Adam Chiles
Adam Chiles' first collection Evening Land was published by Cinnamon Press in 2008. The book was shortlisted for the 2009 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book in Canada. He was brought up in East Yorkshire and emigrated to North America at the age of 22. His work has appeared in such journals as Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Magma, Other Poetry and Painted Bride Quarterly. His work can be found on-line at BlackBird and Free Verse. His poetry has also been anthologized in Best New Poets 2007 (Samavor Press). He is the recipient of scholarships and grants from the Banff School of Fine Arts, the Breadloaf Writers Conference, the Canada Council and Gilman School in Baltimore where he was the 2003-2004 Reginald S. Tickner Writing Fellow. He currently live just outside Washington DC with his wife Emily and son Noah and is assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Northern Virginia Community College.
Wreckage Song
Above is the bird’s soliloquy, a wreckage song
wrung from its furnace, steaming in the oak
like a charred vowel. It has already gone three.
Clocks stare from their dusty mantels.
The sea lifts closer. You can smell it –
her architectures of salt, her dark abbreviations
pouring in land. Feel the northern cottages
flinch and stiffen under the gale.
Your oven tops switch on in a shiver of crowns.
The cat at your window is slinking out
of his animal night as you pace behind
the blinds in a bruised vernacular.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited