Something Must Happen

by Ned Balbo

Something Must Happen, Ned Balbo's new chapbook from Finishing Line Press, examines history's unfolding through the prism of contemporary life. These memorable poems look toward past and future: the twentieth century fades, taking with it the Titanic's last survivors and Times Square's forgotten incarnations, while a future in which minds and memories are mapped beckons menacingly. At this crossroads, questions of faith are inescapable: a Baghdad snowfall brings respite to soldiers and stunned residents, a boy and his dog wander lost in nineteenth-century New York, while, in the late '60s, a boy sells broken space toys while a friend's older brother prepares to leave for Vietnam. Throughout Something Must Happen, something always does, yet Balbo's response to time's passage is always thoughtful, formally confident, and deeply moving.

Ned Balbo is the author of two full-length collections. Lives of the Sleepers (University of Notre Dame Press), received the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize, a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and was a finalist for the Arlin G. Meyer Prize of the Lilly fellows program. His first collection, Galileos Banquet (Washington Writers' Publishing House), was awarded the Towson University Prize. The recipient of three Maryland Arts Council grants, he has received the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. "My Father's Music," an essay on adoptive identity and ethnicity, and a finalist for both the Faulkner/Wisdom award and the Laura Pizer Prize, appears in Creative Nonfiction's anthology of Italian-American prose, Our Roots Are Deep with Passion (Lee Gutkind and Joanna Clapps Herman, editors). A Long Island native, he teaches at Loyola University Maryland and lives in Baltimore with his wife, poet-essayist Jane Satterfield, and her daughter Catherine.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Ned Balbo is the author of six books. His newest is The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (2019), selected for the New Criterion Poetry Prize by Morri Creech, who writes, "Ned Balbo ranges from the grave to the celebratory, from epithalamium to elegy, from spiritual yearning to earthly delight...with a deftness of phrasing and a formal precision that are rare in contemporary poetry." Also published in 2019 is 3 Nights of the Perseids (University of Evansville Press), selected for the Richard Wilbur Award by Erica Dawson, who advises, "Read each poem again and again and watch them come together in a feverish mix of praise and anger...Balbo welcomes us into the chaos but leaves us calm with the certainty that we all have the ability to find ourselves back in the light."

Upcycling Paumanok (Measure Press), according to poet Mark Jarman, uses popular culture and mid-century memory to explore "the vital history of one of the crucial American places." V. Penelope Pelizzon observes, Ned is "unafraid of examining subjects closer to the heart," including love, parenthood, and friendship. It is, writes David Yezzi, "a splendid collection."

Ned's previous book, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press), was selected for the Donald Justice Prize by judge A. E. Stallings and also awarded the 2012 Poets' Prize. Lives of the Sleepers (University of Notre Dame Press) received the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and a ForeWord Book of the Year Gold Medal, and his first book, Galileo’s Banquet, shared the Towson University Prize.

He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature in Translation fellowship for his version of Paul Valéry's "La Jeune Parque," three Maryland Arts Council poetry grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and is a co-winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.

Born and raised on Long Island, New York, Ned is married to poet and essayist Jane Satterfield and recently concluded three years as a visiting faculty member in Iowa State University's MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment.