Sandra Meek was awarded both the Peace Corps Writers Award for Poetry and the Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2003 for her first book, Nomadic Foundations (Elixir 2002). She is also the author of a chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival (Elixir 2001). Named Editors' Choice for Mid-American Review's 2002 James Wright Award, her poems have also appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere, and have been featured on Verse Daily and Poetry Net's "Poet of the Month." She received an M. F. A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Denver, and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana. Currently she is an associate professor at Berry College, where she teaches writing and international literature.

Other poems by Sandra Meek in Verse Daily:
August 16, 2002:  "Foundations for Fire" "In this photo, I send you light..."

About Burn:

"In a poem called 'Negotiating Versions of Forever,' Sandra Meek says, 'We've been there before,' but says it with neither cynicism nor nostalgia. This may suggest the greatest virtue of this book full of virtues: the argument that we can know and love the world, even while fully aware that the world is not easily knowable nor always lovable. The language displayed here is complex, is full of allusions and serious games, like the pun on 'sin' in '... back/to original sign, forsythia's golden bush igniting/that divine burn.' There is both Old Testament gravitas and new joy in this important book."
—Bin Ramke

"Sandra Meek's Burn is crafted with stealthy reflective care in an effort to restrain the hysteria towards which the new century seems to hurtle with 'democracy in entropy' as the '...bisected self goes on ... trampling rusted machetes in the grass.' The cosmos thus far endures, our best, our only reassurance. Whether or not we can get ourselves back to the garden, we are all stardust, and we might want to forget, once and forever, about building that fallout shelter."
—C.D. Wright

"These poems are, in a broad sense, poems of homage. There's a kind of playful dialectic evident here, a mind trying too embrace everything that draws it in and being changed in the process, a synthethesis of observer and observed. The reason of poems, an almost scientific desire to be specific, to get it right, ultimately turns to metaphor, to the need to make categorical and logical jumps in the pursuit of understanding. Light runs through this book—the light of stars, the light of the mind—to such an extent that I wrote 'light as salvation' besided one poem. While redemption is not the intention of these poems, it is suggested by the confindence and beauty with which they proceed. What becomes clear reading the work of Sandra Meek is that intelligence, deftly applied, is love."
—Bob Hicok