James Arthur

James Arthur grew up in Toronto. His poems have appeared in The New YorkerPoetryThe New York Review of BooksBrick, The New Republic, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, and a residency at the Amy Clampitt House. His first book, Charms Against Lightning, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012 as a Lannan Literary Selection. Arthur lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

A Local History

My grandmother’s house was always full of flies.
They’d crawl across each other on the windowsill
or would be spinning out their noisy dying

everywhere―so many, you could sweep forever
and not get all...