\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cP\u003eContradiction and ambiguity are essential to the poetry of Madeline DeFrees. Her work is concentrated, multi-layered, spliced with humor and characterized by a passionate interest in every aspect of words: their literal and figurative meanings and associations; their histories, usage, disappearances, and resurrections. In her recent poems she approaches complex subjects with a new clarity, the dividend of a long investment in the art of writing.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJust as her poetry demands distance from personal biography and revelation, it is also deeply affected by her own life story, most profoundly her 38-year tenure as a nun. Throughout her writing career\u0026mdash;from her early poems written under the name Sister Mary Gilbert, to her newest ones in which she casts a lifelong glance back through history and lineage\u0026mdash;the need to reclaim individual identity is balanced against the relinquishment of the self.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cI\u003eFrom \u003c/I\u003eGoing Back to the Convent\u003c/P\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cI\u003e What was I running from\u003cbr\u003e or into? The uneasy light of the senior\u003cbr\u003e prom? Mother's dream of a a child bride, supported by\u003cBR\u003e pennies from heaven? Or was it the writing\u003cbr\u003e life laid as a sacrifice to a jealous god\u003cBR\u003e on the tomb of the woman\u003cBR\u003e I'd hoped to become?\u003cBR\u003e Whatever it was, it will soon\u003cbr\u003e Be over. I write this now to reclaim it.\u003c/I\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cP\u003eA student of John Berryman, Karl Shapiro, and Robert Fitzgerald, \u003cB\u003eMadeline DeFrees \u003c/B\u003ehas taught generations of poets and poetry students, and earned widespread acclaim for her own work. Madeline DeFrees has taught throughout the US, including at the University of Montana and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she directed its Creative Writing program. She presently lives in Seattle, WA.\u003c/P\u003e\u003c/div\u003e
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