Chelsea Rathburn earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas and is a native of Miami, Florida. Her poems have appeared in the New Criterion, Hudson Review, Formalist and Pleiades, among other journals and anthologies. A freelance writer and producer, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, Brandon Arnold.

About The Shifting Line:

"Chelsea Rathburn’s well-crafted poems honor the beauty and order of the world by accommodating its quirks and oddities. Time and again, her straightforward colloquial grace leads to unexpected yet convincing revelations about her subjects. By acknowledging the fragility of the lives and relationships she explores, she gives them sustaining significance. With its wealth of happy paradoxes, this collection marks the debut of an impressively talented poet."
—Tim Steele

"The line in Chelsea Rathburn's exceptionally fine and promising The Shifting Line is not only the line of love, traced unflinchingly through its lucid confusions and murky clarities, but also the deeply human pulse of feeling and forms -- both metrical and amatory -- composed from the dissonance of a fully lived life. A remarkable debut."
—B.H. Fairchild

"Chelsea Rathburn's debut collection takes its title from a compelling metaphor; glimpsed on a honeymoon trip, a floating pier demarcates the meeting place of river and ocean and suggests marriage itself, the point where two bodies bump up against each other. Many of the poems in The Shifting Line explore love's gray areas — how easily a touch becomes abrasive, and how the atmosphere of even a peaceful home can be charged by 'currents we can feel but can't repair.' Simultaneously clever and emotionally resonant, these poems are the work of an adept formalist with an unflinching eye and a discerning ear."
—April Lindner