magnetism--ensnare the speaker in turn, manifesting in swaggering revelations about self-sabotage, intimacy, and the nature of possession. Nowhere is a BIG mood. Katie Schmid is scary good."
—Marcus Wicker

"Katie Schmid writes with crushing honesty--each narrative impulse fractured with the paradoxical urge of poetry: to contain what is impossible to contain, to say what is unsayable. Tracing the contours of the body, of masculinity and motherhood, Schmid's poems reveal, one by one, each grief that gender makes of us, each loss desire demands we bring back into ourselves. And yet, the necessary beauty of longing shines through in each swallowing, in each insatiable and sorrowed line of this stunning collection."
—Stacey Waite