Lisa DesRochers-Short

Lisa DesRochers-Short is a queer poet and artist, born and raised in rural Maine. She received her BA in English from University of Maine at Orono, and her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she was the 2019-2020 Thesis Fellow. Lisa was the recipient of the 2019 Alan Cheuse International Travel Award. She is currently the Poetry Editor for an anthology of disabled writers with Stillhouse Press, and a reader with So to Speak. Her work has appeared in Thin Air, Permafrost, Common Ground Review, Breakwater Review, and others.

 Lisa’s poem, “Blood Tooth Mushroom” featured in my core rises: mycorrhiza collection, is a mixture of collage poetry, erasure, and original work to form what looks like a longwinded entry in a field guide. The collaged text comes from articles about my cousin’s death in October of 2017, when she was shot on her own property in Maine, by a hunter on the first day of hunting season. I collected articles from the local newspapers and used quotes from my own family members that appeared in those articles. In section II. of the poem, I am doing an erasure of the quotes used in section V.