Poetry. "One of the most difficult things in poetry is to control the 'I,' to let it stay innocent, to let it act and be acted upon freshly in the poem. Dawn Potter manages this difficult trick with ease. In her poems, no matter where she is, the consciousness is always fresh, the perceptions always immediate and the human connections always moving, moving us, as we are by the moments of life coming into focus, newly seen and absolutely clear"--Howard Levy.

Boy Land and Other Poems

Literature & Fiction

Potter, Dawn

Poetry

Deerbrook Editions

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. The luminous tale of a writer's long love affair with an armful of books. In this gorgeous memoir Dawn Potter considers her personal relationship with the books she has read and reread over the course of her life—works by Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and many others. Weaving a daily life into a reading life, THE VAGABOND'S BOOKSHELF is a celebration of our deep yet mutable relationship to literature and the world. Excerpts from the THE VAGABOND'S BOOKSHELF have appeared in journals such as the Southern Review and the Threepenny Review. Dawn's previous memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, won the 2010 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction.

The Vagabond's Bookshelf: A Reader's Memoir

History & Criticism

One winter morning, poet Dawn Potter sat down at her desk in Harmony, Maine, and began copying out the opening lines of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Her intent was to spend half an hour with a poem she had never liked, her goal to transcribe a page or two. Maybe she would begin to appreciate the poet's art, though she had no real expectations that the exercise would change her mind about the poem. Yet what began as a whim turned rapidly into an obsession, and soon Potter was immersed in a strange and unexpected project: she found herself copying out every single word of Milton's immense, convoluted epic. Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton is her memoir of that long task. Over the course of twelve chapters, Potter explores her very personal response to Milton and Paradise Lost, tracing the surprising intersections between a seventeenth-century biblical epic and the routine joys and tragedies of domestic life in contemporary rural Maine. Curious, opinionated, and eager, she engages with the canon on mutable, individual terms. Though she writes perceptively about the details and techniques of Milton's art, always her reactions are linked to her present-tense experiences as a poet, small-time farmer, family member, and citizen of a poor and beleaguered north-country town. A skilled and entertaining writer, Potter is also a wide-ranging and sophisticated reader. Yet her memoir is not a scholarly treatise: her enthusiasms and misgivings about both Milton and Paradise Lost ebb and flow with the days. Tracing Paradise reminds us that close engagement with another artist's task may itself be a form of creation. Above all, Potter's memoir celebrates one reader's difficult yet transformative love affair with Milton's glorious, irritating, inscrutable masterpiece.

Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University of Massachusetts Press

Accidental Hymn

Literary

Whether they’re graveside tourists in Rome or lovelorn girls on a bus, the characters in Dawn Potter’s ravishing second collection of poetry, “betray a fatal longing” for love’s complications. By turns comic and melancholy, hungry and euphoric, these poems surrender again and again to the passions and panics of experience.

How the Crimes Happened (Notable Voices)

CavanKerry Press

Even as she reminds us that writing “doesn’t solve anything,” Potter is driven to chronicle “the years murmur[ing] their old tune” in this compilation of sonnets, extended narratives, and shifting invented forms. Her rushing lyric voice binds together the personal, cultural, and imaginative histories that create the inevitable complications of human character.

Same Old Story

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