Henry Walters was born in Chicago in 1984 and grew up in Clinton, Michigan. After studying Latin and Greek as an undergraduate at Harvard University, he worked as a falconer in Ireland and a beekeeper in Sicily. His first book of poems, Field Guide A Tempo was a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A second volume, The Nature Thief is due out from The Waywiser Press in Spring, 2021. His poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in journals such as Asymptote, The Iowa Review Online, Orion, and The Threepenny Review. He lives in New Hampshire with his young family.
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We followed her in, a stray, the fattest & first, the temple cat./
In a niche by the altar she crouches, watches them come: the/
mad parade we’d wanted, this troupe of heretics — the ass,/
alpaca, gyrfalcon — unbroken line of celebrants, creatures ...
Across the handsaw drawn—as across the world /
now seems—her fiddlebow—a whetting, whittling down /
to two dimensions …
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And now you explore the hidden pockets and come up/
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