Terry Ehret
Terry Ehret
Terry Ehret is a poet, teacher, translator, and one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press, a regional publishing collective run by San Francisco Bay Area poets. She earned a BA from Stanford University and an MA from San Francisco State University. She has published four collections of poetry: Lost Body (1993), Translations from the Human Language (2001), Lucky Break (2008), and Night Sky Journey (2011). Literary awards include the National Poetry Series, California Book Award, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, Northern California Book Award for California Poetry in Translation, seven Pushcart Prize nominations, and an NEA Translation Fellowship. She has led summer travel programs for writers in Ireland, Wales, and Tuscany. She is currently working on a three-volume bilingual edition of the collected published poems of Mexican poet Ulalume González de Leόn. From 2004-2006, she served as the poet laureate of Sonoma County where she lives and teaches.
Translations from the Human Language
Terry Ehret constructs poems that are fearless. . . No matter how dark her themes, she manages to circle back . . . to reclaim new and widening patterns of light, as dark hair, antlers, corollas of oaks spring from her canvas. It is how she listens to her subjects and finds their form that ultimately stuns the reader. Like Joaquin Miller in ‘The Heights,’ she grips the worlds so hard she holds it in place for a few moments—and makes it shine.” —Fran Ringold, Editor-in-Chief, Nimrod
Read review by David Templeton in Northern California Bohemian, December 13-19, 2001.
Read review by Gretchen Giles in Sonoma Independent, February 15-21, 1996.
Lucky Break
“In Terry Ehret’s Lucky Break, the present is not a moment fixed in time, but a dangerous realm where the poet searches for ‘something worth worshipping.’ Pulled by history and memory into the past, and propelled toward the future by the possibilities of what ‘might be,’ Ehret makes her negotiations with contingency. She insists emphatically that ‘There is nothing to fear,’ but it’s the brave honesty of her poems that make this so. By turns tender and fierce, Lucky Break offers the reader courage in lieu of consolation. Ehret quotes Mallarmé’s dictum: ‘Each book a tomb in miniature for the soul.’ A soul could rest easy in Lucky Break.” —Gary Young, author of No Other Life
Listen to Terry Ehret and Caitlin Ehret Moe perform “How Fascism Will Come,” and “All of Us Must Have Been Asleep.”
Listen to Terry Ehret perform “Lost Body,” and “Cupid and Psyche in The City of Light.”
Terry has been nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize for her sonnet sequence “Night Sky Journey”.
Terry’s personal website is at www.terryehret.com
A profile of Terry appeared in the Argus Courier on February 28, 2008.
Read review by Bart Schneider in Metroactive Books, October 22, 2008.
Watch video of reading at Sacramento Poetry Center, October 20, 2008.