I was born and partly raised in California—not that I was only partly raised, but you know what I mean. The rest, and some of the hardest parts, took place in Michigan, where I eventually earned degrees from Kalamazoo College (BA) and, after another stint in California, the University of Michigan (PhD). Somewhere in there I also received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Now I live in Lexington, Virginia, and teach at Washington & Lee University, mostly nineteenth-century British lit. As a poet I tend to Moore’s heresy—“I too dislike it”—and perhaps find any full-bodied embrace of any art less than appealing. Perhaps, despite a love of Dickens, I have something against earnestness. Nonetheless, poems have been for me one of the only real serious ways of thinking about things, paying attention to things, constructing a response to what I guess we’d call the world.