Allison Titus holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont College. A chapbook, Instructions from the Narwhal, is out from Bateau Press. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Other poems by Allison Titus in Verse Daily:
October 9, 2007:   "Shepherding" " If not to clutch this flock..."

Books by Allison Titus:

Other poems on the web by Allison Titus:
"Sum of every lost ship, minus its apology"
Two poems
"Mix Tape for Valentine, Nebraska"
"'Orphanage keeper, handmade, suitcase bearing part of the sea'"
Three poems
"Forest"
"Farewell"

About Sum of Every Lost Ship:

"Sum of Every Lost Ship navigates what is haunting, strange, and unknowable—grief and disappearances, fragments and histories. Reading, we are deftly balanced on the shores of mystery, a mystery fathomed by a keen instinct for metaphor. Allison Titus is a writer exquisitely attuned to compassion, isolation, and the sometimes overlooked details of this sturdy and tenuous world—goats’ hearts, schooners, cabinets, arctic realities. This is a startling and moving collection."
—Talvikki Ansel

"'The pilgrim heart,' as one of Allison Titus’s exquisite phrasings has it, requires an unmooring, a letting go, into a world marked by passing journeys, passing architectures, almost-lost motels for intimates to get lost in—a hardscrabble world rich with leavings. An internality emerges, sets out, to congress with the obstinate, the creaturely. This poetry’s experiment takes us to the fact that the everyday is also experimental, in that, familiar as it is, it can never, if it is seen intensely enough to be durably writ, be wholly predicted. So fine a lyric sensibility as the reader will find in these poems is all the more compelling for acknowledging the human limits of the lyric, for making hard choices, even refusals, and for never romanticizing omission—i.e., obliteration—but testing it at every step with earthly perceptions. Allison Titus’s Sum of Every Lost Ship presents readers with a striking new poetry, and a beautiful and truly original voice."
—William Olsen