Ethna McKiernan is a Minnesota author with strong Irish connections, including a year's stay in Dublin as a child and over 50 trips back since. Her first book, Caravan, was co-published by Dedalus and Midwest Villages & Voices in 1989, the same year she was awarded a State Arts Boad Fellowship in literature. Her most recent work has appeared in The New Hibernia Review, Poetry Ireland, and 33 Minnesota Poets. She is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.

About The One Who Swears You Can't Start Over:

Ethna McKiernan's long-awaited second poetry collection is both an elegiac record of losses and a testimony to our collective human determination to begin again. Though the book is centered around family and losses (loss of a mother to Alzheimer's, loss of a child, loss of a friend to suicide), it also includes a number of coming-of-age poems; poems on poetry, including the dead-pan funny "Why I Lied My Way Through Childhood;" persona poems written in voices unique as Peter the Apostle and Snow White; several sonnets, a sestina and other pieces about the author's children; and poems of deep praise, deep joy, such as "Diner at the Frost Place" and "Homage to the Common."