Off the Rails Quarterly

I was fifteen when I decided I would make myself appreciate Emily Dickinson. One summer afternoon I sat down on my bedroom floor with a small book of Dickinson poems I’d been given as a gift and a dictionary. I’d never looked up so many words (I was not yet a literary girl). I began…

Originally from Alabama, Jake Adam York is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver. He is the author of three books of poems—Murder Ballads (Elixir Press, 2005), A Murmuration of Starlings (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), which was a winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry…