ABOUT SANDRA MCPHERSON Sandra McPherson has twenty collections published, including five with Ecco, three with Wesleyan, two with Illinois, and two with Ostrakon. Her new collection, Quicksilver, Cougars, andQuartz, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry Press (Ireland). Newer work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Pedestal, Field, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Yale Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Cimarron, Crazyhorse, Basalt, Cirque, Palette Poetry, Plume, Red Wheelbarrow, Epoch, JuxtaProse, Vox Populi, and Antioch Review. She taught for 23 years at University of California at Davis and 4 years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collection of 67 African-American improvisational quilts is housed at University of California at Davis Design Department. She founded Swan Scythe Press. She is the great-grand-niece of Abby Morton Diaz, Plymouth feminist author and abolitionist. ABOUT THE POEMS This group felt, to me, as unified as an armload of flowers, old clothes, cats, a child to calm, lost friends, cherished diversions, and selfishlyclutched indebtedness to the wisdom of equals also holding themselves together. Elements: Bill Matthews’ concept about how a poem ends, that he told me at the Aspen Writers’ Conference; my daughter on the Spectrum padded over our newly painted floor in Portland before we knew she could open a door. Raised on the wisdom of older poets, I’ve come to feel that our generation too has said things to preserve. They just stay with you, even if you don’t write them down. The two Sutter Psych poems are from a whole mental illness manuscript, The 5150 Poems, I can’t tantalize any press to take, but it’s valuable to me because it centers on my fellow patients, whom I cared for and whose coping strategies I tried to learn from. In early 2013 I was involuntarily hospitalized for a month. The whole cycle is not depressing, I Page 48 - Nine Mile Magazine
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