Carmen Germain is a painter and poet and the author of a chapbook and three poetry collections, the latest being Life Drawing (MoonPath Press). "The Fixed Stars" comes from this book, which pays homage to van Gogh, Morris Graves, and Alice Neal, among other artists—poets, visual artists, and musicians—and explores our connections to all life, human and nonhuman. She lives on the Olympic peninsula of Washington.

Other poems by Carmen Germain in Verse Daily:
October 16, 2019:   "Olga Confronts Modernism" "'As for me, I have no fear of art,' Picasso said...."
October 25, 2008:   "Chinese Box" "All night I climb in dream rubble..."

Books by Carmen Germain:

Other poems on the web by Carmen Germain:
Two poems
"Thorn on a Riff of Sweet"

Carmen Germain on Twitter.

About Life Drawing:

"The poems in Life Drawing come from a painterly perspective that loves the colors and textures of life. Germain's sensibility is generous: 'I rummage things of childhood/ to find lost blessings' and 'What is given astonishes.' A central tension of the book is the way she grapples with life's hard paradoxes: truth versus embellishing, salt versus sugar, blood and bone versus soul. It's a poetry that embraces the ordinary and sees art as a way to both praise, and make sense of, the world."
—Joseph Powell

"In Life Drawing, Carmen Germain captures moments with a painter's eye and an appetite avid for delight: 'dawn blooming vermilion, ' unripe blackberries 'green as Chinese / porcelain, ' a moon that rises 'like a cabbage.' In 'The Fixed Stars, ' van Gogh works 'with nothing in his belly but milk / and dry bread.' Everywhere, Germain offers us the rewards of such devotion, as in 'Before Time': 'my hand in a woman's handprint / from the eleventh century, my fingerbones / in place of hers.'"
—Bethany Reid