Dear Gravity

by Gregory Djanikian

Dear Gravity offers meditations on art, violence, the allure of rough landscapes, and the wonderment, finally, of being earthly and substantial without future guarantees. It describes how we might yearn for something ethereal even as we submit gratefully to what pulls us down toward what we know and love.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2014

About the author

Born in Alexandria, Egypt of Armenian parentage, Gregory Djanikian came to the United States when he was 8 years old and spent his boyhood in Williamsport, PA. He is a graduate of the Syracuse University writing program and is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania where he was an undergraduate. He is the author of six collections of poetry, The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, So I Will Till the Ground, and, most recently, Dear Gravity. He has been awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, two prizes from Poetry magazine (the Eunice Tietjens Prize, and Friends of Literature Prize), the Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center at Columbia University, and multiple residencies at Yaddo.
His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), Seriously Funny (Georgia), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Poem in Your Pocket (The Academy of American Poets), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House), among others.

He lives outside of Philadelphia, PA with his wife, artist Alysa Bennett.