Gigi Marks lives in Ithaca, New York. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including American Poets Against the War, Best American Poetry, Lilith, Northwest Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and others. Her first chapbook, What We Need, was released by Short Line Editions. Her latest chapbook, Shelter, was published by Autumn House Press.

Other poems by Gigi Marks in Verse Daily:
February 1, 2005:  "Logging Road" "ten-thirty in the morning and I was..."

Books by Gigi Marks:

Other poems on the web by Gigi Marks:
"The Swim"

About Close By:

"Gigi Marks’ poems are intimate, in fact they explore intimacy as their primary concern, probing our desire to find ourselves reflected in an other, to sometimes give ourselves over to that other. In this sense, they are reminiscent of Dickinson; they stay close to home while urgently querying the borders of the human. The “other” in these poems, the “you,” might be a lover, might be a child, might be a flower or a bee, or might be the reader herself, for the poems gesture outward from a speaker who is “waiting to see you,” a speaker who wants to, in “seeing you” discloseby her own self—liquid, widening: “I am / not one of them, I am,” she writes, deftly expressing the question that guides each and every one of these delicate, beautiful, and quietly strange poems: how might we escape what Oppen called “the shipwreck of the singular,” how might we find ourselves, as Marks puts it, “in someone else’s house”? The more I read these, the closer I feel to their speaker, which is to say, to myself."
—Julie Carr