Alice Templeton
Alice Templeton
Alice Templeton’s poems and short stories have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Calyx, North American Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her work was a finalist for the 2020 Neruda Prize from Nimrod, and her chapbook Archaeology won the 2008 New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry from Finishing Line Press. Templeton is also the author of a critical study of Adrienne Rich’s poetics as well as scholarly articles on contemporary poetics, cultural criticism, and literary theory. Originally from Tennessee, she lives in Berkeley, CA.
Her collection The Infinite Field, which draws on her ongoing connection with people and landscapes in Tennessee and Kentucky, will be published by Sixteen Rivers in 2024.
The Infinite Field
Poems by Alice Templeton
Writing from her “share of solitude,” Alice Templeton calls up beloved places and people from the infinite field of memory: the Memphis suburbs of her childhood, the family farm in middle Tennessee that grounded her in adolescence and adulthood, and the relatives with whom she shared those places. Templeton’s language conjures “the hour creatures draw close,” and within the bounds of these singular poems, time is given shape and substance. The decline of her parents and the destruction of the family home by fire compel her to reinspect the past and fully claim her present life in California. Taken together, these poems tell a loving liberation story as the poet moves on from a way of life spent close to the land.