"Contagion"
is the 40-part appendix to the 40-part poem "Quarantine." Together
they comprise the manuscript of "Quarantine." "Contagion"
hyper-punctuates what is unpunctuated in "Quarantine," and it truncates
the narrative established in "Quarantine."
Born in 1972,
Brian Henry has published two books of poetry: Astronaut (UK 2000,
Slovenia 2000, U.S. 2002) and American
Incident (2002). His third book, Graft,
will appear in 2003 in both the UK and the United States. His poetry has been
collected in many anthologies and has been translated into Russian, Slovenian,
and Croatian. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Australia in 1997-98 and was poetry
editor of Meanjin that year; and he
traveled to Russia as a Cultural Specialist in 1999. Editor of Verse since 1995, he founded Verse Press in 2000. He reviews poetry for
the New York Times Book Review, Boston Review, and other publications,
and his criticism has appeared recently in The
Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review.
His edited collection On James Tate
is forthcoming in 2003 from University of Michigan Press. He teaches at the
University of Georgia in Athens, where he also directs the Creative Writing
Program.
His web page has
links to poems and criticism online:
http://www.arches.uga.edu/~bhenr
Criticism on his
work (in the form of reviews of Astronaut) is available at the following sites:
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.2/microspoetry.html
(Boston Review)
http://jacketmagazine.com/16/niko-r-paml-henr.html
(Jacket)
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr90-2/elliptic.htm
(Poetry Review)