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Lauren Camp

Lauren Camp is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Took House, published by Tupelo Press in 2020. Winner of the Dorset Prize, Lauren has also received fellowships from the Black Earth Institute and the Taft-Nicholson Center, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, and the New Mexico–Arizona Book Award. www.laurencamp.com

Various Instructions
Close-up of a small cactus covered in bright purple flowers, on a rocky desert floor.

•Ongoing Revision: Building a Cactus Garden

Planting in the high desert is about compromise. What can stand firm through careening wind? What can handle summer’s bubble-wrap heat? Aside from a brief delirium with utterly wrong choices, for years I have put in flats of appropriate perennials. Of those that make it, some spread voraciously, draining moisture from each neighboring plant.

Poetry  – 

How to Make a Biscuit

In class, we talk layers of lines of a poem / they don’t like. No one is warmed // by the writer’s voice, the stir and fold as he hid / what was sticky and sad.