Jaimee Hills was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1979, and was educated at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Measure, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the English department at Marquette University and lives with her husband, Gerry Canavan, and their two children in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Other poems by Jaimee Hills in Verse Daily:

Books by Jaimee Hills:

Other poems on the web by Jaimee Hills:
Two poems
"Derrida Eats a Dorito"
"Lesson on the Letter S"
"Albanian Virgin"
"Lo Lee Ta"
"The Bar"

Jaimee Hills's Website.

About How to Avoid Speaking:

"Jaimee Hills is enviably gifted, exuberantly ingenious, smilingly audacious. Her language is, by turns, baroque, rococo, and precisely 'contemporary'.... And it isn't only the language that is inventive and provocative, so is the syntax. She plays with constructions as well as with idioms and with vocabulary, and as you read you have to keep your wits about you, as she does.... Not, I think, since William Empson in the late 1920s and 1930s has there been such a nimble trickster of a poet."
—Anthony Thwaite

"Jaimee Hills welcomes us into a world where all things sing their tune and tuneful names: 'Diamond Dove, masked finfoot, tundra swan...silvereye, pink pigeon, rosy-faced lovebird.' What a harmonious uproar her mind must hear as it takes in continuous revelations of identity. In a series of persona poems, Wonder Woman tells all—and so do the letters M, D, F, and Z. Wit is one of her means of understanding, satire another, and admiration informs all her perceptions. How to Avoid Speaking? Sing your heart out."
—Fred Chappell

"Jaimee Hills's poems are a conflagration of art, language, and sheer sensual excess, a fire in the brain and a heart that loves the world in all its multiplicity of beauty and menace. Birds soar, colors blaze, and her words rush in to capture it all. This is a dazzling collection."
—Barbara Hamby