Julia Story
bio
Julia Story
is the author of Post Moxie (Sarabande Books), winner of the 2009 Katherine A. Morton Prize and the Ploughshares' John C. Zacharis First Book Award; The Trapdoor (Dancing Girl Press); Julie the Astonishing (Sixth Finch Books); and Spinster for Hire (The Word Works). Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in many publications including Diode, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Sixth Finch, and The New Yorker. She is from Indiana and now lives in Massachusetts.
Books and Poems
The Word Works, 2020
"Cinematic, darkly funny & seductively sad---watching Julia Story cut these twisty, glinting shapes out of silence is like watching a kirigami artist summon a life-size funnel cloud out of a single sheet of paper. Spinster for Hire is sublime--so full of finely-tuned truth, it practically levitates."
-Karyna McGlynn, author of Hothouse and The Nine-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution"I want poetry to shine its bright light on my loneliness and show me the play I'm in. I want poetry to put its hand through the infinite dimensions in which I exist. I want poetry that offers everything then takes most of it back. This is the poetry of Julia Story. The voice here is friends with its sadness and yet we are yanked, with fierce exultance, up and through joy, too. Mashed and battered, held and protected, these words are life, and a life that asks, 'What harms us more than our hope?'"
-Emily Kendal Frey, author of The Grief Performance and Sorrow Arrow
"Spinster for Hire is an antidote to modern noise—a long, late-night walk that leaves us wondering how we got here. Against a backdrop of existential isolation, Story points out constellations. Maybe they mean something, and if not, these poems shepherd us through the mystery."
-Rob MacDonald, editor of Sixth Finch
Sarabande Books, 2010
"[Story's] speaker is...frequently elegiac and wistful, mournfully observing the passing of childhood, the natural world, and love. [She] manages to do so in a fashion that describes the perception of ordinary moments in a way that restores strangeness both to the moments and to the act of perception itself."
-Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Robinson Alone
"Poems that think this carefully and provocatively about themselves are scarce. But that's no reason to read a person's poems. The misery and the total enchantment of being alive, of being a complex person, mysterious even to oneself, and of feeling like a cliché, of drawing from art and despising art, of thinking simultaneously 'fuck this' and 'bring me more'―that's what got put into this book, and that's what we get out of it."
―Dan Chiasson, author of Bicentennial and Where's the Moon, There's the Moon"A voice distinctly human, frighteningly so, is what we encounter in Julia Story's Post Moxie, winner of the 2009 Kathryn A. Morten Prize in Poetry. Her poems read like missives from the front line of existence, and they've arrived to tell us it's wicked out there. Yet, these poems, striking and strange in both content and form, remind us of the many ways a thing can be beautiful. What's most beautiful about them is their sound, her attention to the subtle textures of our language. Story's ear is first-rate. The lines, most of them haunting, beg to be read aloud."
—Ryan Vine, author of To Keep Him Hidden and Distant Englnes
Selected Poems, Interviews, and Reviews
Review of Spinster for Hire by Rebecca Connors at Tinderbox
Review of Spinster for Hire by Emmalee Hagarman at Sundress
"How Lonely Sat the Town," Pangyrus
"Picture of a River," Sixth Finch, Winner of 2016 Pushcart Prize
"Three Bodies," and "How She Was Tempted," Diode
"Indiana Problem (Mini Gym)," Rove
"With the Time She Had Left" and "When She Went Into the Field," Tupelo Quarterly
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