Alice B Fogel served as the New Hampshire poet laureate from 2014 through 2019. Her 8 books include Nothing But: a series of indirect considerations on art & consciousness, which responds to Abstract Expressionism; A Doubtful House; Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,”  winner of the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and the NH Literary Award in Poetry; and Strange Terrain—a guide to appreciating poetry without necessarily “getting” it—offering inroads to poetry useful for teachers, readers, and writers. Nominated for Best of the Web and over a dozen times for the Pushcart, she has been given a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards, and her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. She leads book discussions and writing workshops; makes quilts and refashions clothing; tutors neurodiverse students at Landmark College, and hikes mountains whenever possible. 

Artwork for the book by Mike Nelson

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These poems refuse sleep. They remind us that life is a cycle of filling and emptying, of finding and having and losing, and that even as hope dips out of sight like a loon, “love / in the end…might still exist.” Falsework, in construction, is a temporary but necessary form that allows what will become the lasting edifice to be built upon it, after which the support structure is disassembled and disposed of. In these poems, a life is built upon the dome of a past that finally fades, while—for now —the new vault, radiating sunlight, remains.

Praise for Alice B Fogel’s writing:

“Challenging, wildly inventive, philosophical, as intense as it is intimate…”
—John Sibley Williams

“The marvelous specificities of her poems demonstrate a fierce and admirable passion…with a steadfast gaze at the natural world as intense and perfectly rendered as that of Rilke’s panther.
— Publishers Weekly

“To read Alice Fogel’s poems is to enter, or rather to be drawn, always toward an inner space. Every image, every word unlocks a secret door
into a farther room. Brooding and meditative, Fogel is a true phenomenologist of the soul.”
—Charles Simic

“Ground-breaking….Fogel leads her reader into vital new ways of seeing that translates as it muses, enlightens as it divines.”
—Chard deNiord

“…in the sense of transformation… [Fogel] creates a sort of dance-like, fugue-like quality in her poems where one form or state of being turns into another before our astonished eyes. Hence the musicality and intensity of her work reveal to us through the ministry of language the enormity
of what is there in each moment of life—its presence and its subtlety and its force.”
—Baron Wormser