About the AuthorAlison Hicks is the author of poetry collections Kiss (PS Books, 2011), and Falling Dreams (Finishing Line Press, 2006), a novella, Love: A Story of Images, (AWA Press, 2004, and an anthology, Prompted (PS Books, 2010). Her poem “house in mind” was winner of Philadelphia City Paper 2011 poetry contest, and a second poem, “canoeing at night,” was selected as runner-up. Also in 2011, her poem “Autumn Lilies” received First Prize in the 2011 Charlotte Miller Simon Poetry Contest from the Ardmore (PA) Free Library. She has twice received Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships, in creative non-fiction in 2003 and in fiction in 2007. Her fiction, poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Apiary, The Alembic, Amoskeag, Blood Lotus, The Broadkill Review, Broad River Review, the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, Calibanonline, California Quarterly (CQ), Cottonwood, Crack the Spine, The Critical Pass Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Edison Literary Review, Eclipse, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Folly, Forge, Four Corners, Gargoyle, Grey Sparrow, The Griffin, Gulf Stream, the G.W. Review, HeartLodge, The Hollins Critic, The Ledge, Licking River Review, Literary Mama, The Lindenwood Review, The Louisville Review, Mad Poets Review, Melusine, Milk Money, The Muddy River Poetry Review, The Musehouse Journal, Organs of Vision & Sight (OVS), Pearl, The Penman Review, Peregrine, Permafrost, Pinyon, Philadelphia Poets, The Progressive, The Puritan, Quiddity, Rough Copy, Rougarou, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Sliver of Stone, Softblow, Storyscape, Studio One, Whiskey Island, Wild Violet, Words and Images, Women. Period., The Wooster Review, and Xanadu. The story “The Reservoir” was performed for the 2002-2003 season of the Writing Aloud series hosted by the InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia and the poem “Twenty-Six Years” was included in the 2005 Poetry is Alive! Performance by the Ritz Theatre Company of Oaklyn, New Jersey.  A woman in middle-age takes a canoe out onto the water at night and must discern obstacles barely visible to keep her craft afloat. Her reward is a vision of stars transformed as they are reflected back through water. Her guide is the loon, whose red eye is capable of seeing underwater, and whose wail echoes and beckons. An adolescent whose mother has become ill must traverse the big county she finds inside herself to find a life worth living. A daughter mourns a father. In this collection, Alison Hicks looks beneath the surface of our emotional lives to murky shapes: the twists and turns we are unable to predict, the scrape of love and the experience of being lost, the whimsy of our fantasies, visitation by spirit guides of myth and legend, things we try to keep secret and yet seek to reveal, the hurt that has happened and the tasks to be undertaken toward a larger vision and understanding, and the flash of occasional illumination.
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