Julie Sheehan was born and raised in Pierson, Iowa. She received a BA from Yale University and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She is the author of the poetry collections Thaw (2001), Orient Point (2006), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise (2010). Sheehan’s poems often feature long lines similar to those of Walt Whitman, and she has cited Whitman as an influence in the past. She also writes in traditional forms, including the sonnet. In addition to the Whiting Writers Award, Sheehan has won the Paris Review Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry, the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Memorial Award, and a NYFA fellowship in poetry. She lives on Long Island, New York, and teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
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Orient PointPoemsFrom"Coyotes in Greenwich!"
Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.
Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving
eastward, indiscriminate, original.
Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,
our nature disobediently tends toward nature.
Orient Point:Poems -
Orient PointPoemsFrom"Hate Poem"
I hate you truly. Truly I do.
Everything about me hates everything about you.
The flick of my wrist hates you.
The way I hold my pencil hates you.
The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped
in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.
Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.
Look out! Fore! I hate you.
Orient Point:Poems -
Orient PointPoemsFrom"Details of Cana"
That the water was transformed, yes, a miracle, but
that the resultant wine was good – ah, conviction,
sensing the presence of divinity in the guest
who exclaims to the host but you’ve saved the best
for last! – to smell a god in the mother asking her son
please, do something or the party will be ruined, ruined!
Orient Point:Poems
“Tender, sassy, quietly observant, deeply cutting . . . a collection bursting with verbal and existential exuberance.” —Billy Collins [on Orient Point]
“The book cover of Thaw entices with what looks like the ice-encrusted coil of an old refrigerator touched with water droplets, and the poetry inside, with its eclectic mix of language and style, is just as enticing.” —Sioux City IA Journal
“Julie Sheehan’s poetry, at its best and most characteristic, exuberantly returns us to Walt Whitman (the real Whitman, and not the barbaric imitators) and to Walt’s grand parodist in Fernando Pessoa’s Alvaro de Capos.” —Harold Bloom, Yale University [on Thaw]
