Kelly Cherry is the author of five previous books of poetry, including Death and Transfiguration and God's Loud Hand, as well as novels, story collections, an autobiography, and a book of essays. She lives in Virginia.

About Rising Venus:

"With Rising venus Kelly Cherry reveals the fearsome beauty, vulnerability, and complexity of women's experience. She masterfully re-creates the full spectrum of the female psyche, from looming madness to harrowing self-knowledge made bearable, even exhilarating, through remarkable poetic range and skill. The book's journey is an ascension from mysterious and overwhelming depths of despair and anguish to a place of peace and perspective."

Praise for Kelly Cherry's Poetry:

"I am convinced that Kelly Cherry is one of the dozen or so best poets writing in American....Work like hers is nothing less than a national treasure."
—David R. Slavitt

"'Requiem,' the abstract prose poem that closes [Death and Transfiguration], in the tradition of Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' and Eliot's 'Four Quartets,' translates personal loss into the historical and universal....In this remarkable book, poetry is, for Cherry, 'the transcendent, escaping craft.'"
—Patricia Gabilondo, Anglican Theological Review

"'[God's Loud Hand] is haunting in its formal evocation of loss, toughly intellectual as it renders a new kind of theological poem....Driven by desire, it has a unity of vision (albeit one in flux) that finds the religious impulse within even the most analytical of minds."
—Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review