Restlessly seeking but attentively observed, the poems of Linda Gregg seek to trace the grief of living to its full and beautiful flower. Here, desire and longing, shot through with lucid observation and luminary grace, are as monumental, as sacred, as joy and fulfillment. Says W.S. Merwin of her poems, “They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance.”

Gregg’s work rings with the musicality of lived experience, of having traveled to where her poems lead and offering back an electric and intimate account of those journeys. With energy and insight drawn from, rather than brought to, the exploration of the inscrutable and inconsolable, Gregg works through grief and solitude with radiant dignity and quiet public grace. William Arrowsmith praises her for “an always observant eye, a disciplined musical sense, the true craftsman's knowledge of her material,” and Gerald Stern says, “Linda Gregg brings us back to poetry. She is original and mysterious, one of the best poets in America."

Things and Flesh is Gregg’s sixth collection of poetry; a new collection is due out from Graywolf press in Spring 2006. As Luci Brock-Broido put it, “Linda Gregg continues to the builder of beautiful contraptions, poems built steadfastly by real life, bright and stark, truths told tranquil in unblinding light.” Gregg is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Writer's Award, and several Pushcart Prizes. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic Monthly, and she has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in New York City.