Dara-Lyn Shrager lives in Princeton, New Jersey and is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. Her chapbook The Boy From Egypt was published in 2009 by Finishing Line Press. Her full-length manuscript Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee was published by Barrow Street Press in 2018, after being named a finalist for the Barrow Street Poetry Prize. Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee was also a finalist for the Akron Poetry Prize, the Perugia Prize and the Brittingham and Pollak Prizes from the University of Wisconsin Press.
Dara-Lyn holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College and a B.A. from Smith College. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals, including The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review, Crab Creek Review, Barn Owl Review, The Greensboro Review, Nashville Review, Passages North, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Yemassee. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her work appears in the anthology Braving the Body (Harbor Editions).
Select Poems
That bruised fist clenches again in my niece’s chest. A surgeon fishes a guide wire through her thigh, lighting a path to her stuttering heart.
All the little knives will come, will cut her before she’s done.
One year ago, doctors slapped a map of her body on a screen. Treasure hunt for cancer. X marks every spot where a scalpel will slice away part of everything she needs, or doesn’t, as the case may be. A miracle, I think, her body a canvas of stars.
She will live, I say. Why not this brown-haired girl with the neck of a swan and the nearly soundless way she enters a room?
